Image by bruno neurath-wilson.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the shock doctrine politics of Donald Trump’s second presidency and lose the historical perspective. Maybe that’s even the point—to keep people so worked up that we can’t rationally or meaningfully respond. I do think there are times that we should respond from the gut, but sometimes those responses are easily manipulated, so there’s some value in taking a few moments to zoom out a bit and frame this picture from a little further up, looking down.
One really helpful thing is to clear up what people in the US are even experiencing. The title of this piece says this is a constitutional crisis, but not everyone calls it that. There are mainstream voices arguing that Musk, Trump, and the Department of Government Efficiency constitute a coup.
Is this a coup? A constitutional crisis? Something else?
A coup is a sudden strike—a decisive theft of power. If we call this a coup, it’s fairly difficult to take a historical perspective. It’s just a surprise attack. But who would even be the legitimate government of the US if power has been stolen in this way?
There are also people who don’t experience this as such a sudden attack. People who have been fighting fascism for a long time aren’t so surprised that it’s rearing its head now.
Slow erosion of the constitution
My gut reaction to a coup feels a little different from my gut reaction to a constitutional crisis, which I do think we’ve been experiencing for decades—constitutional crises being a little more drawn out than coups and very useful for fascists, who tend to find constitutions inconvenient.
One of the most dramatic episodes in this ongoing crisis has been the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of people to a prison in El Salvador, and the attack on due process many people perceive this to be.
A historical perspective is helpful here, because people’s right to due process in the US was already seriously eroded. It’s easier to completely suspend rights when they’re already weakly protected.
It’s relevant to know that at least as far back as 1979, most criminal charges—and nearly all minor ones—were resolved with no trial, no judge, and no determination of guilt or innocence. Most defendants never go to trial unless their charges are very serious, because the punishing cost of the legal process forces defendants to accept plea bargains just to get out of pre-trial detention.
Decades of using the legal process as punishment for criminal charges without bothering to determine guilt or innocence obviously violates constitutional rights to presumed innocence, equal protection, and due process.
This is a constitutional crisis decades in the making, though people adjust. During the Civil Rights Movement, churches and bail funds collectively raised money to get people out of pre-trial detention. This strategy was greatly expanded during the Black Lives Matter protests when outrage over police murders brought people into the street en masse, with over ten thousand arrests between May and June of 2020.
Cop City and the Weelaunee 61
By the present time, we find that our constitutional rights to equal protection and due process are seriously eroded, being suspended even in serious felony cases. In one example, sixty-one people protecting Weelaunee Forest from the Cop City development in Atlanta have been charged with criminal conspiracy (RICO). Some of the Weelaunee 61 also face charges for domestic terrorism based on evidence as flimsy as mud on people’s shoes. In a drawn out process that has gone on for over a year and half, members of the Weelaunee 61 have experienced imprisonment, restrictions on their movement or who they can contact, online targeting, and other punishments. The state has collected over a million dollars in bond for this group of defendants. They have no idea when their trial date might be—not even the one who demanded a speedy trial.
When the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organized bail for the Weelaunee 61, the state retaliated with a S.W.A.T. style raid and bogus charges for money laundering that were quickly dropped, later indicting the fund’s organizers in the Welaunee 61 RICO case. In a final strike, the state passed a law that no organization could bail more than three people out of jail in a year. All of that is kinda what a coup looks like, by the way.
So when Donald Trump began his second presidency, the constitution had already been eroding for decades such that the legal process itself: arrest, imprisonment, bail, legal fees, and bond conditions punish anyone charged with any crime whether they are guilty or not; and it’s more expensive to prove your innocence than it is to take a plea bargain and get out. This approach has been steadily expanding so that people in pre-trial detention make up an ever-increasing portion of the US prison population (which is the largest in the world).
By the present date, weaponization of the legal process is a significant deterrent to protest, cop cities are popping up all over the country, and institutions that defend people from all of this are being targeted.
Go with your gut
The recent deportations as an attack on equal protection and due process are just part of the constitutional crisis that we’re experiencing, and we can also find historical perspective in some of the other threads that are coming unraveled. For example it’s helpful to see Musk’s aggressive DOGE policies in the context of both the rise of AI and of civil unrest over the last fifteen years or so. Maybe this perspective also suggests that we aren’t experiencing a coup, because maybe Musk doesn’t even care about power in the traditional sense: he just wants all the data he can steal for training AI, and now that he’s got it he’ll mumble something about not being appreciated enough, give up his career in government, and go build the AI that conquers the world. Would that mean the coup is over?
I don’t think it’s worth spending too many words speculating on the billionaires’ plans. I don’t think we should hyper-rationalize a complex situation or believe that anyone with some grand vision is going to fix much of anything. And although zooming out in both space and time continues to be helpful: we can even better understand the struggle against Cop City if we understand its implications for the war in Gaza, or get some background on its relation to Trump’s cooperation with El Salvadoran president Bukele, but in the end, we do have to go with our gut and find something that makes sense to do when the government of the United States is devolving into a gang with the most powerful military in the world.
I think it makes sense to find movements that have already positioned themselves to be building and fighting for something better in long-term opposition to fascism. It’s helpful to join or support specific movements like Defend Atlanta Forest that provide concrete opportunities for action, and also broader frameworks like Landback that give us enough historical background for sensemaking. The Weelaunee 61 have a court date in May. Show up.
Liberal responses like Indivisible, Hands Off, or 50501 have gained a lot of attention, but they feel very immediate and lack enough historical perspective to be cohesive with existing anti-fascist struggles…or even enough to cobble together some sensible picture of what’s going on for the sake of mental health. It’s good that people are in the streets, but the streets are confusing. Let’s get ourselves in the right places at the right times.
So once in a while, let’s zoom out a little, get some perspective, then zoom back in and go with our gut.
