His words made a lasting impression on me. I came back to them again and again when I was in college and law school, as the promise of the early 1960s curdled with the assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the backlash to the civil rights movement, and the horror of the Vietnam War. When I felt myself slipping into despair—like after the killing of four unarmed college students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970—I thought back to Dr. King’s message. I couldn’t just shut down and stop caring or paying attention, as tempting as that was. For my mental health, I had to keep my eyes open and my mind fixed on the prospect of a better future. That didn’t always work, but more often than not, it gave me the emotional boost I needed. And it helped teach me the persistence that’s so essential in a life of politics and activism.
Dr. King’s theme that day in Chicago was the old story by Washington Irving about Rip Van Winkle, who slept for twenty years and awoke to find America transformed around him. Dr. King noted that when Rip went to sleep, there was a picture of King George III hanging outside his local tavern, but when he woke up, it had been replaced by the unfamiliar face of George Washington. So much had changed that Rip felt like a stranger in a strange land. “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution,” Dr. King said.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on that bit of wisdom, because so many Americans are once again feeling exhausted or resigned or have just plain tuned out the enormous changes remaking our country. We are heading toward an election that could transform America and undermine—or even end—democracy as we know it, yet many are struggling to stay awake to the dangers. To paraphrase Dr. King, it would be such a tragedy to sleep through a coup!
This isn’t hyperbole. After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies plotted to overturn the results and stop the peaceful transfer of power, culminating in the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. They failed, but it was a narrow escape. If a few things had gone differently—if a handful of state election officials had buckled under pressure, if Vice President Mike Pence had been less committed to his constitutional duties, if brave Capitol Police officers had failed to protect members of Congress from the rampaging mob—the coup might have succeeded. And make no mistake, Trump and his allies will try again to seize power, whether they win the upcoming election or not. That’s not speculation; it’s what Trump himself has promised.
A 2023 report from the indispensable Brennan Center for Justice detailed how Trumpists are planning a “more coordinated and sophisticated election denial campaign” this time around and how “efforts to undermine electoral systems have proliferated and expanded.” Trump has promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and now celebrates them as heroes, laying the groundwork for future violence. Unbelievably, he has said, “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.” His campaign later claimed he was talking about the car industry, but you can read what he said for yourself and judge it against his long history of inciting violence. When asked in an April interview with Time magazine whether he would reject violence over the 2024 election, Trump said, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
The defeat in 2022 of prominent election deniers like Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania may have given many Americans a false sense of relief, even complacency. But a study from the organization Informing Democracy identified hundreds of local officials across six battleground states who have taken anti-democratic actions, such as refusing to certify vote totals, and many of them are set to administer or influence the 2024 elections. They’re county clerks and municipal election commissioners, state legislators and members of canvassing boards. They’re people you’ve probably never heard of who play vital roles in making our electoral system work. Like Peggy Judd, a middle-aged white woman from Cochise County, Arizona, who participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and reportedly promotes Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and QAnon conspiracy theories. Judd is not just some Facebook gadfly. She is an elected member of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors. And in 2022, she refused to certify the results of the midterm elections until she was finally compelled to do so by a judge.
In late February 2024, a mob of Trumpist election deniers rushed the stage at a meeting of the board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona, forcing officials to flee. “This is an act of insurrection,” declared one woman, who leads a group whose website boasts a painting of Trump on a horse and costumed as a founding father. These fanatics are not trying to hide their intentions.
We need to stay awake to this threat. Please pay attention to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on the campaign trail. Go back and watch the riveting hearings conducted by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Listen to the warnings of former Trump officials, like his defense secretary Mark Esper, who says Trump is “a threat to democracy.” Or John Kelly, a retired four-star general in the Marine Corps who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security. He describes Trump as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” Read Liz Cheney’s book. She rightly calls Trump an “existential threat.”
Check out what respected historians are saying. The presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told Time that a second Trump term could bring “the end of our democracy” and “the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.” The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told the Washington Post, “I think it would be the end of the republic.” Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, predicted, “He’s going to come in like an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”
I know some people hear warnings like this and think, How bad could it really get? I won’t be deported. I don’t need an abortion. My voting rights won’t be taken away. Maybe I’ll have to read some mean tweets, but at least I’ll get a tax cut. Others say, During his first term his malevolence was constrained by his incompetence, so we really don’t need to be too worried. Someone will stop him before he causes any real damage. Cooler heads will prevail!
These are dangerous delusions.
To understand why, and to see what could happen, let’s take a page from Rip Van Winkle and imagine the America you’d find if you suddenly awoke a few years into a second Trump presidency. It’s not hard to picture. All we have to do is take Trump both seriously and literally. He and his advisors have been telling us exactly who they are and what they want to do. We just have to pay attention. So shake off the cobwebs, rub the sleep from your eyes, and let’s see what’s happened to our country…
Welcome to Trump’s America. If you live in a major city, the first thing you’ll probably notice are the soldiers patrolling the streets outside your window. Are we at war? Have we been invaded by a foreign adversary? The answer is no. Here’s what you missed while you were sleeping: On January 20, 2025, President Trump’s first day back in office, he ordered the U.S. military to enforce “law and order” in cities with large minority populations like Chicago, New York, and D.C. that he called “crime dens.” Peaceful protests began in many places, but they were harshly put down with aggressive rules of engagement that came straight from the Oval Office. Video of a few isolated incidents of protests turning violent played on a nonstop loop on Fox News and were boosted by an army of bots on X, the right-wing social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Trump cited this “carnage” to justify mass arrests and made the military deployment permanent “until we figure out what’s going on.”
Since you’ve been asleep since 2024, this might be a bit of a shock. After all, the military isn’t supposed to do domestic law enforcement. The founders had seen how British troops abused their power and wanted to make sure nothing like that happened in the United States. Federal law is very clear about this… except: What Donald Trump knows, and you should, too, is that there’s a loophole called the Insurrection Act. It was written way back in 1792 and not updated since 1871, and allows the president to deploy the military domestically in extraordinary circumstances like a rebellion. This obscure law has rarely been invoked, but it’s how President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and President Johnson were able to use federal troops to protect Black children desegregating schools in the South.
In an ugly reversal of that history, during his first term Trump talked about using the Insurrection Act to crush racial justice protests in American cities after the murder of George Floyd—and he later said he regretted being talked out of it. His legal advisor Jeffrey Clark, indicted alongside Trump in the Georgia election racketeering case, also pushed for using the Insurrection Act to prevent the transfer of power after the 2020 election and keep Trump in office with military force. Campaigning for president in 2024, Trump vowed to use the military to crack down on protests and crime much more aggressively. “The next time, I’m not waiting,” he promised. This is all real—look it up. So, Rip Van Reader, there really should be no surprise that you’re waking up under martial law.
That’s not all you missed. The new president found it convenient to have troops in the streets when he ordered the mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants in the country, following through on plans his advisors had touted for years. Rounding up millions of people—many of whom had been in the country for decades, with families, jobs, and homes—was a logistical and humanitarian nightmare because there was no master list and because the immigration status records were sometimes wrong. It also swept up huge numbers of legal immigrants who spoke another language or looked “foreign.”
The Department of Homeland Security was initially overwhelmed by the task, and Trump ordered the Army to step in. Some people asked if this was legal, and Trump just repeated what he told Time in April 2024: He can use military force because “these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”
The new Trump administration also revived his notorious family separation policy, tearing toddlers away from their parents and bragging that abject displays of cruelty would encourage others to “get in line.” Families hid in fear. Businesses had to shut down because their workers were all gone. Communities were ripped apart. Exactly as planned.
Trump also severely restricted legal immigration and reinstituted a sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States from a long list of countries. He ordered federal agencies to stop issuing passports or Social Security cards to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants, defying the Constitution’s clear guarantee of citizenship to everyone born on United States soil. Martial law meant that protests against these draconian actions were muted. And no one could say Trump had kept his plans a secret. He was just keeping his promises.
Soon, massive, sweltering camps were established in the Texas and Arizona deserts to hold immigrants while the new administration tried to bully Mexico and other countries into accepting them. Those diplomatic negotiations were tricky, especially when Trump ordered airstrikes inside Mexico targeting alleged drug labs and cartel leaders. According to Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, Trump actually explored this kind of military action against Mexico during his first term but was ultimately dissuaded. In 2023, the idea gained momentum among Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail. Trump asked advisors for “battle plans” to be ready to attack if he became commander in chief again. (Seriously, this is all too real!)
So when Trump returned to power he eagerly pulled the trigger. He promised a “beautiful,” quick military action, but things didn’t go smoothly. When a cruise missile hit a Mexican hospital that was treating patients, not manufacturing fentanyl, it caused an uproar across Latin America. Then a team of U.S. special operations forces got into a firefight with Mexican troops outside Ciudad Juárez and there were casualties on both sides. Congressional Republicans demanded Trump formally declare war and tensions soared.
The new administration suddenly had its hands full of foreign policy crises. Trump also made good on his long-standing desire to effectively withdraw from NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, even though Congress passed a law in late 2023 to try to prevent any president from abandoning it. But Trump got around this by completely defunding the alliance rather than technically leaving it. NATO, which had been a bulwark of peace and security since the end of World War II, could no longer defend its own members, and without American support, Ukraine was overrun by the Russian army. Trump has long thought of America’s alliances as protection rackets that serve mostly to extort payments from weaker countries. During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who refused to pay up. Once back in power, he just followed through.
The emboldened Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began massing troops on the borders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and former Soviet states that he had long coveted. As Europe braced for a wider war without American backing, the price of energy and grain shot up around the world.
Meanwhile, China took note of the clear signal that the United States would no longer guarantee the security of its allies and stepped up preparations to invade Taiwan. As he did throughout his first term on all things China, Trump vacillated between obsequious appeasement and unhinged bluster. Instead of Joe Biden’s sober, principled foreign policy, America now had an erratic commander in chief careening from one flash point to the next.
It’s a lot to catch up on, I know. But soldiers and roving deportation squads in the streets will only be the most visible signs that something profound has changed about our democracy in just a few short years. As you try to get your bearings, pay attention also to what you won’t see.
The women’s health clinic down the block is closed. There was a lot of talk during the 2024 campaign about national abortion bans, but in the end, Trump didn’t even have to sign a new federal law. He simply instructed the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw approval for all abortion-related medications, so now safe and affordable drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol, long used for miscarriage and abortion care, are nowhere to be found. Some states have started invasively monitoring women’s pregnancies to ensure they’re carried to term, just as Communist Romania used to do. Hard to believe? In April 2024, Trump said matter-of-factly, “I think they might do that.” Then he ordered the Justice Department to overturn decades of precedent and start interpreting another obscure old law—the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use”—as banning all abortions across the country. There were legal challenges, but unsurprisingly, the ultra-right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that ended Roe v. Wade and protected Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign continued to aid and abet his agenda. Women and doctors were soon prosecuted and imprisoned. Those who could afford it flew to Canada or Europe, but new state laws criminalized crossing state lines for the purpose of seeking an abortion.
Unwanted births skyrocketed. Tens of thousands of survivors of rape and incest were forced to give birth to the children of their attackers. Women were regularly turned away from hospitals because they weren’t close enough to death to qualify for an abortion. Doctors were driven out of hostile states because laws made it impossible to provide the health care they were trained to provide, and now many parts of the country have no practicing OB-GYNs and hospitals without maternity care. As a result, our already bleak maternal mortality crisis grew worse. Babies were left in dumpsters. On the first anniversary of his executive order, Trump threw a lavish party at the White House for Federalist Society donors and anti-abortion activists to celebrate their success.
That isn’t the only change in American health care you’ll discover. With the help of the Republican Congress that swept into power on his coattails, Trump finally succeeded in repealing the Affordable Care Act, kicking more than twenty-one million Americans off health insurance and fulfilling a long-standing personal goal. Republican moderates who had stopped him before, like Senator John McCain, were long gone, replaced by MAGA loyalists. Then, surrounded by beaming pharmaceutical CEOs in a White House ceremony, Trump also repealed rules put in place by President Biden to lower the prices of drugs like insulin and allow Medicare to negotiate better prices for seniors.
Now, you might be wondering: What about the filibuster? It’s hard to imagine Republicans with sixty votes, even in this nightmare scenario. But Trump has said for years that he wants Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster once and for all using a simple majority vote. Do you really think if he’s president again he won’t be able to bully fifty-one senators into doing that? And even if he didn’t, don’t underestimate how much he can do with executive power alone, especially without the usual guardrails. For example, if he removes key civil servants and installs dedicated Trumpers to manage the Affordable Care Act’s websites and insurance plans, how long do you think it will last? Even if the law allows our government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare recipients, who will show up to meet with Big Pharma if they’re ordered not to by the president? I could go on, but you get the picture. Trump and his co-conspirators can stop doing the work and issue orders to ignore laws they reject. Who’s going to stop them?
Back to our story. As the price of lifesaving medicine shot up, so did the prices of groceries and other everyday staples. In his first week back in office, Trump kept his campaign promise to impose an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all imported goods—and 60 percent on goods made in China. A global trade war quickly ensued, crushing American exports. During the 2024 presidential campaign, economists at Moody’s predicted Trump’s economic plans would destroy 675,000 jobs, reduce gross domestic product, and plunge the country into a recession and “stagflation,” the dreaded combination of low growth and high inflation that plagued the United States in the 1970s. Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, a prominent Biden critic who was one of the few economists to accurately predict the post-pandemic spike in inflation, said, “There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump.” Experts at the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated Trump’s tariffs would mean, in effect, a $1,700 tax increase each year for the average American family—or more. That all came true.
A severe labor shortage caused by Trump’s massive immigrant deportation campaign forced businesses to raise prices and cut back on production. Construction projects ground to a halt. Nursing homes and childcare centers closed. Farmers had no choice but to let produce rot in the fields. Prices for groceries and other goods rose. Inflation, wrestled down under President Biden, spiked again.
Wages did not keep up, especially as Trump-appointed officials and judges busted unions and crushed strikes. The new president pushed through another massive tax cut for corporations and the super-wealthy, sending inflation and the budget deficit even higher. (So, yes, even if you don’t need an abortion and aren’t going to be deported, this should matter to you. Unless you’re a billionaire. Honestly, even if you’re a billionaire.)
Is this making your head hurt? Well, the burning you feel in your eyes and throat is probably from the smog blanketing the sky. In his second term, Trump accelerated the climate crisis and removed restrictions on polluters, making it easier for them to dump toxic chemicals into our air and water. Just as he promised oil executives during the campaign if they donated $1 billion to his cause, Trump reversed Biden’s climate rules and ended most incentives for green energy and electric vehicles (except for money he could steer toward supporters like Elon Musk). Half-built factories turned into ghost towns. Federal scientists were muzzled or fired, but outside academics and UN researchers issued increasingly dire warnings that a global climate catastrophe was becoming unavoidable.
Trump’s financial backers got what they paid for. They long ago decided that democracy was bad for business. Corporations couldn’t abuse workers and pillage the environment so long as the rest of us had a say. That’s why the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It’s a twisted idea of freedom that prizes unchecked corporate power above all else.
Like everything else, this should come as no surprise. Trump may have originally campaigned as a populist, but in his first term, he governed as a plutocrat eager to line his own pockets and those of his wealthy friends. That policy agenda goes hand in hand with his authoritarian impulses. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt rightly called out the “economic royalists” who, “thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself” and tried to create “a new despotism.” Too much concentrated economic power is antithetical to democracy, and that’s why generations of Americans fought for commonsense rules for the economy—everything from anti-monopoly laws and limits on child labor to the minimum wage and the right to unionize—all of which Trump and his allies seek to roll back in a second term.
And this is just the beginning. We haven’t touched on the favors a back-in-power Trump can now do for the foreign dictators he admires and the oligarchs whose money has flowed, and is flowing, through his family’s companies. The opportunities for corruption are staggering.
At this point, you might be asking: How could Trump get away with all this? In his first term many of his worst impulses were tamed by Congress, the courts, and his own advisors. Wouldn’t that happen again in a second term? The answer is no, no, and no.
Republican moderates—or Republicans willing to protect the Constitution instead of protecting Trump—were already a dying breed when you fell asleep. Many key leaders who opposed Trump in his first term were gone or would be soon, from McCain and Mitt Romney in the Senate to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in the House. Even Mitch McConnell bent the knee and slunk away. By the time of the second Trump term, Republicans were a total rubber stamp for whatever their Dear Leader desired.
Holding out hope for relief from the courts is another pipe dream. Do you think the Supreme Court majority that struck down Roe, gutted the Voting Rights Act, made it much harder for government agencies, scientists, and other experts to stop polluters and check corporate power, refused to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists holding high office, and invented sweeping new legal immunity protections for Trump was suddenly going to hold him accountable? If anything, the decision in July 2024 to grant immunity to official acts gave a green light for Trump’s future criminal acts. It was beyond reckless. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, if he “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” The conservative legal icon and retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig called the ruling an “abominable decision.” He wrote, “The Supreme Court held today that the President of the United States—and the former president in particular—is above the law, and the only person in America who is above the law.”
What about the “adults in the room” in the White House and the Pentagon who sometimes managed to redirect Trump’s wildest moves during the first term? Gone. Weeded out in the transition by loyalty tests and a rigorous screening process to ensure no one but hard-core MAGA loyalists get close to power. Or in prison. Trump had promised a campaign of retribution, and he meant it. Remember how he suggested that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, should be prosecuted and potentially executed for treason? And that his former attorney general Bill Barr should be investigated for lack of loyalty? When you start locking up former generals and Justice Department officials, dissent disappears quickly.
