The Emerging Police State Bares Its Teeth
Special Edition: Please Read!
March 24, 2025
By Marc Cooper
I thought a moment of humor above might be in place because there’s nothing else funny about what’s going on or what you will find in this post.
There’s been a minor revolt inside The Coop Scoop’s Forecasting Unit. Our in-house analysts have pushed back hard on me for my post a few weeks ago suggesting that for Trump/MAGA it would be difficult to erect a bone fide police state.
I now retract that suggestion and am flip flopping. More than the revolt of my forecasters, Trump himself in the past 10 days has convinced me that we are in a Code Red emergency as the police state has started baring its teeth. Yes, there are the Bernie/AOC rallies which are great, but the dictatorial threat is here and present and growing.
More major institutions are falling like dominoes, capitulating to Trump’s threats, extorsion and open blackmail. The Nazis called this “synchronization” and that is what we are watching NOW. The capitulation by Columbia University that has a $15 billion endowment and should have told Trump to stuff its $400m blackmail note up where the sun doesn’t shine. Instead, they basically let him put the school’s middle eastern studies departments under his indirect control. It’s beyond shameless and for the enth time reveals that university administrators are usually jellyfish. And it was all done in the name of “fighting anti-semitism,” engineered by America’s leading enabler of neo-Nazis.
More frightening are the fiery attacks on the judiciary — the last constitutional institution standing, and the weakest. The slandering of judges, the demeaning of the judiciary per se, and the bellicose statements from Trump, Vance and other MAGA allies that they see no reason to really comply with judicial orders are chilling. Some pundits are still wanking off by debating whether or not we are “in a constitutional crisis” are laughable and depressing. What are they waiting for? Torchlight rallies in the Rose Garden?
We are way past that stage of constitutional crisis as Trump is now directly challenging the rule of law. That should move you regardless of your station in this unequal society. When the rule of law is discarded we are into dictatorship. Pure and total unaccountability for a lawless regime headed by an elderly and addled ignorant madman surrounded by greed-head and sou-less billionaires, fanatics, fraudsters, liars, opportunists, cretins, man-babies and other species of human scum. Look at the moron who heads the Pentagon who sent out classified war plans today by email and didn’t know a journalist was on the list! He should be under arrest today but will probably be a guest on Fox News tonight.
Trump has also ominously moved the goalposts on his “ill-named” immigration issue. It’s no longer about just being undocumented. It’s now about being a foreigner where the base assumption is that they are “terrorists.” One judge today said that nazis got better treatment from the US government than what is being dished out to today’s Venezuelan deportees.
Branding all those arrested as “terrorists,” refusing to say who they nabbed, defying a federal court order to stop these kidnappings, denying the victims any legal representation and packing them off to a virtual concrete concentration camp in El Salvador outside of US jurisdiction would please Heinrich Himmler. And the Salvadoran dictator Bukele said today that just maybe these deportees will spend their lives in his notorious hellhole of a ultra-max prison. The only difference so far between how Pinochet disappeared his imagined enemies and what Trump is doing is that the latter has yet to start tossing some of the detainees off the plane into the Pacific Ocean,
The administration is openly detaining LEGAL residents as well as those that are fully complying with the asylum process to get legalized, arresting more than 100 Cuban exiles this weekend as they showed up for appointments with ICE as part of the process! Some terrorists they are — most of them supported Trump.
Foreign tourists are being hassled at ports of entry and at airports and a few have also been disappeared for no reason. European governments are issuing tourist trvael alerts about entering the U.S.
The immigration police, from the Border Patrol, to ICE, to Customs officers are known in the law enforcement community as the residue at the bottom of the barrel. And now it seems Trump’s bellicose posture has empowered every federal goon with a badge to act like the Gestapo. And you can bet your life that this attitude is filtering down to local police. That’s the MAGA vibe now.
Under-reported is the fact that Trump has mobilized thousands of armed federal agents — even less trained— from every federal agency possible to aid ICE in its repressive campaign. Like airport, rail, postal police and Wildlife agents among many others. The IRS has now also agreed to report undocumented who are paying taxes to ICE for arrest.
If you can show me ANY difference between the rhetoric used by the Nazis to characterize Jews and the way Trump talks about terrorist migrants, you must have magical glasses.
Now here’s a a question for you, How does this end? Think beyond today’s headlines. There are NO political institutions that can impede Trump until the midterms 18 months from now. And there is no guarantee that the Democrats will win. Not up against several billion dollars, tens of billions, that Elon Musk will use to backstop MAGA. There is no guarantee that there will not be an American Reichstag that will suspend the elections. And while a Democratic House would be an obstacle to Trump, it alone would not stop him. I can’t even imagine what the last two years of Trump would mean. If it is only two more years. If there is no rule of law, there are no limited terms of office.
Finally, Trump still has the support of 40 percent or so of Americans, many who love these deportations and want more and who don’t give one hot damn about the rule of law. There is a large swath of Americans who have turned to wanting dictatorship and they are not about to be converted because Gavin Newsom plays verbal patty cake with some of them on his podcast.
PEOPLE POWER
The emergence of angry town halls and the startling 90,000 people who showed up this past weekend to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC was truly gratifying and inspiring. Bless them and those who showed up. And may there be many many more of these events from coast to coast and, more importantly, in the blood red Heartland. And may there be many more such militant tribunes beyond this dynamic duo.
Even Bernie himself, in a mass email this weekend, said very clearly that rallies are not enough. And he’s right. The attendees must get ORGANIZED! I did not hear that call to organization from AOC or Bernie but I am hoping there were people in the crowd quietly circulating to start building those people-powered institutions of organized opposition. If not, all the rallies in the world will not dethrone Trump.
I have no hesitation in saying that this will only end when the opposition rends the country ungovernable with organized and fearless mass non violent civil disobedience that gets channeled into some effective electoral formula. If you can think of some other way to end this dark chapter, then speak up and argue the point.
I have seen and lived under two Latin American dictatorships and am aware of others in the region. My first supervisor in Chile in 1971 was a refugee from the Brazilian dictatorship. None of those dictatorships were undone by violent revolution and none were brought down by disparate rallies or phone calls to their legislators. They were defeated by massive and robust social movements.
I could go on… but no need. I was delighted to open my email this late morning too see several high profile analysts reacting in similar ways that I am doing. None have yet gone as far as advocating the inevitability of massive ungovernability but I am confident they will get there soon enough.
With that caveat I reproduce below a zinger of an essay by Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark who made the following post free and shareable, so I am sharing it. Read it. It has concrete examples of how to proceed. I am in 95% agreement.
And remember JVL and The Bulwark are all veterans of Murdoch’s rancid and deceased Weekly Standard. It’s amazing how far they have come and it is inspiring to see them evolve. Indeed, I prefer The Bulwark to most center-left outlets who are not as hard on either party as the Bulwark is.
What about you? Are you ready to stretch your imagination, re-assess your preconceptions, overcome your fear and denial and are you ready to join the active immediate fight against American Fascism?
Or as the old union hymn says, Which Side Are You On? There is no longer any middle ground nor any room for those so cynical they just prefer to observe or those on the Left who discard the Good waiting for the Perfect.
Here’s JVL —>
AOC, solidarity, and people power.
I’m leaving this edition unlocked. I hope you’ll share it. And if you’re not a member of Bulwark+ yet, I hope you’ll consider joining today. We’re doing something important here. We’re building a community that is going to be part of a broader solidarity movement. And all of the pieces of this movement need to be supported.
In the coming months everyone will be forced to choose a side, like it or not. Stand with the Bulwark community. We want you with us.
1. Seeing Like a Dissident
I was wrong about one big thing in 2024: I did not realize that most American institutions—the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector—would immediately capitulate to Trump.
In 2016 I believed the Republican party’s submission was the result of the GOP’s particular failings. That was incorrect. The Republican party was merely the first institution to accept authoritarianism because it was the first institution Trump targeted.
We now see that most institutions are weak in the face of authoritarianism.
JVL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.
The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.
Once you accept that reality, our next steps become clear.
The rough roadmap for how to proceed goes like this:
Demonstrate popular power in the provinces through large-scale rallies.
Use these events to organize the resistance into a mass movement that can be called into action.
Direct the mass movement into targeted political strikes: Getting blowout wins in special elections; boycotts of Tesla; etc.
Politicize everything: Attack the authoritarians for every bad thing that happens, anywhere in the world. Flood the zone.
Elevate the corruption/graft in a way that pits the billionaire insiders against the “forgotten man.”
When the moment is right, bring this movement to the Capital for a show of strength.
Use this demonstration as a slingshot to take back legislative power in the 2026 elections.
More importantly, use it to send a message to the institutional actors that people will have their back if they show courage.1
2. The Near Term
Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.
And the only way to win is people power. That’s it. No institutions are going to save us. The courts won’t stop the authoritarians. Corporate interests won’t stop them. The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.
AOC’s public events over the last week have been exactly what the opposition needs.
She is making herself a rally point and telling everyone who wants to resist that they have a place to go. She should do these rallies, over and over, across the country. But not in Washington or New York. Not yet.
When you look at the history of dissident movements, they almost always begin in the outer provinces.
The autocrats’ power is greatest near the literal center of the government they control. The further you get from their power center, the weaker their hold and the more risks they have to take if they want to put down demonstrations.
AOC went to Denver and Phoenix last week. She needs to go to Nashua and Nashville. Houston and Chicago. Oakland and Oklahoma City.
The bigger these rallies get, the better. Make them ongoing events.
She will need an infrastructure. It’s not enough to get 30,000 people in the streets. You need to get them organized. People in the pro-democracy space will need to help figure out how to do that—how to turn live attendance into lists that can be activated.
And when I say “activated” I do NOT mean for fundraising. Keep Act Blue away from this project: These lists should never be used for ginning up donations. They should be used to direct people into actions. Getting them registered to vote. Getting them to turn out for elections. Getting them to show up at the next rally; to organize their friends.
This will require a sophisticated data operation. AOC will need help. It would be great if Mark Cuban or Scott Galloway could step in here. The dissident movement will need its own platform.2
It will also need its own media. Because believe me, the New York Times is never going to be explicitly anti-authoritarian.
This movement should have millions of highly activated people attached to it by the end of 2025, building to a show of strength in the summer of 2026. The goal should be a day when 2 million people show up in either New York or Washington and demonstrate that there is an unprecedented mass movement opposing the authoritarians running the federal government.
That’s the moment you force the rest of America to take a side. And the moment you dare Trump to do what he’s always wanted: To take the mask all the way off and use force against American citizens.
The more people you bring out, the greater the provocation and also, the safer the opposition will be. If you put 2 million people in the streets Trump will look weak if he doesn’t respond, but will look like a tyrant if he does.
And everything is about making him unpopular and weak in the final stretch before November 2026.
What will this movement actually look like? I don’t know. These things are unpredictable. But I have a high degree of certainty about one thing: The movement must be, at some level, oppositional to the status quo. It cannot only be a defense of democracy and our institutions, it must be a challenge to them.3
One thing I found interesting over the last week is the way that two potential leaders of this movement from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum were both aligned in this framework.
On Tim’s podcast Maryland Governor Wes Moore put it like this:
[Many Americans] don’t see how this system works for them. And the truth is, it hasn’t. And that’s why I think we have to be real, real careful about somehow spending our time defending a status quo, when for real, for many people, the status quo never worked for them. So how are you defending something that’s indefensible?
For AOC this outsider messaging is right there in the branding of their “Fight Oligarchy” barnstorming. She’s anti-establishment enough to talk about needing a Democratic party that fights harder.
The reality is that a mass movement is not going to arise around protecting institutions. The way for us to actually protect our institutions is to rally together behind leaders who commit to reforming them.—- Jonathan V. Last (JVL) +++
Corrections: An earlier edition of this post mistakenly asserted the NIH grant to Mojo daily was cut. My bad. Mojo was reporting on other NIH research grants getting canceled. In that same edition I suggested that it was the Secretary of Defense sent out the war plans today. It was instead the National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, though DefSec Hegseth was also involved.
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As you pointed out, it takes massive robust movements to overthrow authoritarian dictatorships. But not without casualties. Above anything else we should be about building a mass movement that engages with non-violent militant actions. There is disagreement about where that mass movement should go and what it should do, but right now the priority is build the resistance.
The MAGA leaders are goons. They are thugs. And they will do harm. As we gain momentum and see our resistance grow, we should be prepared for what will follow.
And at some point we will have face the fact that we too will have to go over our own Edmund Pettus Bridge.