“If you’re wondering if you’re in a constitutional crisis and the republic could collapse at any moment, you are.”

Rick Wilson

As Rick Wilson suggests above, America is in the midst of a traditional coup-d’etat. For those of you not familiar with his work, Rick is a former Republican operative who became disenchanted with his party during the Trump takeover of the GOP. He went on to attack Trump and his minions in the MAGA movement through his Lincoln Project initiative.

I started to focus seriously on this possibility of a real coup when two former Peace Corps volunteers from my old 1960s India-44 group reached out recently. Our group no longer communicates that much, so two messages in one day stood out. Both messages essentially posed a similar question, are we now involved in a real coup? That same question has been circulating among my close neighbors and associates, generally retirees with advanced degrees from top universities and highly successful careers behind them. These were not people who would panic easily or be misled by political propaganda. Perhaps this growing sense of dread we all felt was justified.

What is happening in Washington surely has the feel and quality of a traditional coup-d’etat. The standard elements are in place … the identification of outgroups or scapegoats, the vilification and denunciation of all critics of the new regime, the sweeping aside of most expert government officials to be replaced by obsequious sycophants, the immediate freeing of some 1,500 insurrectionists who attacked both law enforcement and threatened our constitutional transfer of power (thus making them available for future paramilitary actions), and the systemic replacement of all those who might hold the current set of power brokers (i.e. the new autocracy) accountable. This list could continue, but you get the picture. It took Hitler less than 60 days to sweep aside the Weimar Republic even though the Fuehrer didn’t have a majority of the people behind him when appointed Chancellor. Trump did get the majority vote in 2024 and has a slim majority in Congress. On paper, he is in a more advantageous position than the Nazi leader back in the early 1930s, and he still has plenty of time to do the same here and now.

Yet, we oft tend to check ourselves against hyperbole and exaggeration, and rightly so. There is this innate reaction that it can’t happen here. Not in America! As G.K. Chesterton once said … “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent (those) mistakes from being corrected … Thus, we have two great types – the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.” Such sentiments suggest blame should be placed on all sides in our political scheme of things. What we see about us is politics as usual, with sins to be found in us all.

After all, the struggle for authority and power has been an intricate part of our Republic since the bitter contest between Jefferson and Adams created our nascent political parties at the end of the 18th century. Moreover, we have had many periods in our past where the rule of law has been tarnished and where our democratic principles have faltered. John Adams passed the infamous Aliens and Seditions Act; Abe Lincoln eschewed the legal protections of habeas corpus at the beginning of our great Civil conflict; the long nightmare of Jim Crow laws and legal apartheid impacting minorities remains an embarrassing scar in our history; the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare at the end of WWI found thousands being rounded up mostly because they were immigrants and thus presumed to be a danger to society; then the the arrest and resettlement of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during WWII primarily due to prejudice based on their ancestry; and the wholesale persecution of many thousands during the McCarthy era from an irrational (and mostly unfounded) fear of alleged disloyalty. The republican form of government envisioned by our founding fathers is not easily done. It takes work and constant vigilance. Yet, despite the inefficiencies of our system of checks and balances, it remains the best form of self-governance we can imagine. Or, as Winston Churchill once quipped, it is a terrible system but beats the available alternatives.

Yet, the current effort to dismantle the very foundations of our Constitutional framework seems more authentic and quite different from past scares. It strikes an increasing number of otherwise sober observers as fundamentally more dangerous than virtually any prior threat. Even our Civil War did not threaten to undo our basic institutions, merely seeking to divide us into two nations that reflected fundamentally distinct cultures but which would retain certain bedrock guarantees in each. The London-based news outlet, the Guardian, issued an incisive editorial view on America’s current political drama, calling it a ‘coup veiled by chaos.’ “Donald Trump is provoking a U.S. constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralize financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel Lareate Paul Krugman warns, it would be a 21st century coup – with power slipping from elected official’s hands. The real story behind the President’s trade war, he (Krugman) says, is the hijacking of government. And Mr Krugman is right.” In a recent poll conducted in the European Union, Donald Trump was seen as the greatest threat to world peace by far, greatly exceeding the dangers posed by his fellow autocrats in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

One of my former PC compatriots now writes an eloquent blog on contemporary politics titled Feathers of Hope. He answers the question as to whether we are in an real coup as follows. The “The President of the United States is engaged in the systemic destruction of vital government institutions, each of which has been painstakingly built and nourished for generations.” [Jerry Weiss, in Feathers of Hope.] Even some centrists are waking up to the unique dangers facing our Republic. Angus King is a U.S. Senator from Maine. Nominally an independent, he traditionally has been considered a Republican. During a recent Cabinet appointment hearing, he said “… right now – literally at this moment – our Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history, an assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.” Later in his testimony, he went on to say that “Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shedding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule.” That is strong language from someone considered a moderate, if not a traditional conservative.

While the danger signs abound everywhere, perhaps the recent assertion by Vice President Vance best outlines the new threat in the clearest terms imaginable. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executives’ legitimate power.” This, in a nutshell, defines the new ‘imperial’ Presidency being sought. There will be no checks on the powers of the executive. Consider this for a moment. The abiding fear among our founding fathers was that power would drift to the center in ways that mimicked the monarchical tyranny they wished to avoid. In response, the Founding Fathers worked to distribute power throughout the mechanics of government in ways that limited the usurpation of authority by one man (or by a small autocracy). They spent countless hours putting together the apparatus of government with great intent and greater care. Power was to be muted consciously and with exquisite subtlety. And yet, it seemingly is taking mere days for a wannabe dictator and his devotees to tear it all apart.

Yet, there is an element of illusion operating here. The coup, as it were, is not something that has been suddenly thrust upon us, nor is it the work of one deranged man. And while Donald Trump might be the match that has ignited the fury, the groundwork for this moment has long been in the making, for several decades in fact.

Its ultimate success depends on two factors … eroding our confidence in what is real and in taking control of the key institutions governing society. As we know, the emergance of a fractionalized distribution of information through our digitalization media frameworks makes it easier to manipulate people, especially if you have no basic allegiance to the truth nor any desire to be influenced by faith and facts. A study at the University of Amsterdam recently examined some 32 million messages from elected officials across 26 countries between 2017 and 2022. They found that far-right populist politicians were significantly more likely to issue misinformation or, put more colloquially, outright lies for political advantage. Fox News, and its allies, never purported to present real news. It was a propoganda outlet from day one. And part of their propoganda campaign was to subvert and discredit legitimate news outlets.

Part of the long-term multi-faceted initiative to subvert democracy lay in creating a new language. Lee Atwater, the Republican operative responsible for electing George Bush (senior) in 1988, said the following back in 1981 … “You start out in 1954 by saying [N-word, N-word, N-word]. By 1968, you can’t say the ‘[N-word]‘ – that hurts you. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and your getting so abstract. Now, your talking about cutting taxes and all these things your talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘we want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than … [N-word, N-word]. And therein lay one secret to setting the foundations of today’s coup. Play upon the remaining hate inherent in America’s political fabric without being obvious about it. Prejudices and fear remain the touchstones, the lightening rods, of our politics. It is an ancient ploy that yet resonates with so many of our fellow citizens.

The second foundation for today’s coup lies in taking over the basic institutions of a civil society. That did not happen over night. As I’ve discussed ad nauseum in prior blogs, the long-term conservative strategy can at least be traced to the memo written by future SCOTUS justice Lewis Powell in the early 1970s. He noted that ultimate control by conservatives depended on asserting dominance over the media, think tanks, the courts, our educational system, local electoral processes, and like systems. That is precisely what the conservative movement focused on for the next five decades … with considerable success. They gradually assumed more and more control over the very institutions that mattered the most.

With many of the elements in place, the coup was close to being ready to launch when Trump surprised the world by catching the brass ring in 2016. But they were not quite ready, mostly because his election was a shock to even the true believers. A recent article in Foreign Affairs (Feb. 11) put it this way. “Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not fully control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and many Republican leaders were still committed to the democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of this is true anymore.” This time around, MAGA has a detailed plan, Project 2025, and a devoted coterie of sycophants prepared to breach the walls protecting our most precious institutions. The article went on to say, “Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protests.” Heaven help us.

In our great Civil conflict, some 620,000 Americans perished. In two World Wars, another 550,000 or so died to protect our institutions. Now, one uber-wealthy foreigner (Elon Musk) bought the keys to this country for less than $300 million. And most Americans hardly seem to care. Trump’s image and approval rating remain strong. Many describe him as firm and energetic. My initial thoughts on this move toward a dictatorship largely drift toward apathy and resignation, if not despondency. That is, we deserve whatever hell awaits us. I will not shed a tear for a people who seem, in general, so unaware, so self-absorbed, and so full of hate. I certainly hope they never come back with we didn’t know. They had to know, much like the Germans had to at least guess what had happened to their Jewish neighbors in WWII.

Then I pause. The old Hebrew word, Amidah, comes to mind. It suggests resistance, perhaps spiritual or perhaps something more. Nevertheless, no matter the form, one must never acquiesce to evil. I am an old man. Not since I was in my youth, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s, have I contemplated sacrificing my body or life for a patriotic cause. That extraordinary thought now occurs to me. Then again, it would not be much of a sacrifice. After all, how much life remains to me in any case.

AMIDAH!