Why no one is safe from an autocrat
Plus, Navalny’s murder, 18th century law and internet memes
Warning — a dark one this week. We’ll get to the sad news that has me especially down in just a moment. But first I want to zero in on two stories that, together, summarize Trump’s immigration plans for a second term and demonstrate how escalating tensions around immigration may set the scene for the rest of his autocratic agenda.
The Atlantic: Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’
Axios: Inside Trump's plans to deport millions from the U.S.
As The Atlantic puts it, “the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.”
Per Axios, “[i]f elected, Trump wants to mobilize ICE agents — along with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, federal prosecutors, the National Guard, and even state and local law enforcement officers — to carry out deportations of undocumented immigrants.”
In other words, the plan is to throw every resource at the federal government’s disposal — including massive, military-constructed detention camps reminiscent of World War II — to round up millions of people for rapid deportations, often with little due process. And not just federal resources. Again, Axios: “Texas' aggressive actions on the border and the vocal support from other GOP-led states indicate Trump would have some state-level allies for his program.“ These efforts will not only be widespread and resource-intensive, but also chaotic and cruel.
If Trump were to take office again, expect an effort to draft state and local law enforcement, and National Guard troops into the deportation effort, especially in states like Texas.
And then things could get even uglier.
What happens when Trump sends the Texas National Guard into California?
According to The Atlantic:
Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.
Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control.
This plan could be grounded in one of two legal authorities — a perceived loophole in a law regulating the deployment of the National Guard or an invocation of the Insurrection Act. (Read about them here in our Authoritarian Playbook for 2025.) These laws could be used to try to send thousands of troops into blue states over the objection of governors.
How such a scenario might play out — and which legal and political obstacles Trump would face — will depend upon the facts on the ground. But if a reelected Trump is able to follow through on this plan, it could lead to an unprecedented degree of harm to vulnerable people, widespread fear (especially among communities of color, whether or not individuals are undocumented), disruption of our workforce and economy, as well as interstate (and potentially even violent) conflict across the country.
I don’t think it’s safe to dismiss this as campaign bluster — as The Atlantic points out, the plans this time around are “much more explicit and detailed” than they ever were in 2016. Plus, Trump learned what not to do from his first term, when (per The Atlantic) “political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees” stymied his then-vague deportation agenda. (This dynamic is true for most of his second term plans.)
Authoritarianism doesn’t stop after targeting the most vulnerable
We know from history that autocrats scapegoat and attack specific communities, deliberately and with purpose. But they rarely stop there. (As Pastor Martin Niemöller famously put it, “First they came for the Communists; And I did not speak out…”)
Take Trump’s immigration plans seriously not just because of the untold suffering they would cause but also as a potential excuse and precursor for far broader repression and intrusion into every corner of American life.
As my colleague Deana put it to The Atlantic:
“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”
If Trump were disqualified, would red states retaliate?
My colleague Jessica Marsden, who leads our free & fair elections work, was struck by one question in the Supreme Court oral arguments over the question of Trump’s potential disqualification. From Alito:
We have been told that if what Colorado did here is sustained, other states are going to retaliate and they are going to potentially exclude another candidate from the ballot. What about that situation?
Alito kept pressing on this hypothetical, and seemed taken aback when the Colorado Solicitor General suggested that the courts — including SCOTUS — would and should quickly dispense with unserious and retaliatory disqualifications.
This exchange — along with a similar line of questioning from Chief Justice Roberts earlier in the argument — should set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about the rule of law in our country. Think about what it would mean for a state to “retaliate” in this way: In the absence of any other presidential candidates who plausibly participated in insurrections, the officials who run elections, and the judges who oversee them, would have to disregard the meaning of the word “insurrection” in favor of a tit-for-tat effort to punish their political opponents. And in last week’s argument, Justice Alito suggested that the legal system might be powerless to stop them.
Justice Alito is surely right that if Colorado is permitted to remove former President Trump from the ballot, some officials in other states may attempt to remove President Biden from the ballot on the same basis. (Note, however, that South Dakota governor and Trump ally Kristi Noem has dismissed the idea.) We’ve seen parallel threats from former President Trump, who responded to the criminal charges against him by threatening to pursue charges against President Biden: “If I don't get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn't get Immunity. . . . By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box.” Pursuing baseless charges against political rivals is a core tactic of the autocratic playbook and a major warning sign for democracy.
But the Supreme Court can’t stave off democratic decay by prematurely conceding to these threats. To the contrary, the appropriate response is to hold the line: facts matter, words matter, law matters. The mere fact that a political opponent might try to label conduct “insurrection” doesn’t make it so. (Indeed, Justice Alito’s concern that “insurrection” will become a free-floating weapon to use against political opponents is somewhat ironic, coming as it does from a purported textualist, for whom the meaning of words is meant to be paramount.) As the Colorado Solicitor General pointed out, there’s an entire legal apparatus — up to and including the Supreme Court — available to hold state officials to the letter of the law.
Put another way: political actors openly promising to abuse the law in bad faith is scary. The legal system deciding not to even try to apply the law for fear of bad faith retaliation is even scarier.
That’s only a part of Jess’s important and nuanced argument. Read the rest of her piece here.
Navalny’s murder must be a turning point for Russia — and authoritarianism everywhere
Heartbreaking news this morning. While (as of writing) people close to him have not confirmed, reports indicate that Aleksei Navalny, by far the most prominent pro-democracy voice in Russia, died in a prison camp north of the Arctic Circle.
While reporting is early, I think it’s appropriate to define this as murder, regardless of the circumstances of his death. This is true whether the proximate cause was poisoning, as Putin’s regime tried and failed twice in 2019 and 2020, or simply the inevitable result of mistreatment and abuse in a prison where the sun ceases to rise at all in midwinter. He was murdered by Vladimir Putin for the crime of refusing to bow to oppression.
This is also a good moment to step back and reflect on what some prominent U.S. political figures have said about the Russian dictatorship this week. Yes, this week.
“Leadership requires killing people”
-Tucker Carlson, responding to a question about Navalny on February 12th, 2024
“I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want”
-Donald Trump, on whether he would defend NATO allies as president, also on February 12th, 2024
We owe it to Aleksei, to the Russian people, and indeed to ourselves to ensure that this is the darkest moment. That the global march of authoritarianism does not advance any further.
As we often say, the only way it can happen here is if we believe that it can’t. Aleksei left a video in case of his death. Watch it.
He’s right. We are not allowed to give up.
Applying 18th century law to internet memes?
To call Douglass Mackey a “social media influencer” is an insult to ring-light illuminated instagrammers everywhere.
Otherwise known as “Ricky Vaughn,” Mackey was convicted by a jury of his peers for conspiring in 2016 to post false information designed to mislead voters into thinking they could vote by text in an upcoming presidential election.
Per the U.S. Attorney’s Office:
[Mackey and his conspirators worked to] disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media which, in reality, was legally invalid. For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home.”
Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison. But now, on appeal, his case is becoming a test for the limits of the applicability of a key federal civil rights statute to conspiracies to circulate false information about voting mechanisms and procedures. So this case could have significant implications for the 2024 election — and for our long-term ability to deter the use of disinformation to disenfranchise voters.
Thankfully, the history of protections around the right to vote, dating all the way back to England in 1703, makes the question fairly clear. The 1870 federal civil rights statute at issue makes it unlawful to conspire to “injure” any person for exercising protected federal rights. For over three centuries, judges have recognized that intentionally depriving someone of their right to vote is, in fact, “an injury.” (Which yes, is the sort of thing lawyers argue over.) As a result, intentionally making false statements about voting mechanisms and procedures to deprive American citizens of their right to vote injures them, thereby violating the legal prohibition on injuring citizens in the exercise of federal rights.
You can read all about it in a new brief we (and the good folks at the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic) filed in the case on behalf of Professor Richard Hasen.
18th-century law and internet memes. Who says being a lawyer is dull?
Tick tock: Now 65 days
Time to go check the Trump Trial Delay Tracker.
It’s been 65 days and counting. Tick tock. Share this tracker with your networks.
(And if you missed the special briefing earlier this week from my colleagues Kristy and Genevieve on the delay strategy, read it here).
What else we’re tracking:
Autocracies like China and Russia are becoming more explicit in their efforts to normalize authoritarianism as an alternative to democracy, according to a new report from the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies.
We’ve focused on the tactics and strategy behind the immunity question, but it’s also worth digging into the substance of the issue. Jamelle Bouie does so: “Trump’s Fever Dream of Immunity Meets Its Match.”
Voter suppression has a human toll beyond disenfranchisement. Theodore Johnson tells the heartbreaking story of Crystal Mason, sentenced to five years in prison for not knowing that she was not yet eligible to vote.
Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) is one of my favorite pro-democracy organizations — a perfect example of the pluralist, come-to-the-table-as-you-are civic engagement I feel our democracy badly needs. Daniel Stid has an insightful interview (from December) with their founders: “Politics on the Road to Zion.”
A final link worth clicking. Photographer Anne Hermes has spent five years traveling the country and capturing the reality of small town newspapers. The New Republic has some of those vignettes: “The Last Days of the Local Paper.”
“It’s worrisome, what is going to happen when you lose the accountability ... that rules are followed and democracies upheld and all of the things that this country was founded on.”
—Cecily Weisburgh, co-executive editor of The Keene Sentinel, circulation: 5,000