February 21, 2025
All of it is meant to disorient and overwhelm us. The question is: How are we to navigate all that excrement?
President-elect Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance attend the 125th Army-Navy football game in Landover, Maryland, on December 14, 2024.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.
We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the “Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group’s latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.
Finally, I thought: If I can’t talk about him with these women I’ve known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, “Do you think we’ll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?”
I didn’t even need to say the end of what: of American democracy, the rule of law, and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? “The end” alone signified all of that and so much more.
“Absolutely we will,” was my partner’s instant response. The other women agreed that Trump’s second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it’s as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important—say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Current Issue
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.
The expression “paradigm shift” derives from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s pioneering analysis of the way scientific disciplines change over time. As he saw it, a paradigm is a shared fundamental understanding of how a complex phenomenon (physics, biology, a nation) works. A paradigm shift represents the abrupt replacement of one theory (like Newton’s theory of gravity) with something profoundly different (Einstein’s theory of relativity).
The point is that a paradigm shift in this country wouldn’t just be a tweak to business as usual like a change in the way the filibuster works in the Senate. It would be a wholesale upending of the constitutional balance of powers. In this case, it would potentially mean relocating the power to make, assess, and execute the law (powers now resting in three distinct branches of government) all in the person of the president. It would be a change from democracy to autocracy, or as President Donald Trump has implied, to dictatorship. And it’s happening now, in front of our very eyes.
Moving toward dictatorial control is the fundamental purpose of issuing a seemingly endless series of executive orders that clearly violate existing laws—for example, those governing the firing of inspectors general. It’s certainly true that Donald Trump doesn’t like the very idea of inspectors general. We should remember that from his first term. He wants a free hand to run all the federal departments and agencies without watchdogs getting in the way. But far more importantly, that executive order violated the 2022 Inspector General Act, as a former Pentagon inspector general under Trump told National Public Radio:
“Well [Trump’s order] didn’t follow the Inspector General Act, which requires the president, if he wants to remove an inspector general, which he’s allowed to do, but he must give Congress 30 days notice before the removal, and the substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for each removal.”
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat. Similarly, he has used executive orders to attempt to freeze funds already approved by Congress under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As the Senate Committee on Appropriations has pointed out, it is Congress, not the president, that holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. In its 1975 decision in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court denied presidents the power to impound funds Congress has appropriated.
The same logic applies to Trump’s order, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to impose a 90-day halt to all U.S. foreign aid, civilian and military, except to Israel and Egypt. Again, this is an arrogation of congressional power by the president, and its point was undoubtedly as much to assert presidential power as to effect some as-yet-undefined foreign policy goal.
And that logic will undoubtedly apply to a flood of other previously unimaginable actions Trump will most likely take between the writing and the publication of this article.
The Great Trumpian Litany
The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contains a long prayer known as the Great Litany. A litany is a ritual petition to God, a list of actions congregants “beseech” God to take. The Great Litany is most often recited during Lent, a 40-day period of reflection leading up to Easter. If you’re standing or kneeling, it can seem to go on forever. And just when you think you might be nearing the end, along comes a whole new section requiring a whole new response. As time passes, you may find yourself covertly glancing at your watch. It’s hard to stay focused through it all.
English speakers also use “litany” in a secular sense, as a metaphor for a long list of anything, especially when recited or recorded. We speak of “a litany of grievances,” “a litany of excuses,” or even “a litany of gripes and grudges,” which was how Vanity Fair described some of Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks.
In the single week since that inauguration, observers have already produced excellent litanies of his many distressing actions. Although lists of these are available online, there is no space to catalog them all here. In fact, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because the list grows by the day, even the hour. Since I sat down at my desk this morning, Trump or his appointees have fired attorneys who worked with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on criminal cases against him, rescinded job offers to 200 bank examiners who were to have been employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC, which insures our bank accounts), and launched an investigation into the prosecution of the January 6th rioters. And that’s just in the last six hours.
The Episcopal Great Litany, a long list of human concerns, leaps from topic to topic, petitioning for benedictions ranging from protection from “lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine” to a request that God “illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly.”
Some might argue that this last request was at least partially fulfilled in the sermon of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the first woman elected to her position, who, at the ecumenical service held on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, had the effrontery to address the new president in these words:
“Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are
