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 A fellow Virginian.

Banana Republicanism

To date, the Felon's regime is reminiscent of a mixture of early 1930's Germany and Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorships of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc", where loyalty to the dictator is more important than competency and expertise and where government policies enrich the select few and the dictator himself, and where government forces are used to threaten and intimidate the majority of the populace.  ICE is operating as a form of the Gestapo and the Felon is demanding that heads of government agencies yield to his whims and malicious prosecution of political opponents, real or imagined. The worse of these to date may be the Felon's push for the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi (who should be disbarred for her actions to date) to launch a flimsy, contrived criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.  Powell's real offense is doing his job rather than follow the demands of the Felon, who wants lower interest rates despite the potentially inflationary impact at a time when even much of the MAGA base is complaining about high prices. The move also may destabilize the Federal Reserve and adversely impact the economy in additional ways. Throughout these outrages, most Republicans remain silent or mumble when not on the record. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this effort to turn the United States into a banana republic:

The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on grounds so flimsy and transparently hypocritical that it is difficult to know whether anybody is supposed to take the charges at face value. When a respected public servant is being accused of wasting taxpayer dollars and lying to Congress by a president whose extravagant White House renovation has already doubled in cost in just three months, and whose inexhaustible capacity for lies has essentially broken every fact-checking medium, one almost wonders if the criminal allegation was chosen for its absurdity, to demonstrate that Donald Trump can make the law mean whatever he wants it to.

Trump’s gambit is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. Powell’s term ends in four months, a timeline so brief that it wouldn’t be hastened by even a well-founded criminal charge, which this is not. In theory, harassing Powell with trumped-up charges could intimidate him into backing down, but the Fed chair responded with a defiant statement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis vowed not to support any new nominees to the Federal Reserve board “until this legal matter is fully resolved.” And even if Trump were to manage to install sufficiently pliant figureheads at the agency, the Fed’s demonstrable lack of independence would be apt to weaken its influence over monetary policy and make the economy worse, not better.

What’s more, Trump is gambling that his control over the Republican Party is so unshakable that he can extend his banana republicanism to a policy domain that matters deeply to his wealthy partisan allies. Those conservative economic elites who don’t actively cheer on Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption have learned to live with both, because he delivers the goods in the policy realms that matter to them: tax cuts, deregulation, and other conservative economic priorities.

Every affluent Republican, from the tech right to fossil-fuel owners to heirs managing their inherited portfolios, has a direct and visible interest in stable and competent monetary policy. The Republican Party’s respect for the Fed’s independence is already evident in a recent Supreme Court ruling, in which the conservative majority appears to be seeking to create a special exemption for the Federal Reserve from the Court’s general doctrine that presidents are entitled to fire the heads of independent agencies.

The apparent source of this desperate gamble is that Trump seems keenly aware that the public disapproves of his presidency and his economic policy making. But rather than move to the center and try to allay the concerns of his wavering supporters, Trump’s response to adversity has been to try to seize as much economic and political power as he can, as fast as possible.

Thus the invasion of Venezuela, which he hopes will provide him with a windfall source of petro-dollars. (Sunday night, Trump shared on Truth Social a mock biography describing himself as “Acting President of Venezuela.”) After floating a proposal to cap credit-card interest rates that stands little chance of passage in Congress, he told reporters on Air Force One that firms that fail to comply with his target by January 20 . . . . . will be “in violation of the law.”

In normal times, private companies could simply laugh off a president’s threat that they have “violated” a law that does not exist. But since Trump has amply demonstrated his eagerness to redefine the law as synonymous with his own whims, his threats may well contain real power.

Trump’s clumsy legal intimidation of Powell mirrors tactics used by regimes such as those of Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. This is not a list of the most prosperous economies in the modern world. What these states have in common (with the exception of Argentina, which has rebuilt its economic and political systems from the setbacks they suffered under disastrous Trump-style experiments) is an entrenched elite that hoards wealth and control.

The administration is fond of accusing immigrant communities of importing dysfunctional political cultures from the developing world. . . . . The global South may be cursed with more than its share of regimes in which economic success depends on political access and the rule of law is a bitter joke. However, it is not the desperate refugees fleeing poverty and oppression who are importing their political culture, but Trump himself.

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American Violence Is Becoming Too Much for Families

As often noted, the current nightmare political reality that is gripping the United States is something I could never have envisioned growing up or when I was an active Republican now decades ago.  Gun violence is off the charts with Republicans putting gun sales for the gun industry ahead of the lives and safety of their constituents.  Now, with ICE acting as the Felon's own fascist police force, unfettered by any desire to act humanely and decently - a marked change from ICE under the Bush presidents, Obama and Biden - more and more American's especially younger woman are thinking about leaving the United States for somewhere they deem safer for themselves and their children. Indeed, as noted in a column in the New York Times, 40% of women ages 15-44 are interested in leaving the USA. Yes, each presidential election is seen by those saying they will leave the USA, but as a piece in the New Yorker explores, this time around, more people are actually leaving. I have both blogger friends and former local residents who have now actually made the move out of the country and who, so far are very happy with their decisions.  With grandchildren of my own, I worry about what this country is becoming and what my grandchildren's' futures will be in a nation seemingly spinning towards autocracy with policies that mainly benefit billionaires and oligarchs and where masked  ICE agents can invade one's neighborhood.   Here are highlights from the Times column:  

The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults. That tells me that the women who are building their lives and the lives of the next generation are looking for the exit.

Women in other, similar nations do not share this desire to relocate. In November, I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.

While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations.

In 2025, there were more mass shootings in the United States than days in the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (which uses a broader definition than The Times). There were 75 school shootings. According to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit focused on health equity, “The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents and women, both globally and among high-income countries”; Black Americans and American Indians are particularly likely to die from gun violence.

It feels as though we have hit a particularly horrifying patch of violence in the last month. A shooting at Brown University and the death of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, were beyond disturbing. Some elected officials seem more interested in spreading disinformation about killings like these while gaslighting and smearing victims than doing anything to stop it.

As Adam Serwer pointed out about Good’s death, the administration’s victim-blaming playbook — Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist” — is shopworn, and has been used to defend police killings for a long time. In 2020, I commissioned a personal essay by the writer Imani Bashir, who purchased a one-way ticket out of the United States in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland while in police custody, and who felt that living abroad was the only way to keep her Black son safe.  “For my husband and me, the conversation was: Where could we safely raise a family? Where could we feel like we didn’t have a constant threat or target on our backs?” Bashir wrote.

When I spoke to readers who were considering moving abroad, they expressed similar sentiments. For a variety of reasons, they described the feeling that violence was closing in on them, and that they needed to get out of the country. Emma Stamper, who has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States and lives in the suburbs of Denver, said that multiple high-profile mass shootings in Colorado played into her thoughts of leaving. Stamper, who has a 3-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter, works for a nonprofit and her husband is a programmer. They both work remotely, so relocation is more possible for them than it is for many families. . . . She also talked about feeling a less tangible shift, a sense that there’s “a cultural aggression that continues to spiral,” in the United States.

I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe. The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.

The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. . . . His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”

But over the years, as these violent incidents have piled up, it has become harder to soothe myself with cold rationality. The hour after I heard about the shooting at Brown, where I went to college, I was Googling “going to university in Europe” for the first time. For a few days, I considered the idea that the future might be brighter for my daughters elsewhere.

For now, it’s just a passing thought, one that’s already in the rearview. But I can’t predict what is coming next.

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Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans

This past week included frightening signs that the Felon and his lawless henchmen and henchwomen want to both transform America into a police state and to threaten and seize foreign territories into submission or yielding territory.  The justification is a manufactured "emergency" that depicts undocumented immigrants as hardened criminals and foreign terrorists and that couches territorial demands in terms of "national security" needs.  The killing of a 37 year old white woman who was an American citizen in Minneapolis by ICE agents should be a blaring siren that no one is safe in the Felon's America. In the minds of this dictatorial regime, 4th and 5th Amendment rights have been erased.  Frighteningly, on social media I see Trump voters - some of who I used to think were moral individuals - justifying the ICE outrageous actions and/or trying to deflect the debate.  Perhaps these people are refusing to admit that they made a horrible mistake in casting their vote for a convicted felon and malignant narcissist. The other explanation is perhaps darker and seemingly motivated by racism against non-whites.  These apologists ignore the reality that once rights are erased, they themselves could later become targets. A lengthy piece at The Atlantic by an author who has written about authoritarian regimes looks at the manner in which legal rights of citizens are being trampled upon even as the Felon and his regime seek to intimidate and silence critics  among the citizenry. Here are highlights from the piece that include the seizing and incarceration of an American citizen seemingly solely because he looked Hispanic: 

The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation.

[The Felon] the president and his entourage are accumulating power in ways that seem familiar to me: this is exactly how elected leaders in other countries have distorted their democracies. . . . an issue you’ve probably heard about: the transformation of America’s immigration and customs officers into a masked and heavily armed paramilitary, and the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, supposedly to defend them. Americans may think of this as a change that mostly affects illegal immigrants, but this new federal police force is also establishing standards of lawlessness, and they are operating with an assumption of impunity that is changing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

George Retes has already felt the impact.  Retes: I was driving to my workplace, where I work as a contracted security guard. When I pulled up, there’s just cars on that entire road, bumper-to-bumper—people getting out, just cars driving around each other. And I was like, All right, well, I just need to make it to work. So I make my way through, and it’s just this roadblock of ICE agents just standing across the road.

Like, You’re not going to work today. Get back in your car. Leave. So I end up getting back in my car, and they just all start walking in a line towards me, and they just surround my car. I have the agents on the side trying to pull on my door handles, trying to open my car door, yelling at me to get out, and the agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, contradicting what these other agents are telling me to do.

They end up throwing tear gas. And I’m in there choking, trying to plead with them, like, I can’t see; my car’s engulfed in smoke, and eventually they hit my window again, and it just shatters. Immediately, the moment it shatters, another agent sticks his arm through and sprays me in the face with pepper spray.

They just dragged me out of the car, threw me on the ground. They just immediately kneeled on my neck and back. There’s maybe four or five other agents just standing around us, just watching as they do this.

I was detained for three nights and three days. That Saturday was my daughter’s third birthday party, and that was probably the worst feeling ever. She’s my princess. It was just terrible.

So Sunday, a guard ends up coming up and is just like, You’re off, like, He’s getting released, and that’s all he says. That was it. They’re like, You’re free to go. All the charges had been dropped; you’re free to go. And I just asked them, “So I basically was locked up and missed my daughter’s birthday for no fucking reason?” And they just were silent. They just stayed silent. I was given no explanation, no apology, just: That’s it. . . . . Someone has to be held accountable. Treating people a certain way without dignity or respect or humanity is so fucking wrong. To not have any fucking rights, especially here in America, when that’s what we’re supposed to be all about—it’s wrong. It goes against everything we stand for. And so I hope that the justice system, even though I don’t believe it works all the time, I hope that in this case it works.

ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose.

The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law. . . . It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?

I asked two experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU what we should be doing to secure our own safety, and to preserve our democracy. (We spoke before the killing in Minneapolis this week.)

Our first guest, Margy O’Herron, has documented the transformation of ICE. I started by asking her about the George Retes story and what ICE is supposed to do when it picks up a citizen. (And we should add here that ICE did not respond to questions from The Atlantic about the Retes case.)

Margy O’Herron: When ICE discovers that somebody is a citizen, they are supposed to release them right away. I think what you’re seeing, too, is just a bigger phenomenon of unchecked, chaotic deportation and arrest that is dangerous, and it risks all of our rights.

[T]he Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do still apply to immigrants. They apply to immigrants in the same way that they apply to citizens. There’s no distinction in the law. So without those things, ICE is arresting people and taking people out of the country without any kind of process, without alerting them that they’re going, without allowing them to talk to a lawyer—that is not lawful; it’s unconstitutional. Those rights exist, and they should be protected.

Trump’s big spending bill, which he called the One Big Beautiful [Bill] Act, will allocate over $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement, with a significant amount going to ICE. . . . . And the money going to ICE is triple what they were authorized before. And what it means is that the types of raids that we’ve seen and the scale of detention that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to increase significantly as they start spending all of those funds.

So you see a 400 percent increase in detention and a 14 percent increase for the number of judges. We’ve also seen attacks on the immigration courts and immigration judges. The administration has fired more than 80 immigration judges, mostly for no cause. They’re claiming this is the right of the president to decide who’s an immigration judge. One assumes that they’re being fired because their positions or history or background is something that this current administration does not like. And they’re proposing now to replace those fired immigration judges with military lawyers. And although there are excellent lawyers in the military, they are not trained as immigration judges. And without that training, without that background, it suggests that there’s something else at work. And the fear will be that those judges are there to rubber-stamp the administration’s broader deportation agenda.

Of the folks that are being arrested, 70 percent have absolutely no criminal background, and of the folks that do, there is a very slim number that have any kind of violent criminal background. Most have property crimes or— Parking tickets, I read in one case. . . . And so you’ve taken your FBI agent who’s well trained to go after a drug trafficker or child predator, and instead you have them going after a landscaper or a guy who works at the car wash—to go after civilians.

. . . [T]here is a sense from the top that the agents who are taking these actions are not gonna have any consequences for those actions. For example, there was a video that circulated quite broadly of a woman who was pushed by an ICE agent outside the New York immigration office. She was shoved across a hallway, and she fell. She ended up being hospitalized. Initially, ICE came out with a statement that said that type of action was unacceptable, but a few days later, it was reported that that ICE agent was back on the job.

What we now see is a very heavy, militarized law-enforcement presence with very little oversight. You’ve got ICE agents and their law-enforcement partners using—they’re dressed like military soldiers. They are using military weapons. They are rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters. They’re using flash-bang grenades to clear out buildings.  They’re zip-tying the elderly, children as a way of evacuating a building. These are tools that are used by armed soldiers against enemies—not that we use against civilians.

[T]hey’re trying to convince people that this is a real military operation against real terrorists. They even made a recruiting video out of the raid that deployed Black Hawk helicopters, making it seem something like the Marines in Iraq. But even that raid, it was allegedly meant to target a Venezuelan gang, and yet no one who was detained appears to be a member of a gang, or even a criminal. So it seems that it’s ordinary people.

So what we’re seeing now, not only has Trump deployed the military into American cities three times in just over eight months in office, compared to 30 times in the nation’s entire history before this, but he’s also doing it in circumstances where it just hasn’t been done this way before. . . . He’s claiming he’s claiming emergency powers. There’s a very bad tradition of leaders using emergencies to do things that are illegal. I mean, it goes back to the 1930s and earlier. . . . it’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world, because emergency powers free leaders from legal constraints that they would otherwise face. And so there’s obviously a temptation to either exploit real crises or to manufacture crises in order to act without these legal limits.

When soldiers are dragged into what is widely perceived to be a domestic political fight, that this—first of all, it’s really bad for the morale of the soldiers. That’s not why they enlisted. They don’t like being dragged into politics. But also, it undermines public trust in the military. When you do that, that really weakens our military, when it cannot appeal to and draw from all sectors of the U.S. population, when it loses the public confidence.

And you have to worry about the long-term effects on the military in terms of who is going to join up and who’s going to stay in the military. . . . And that would very fundamentally and dangerously change what our military is.

[T]here’s certainly a risk that the president would attempt to deploy troops around the time of an election on the theory that people are less likely to come out and vote if they think that the streets are gonna be full of, you know, heavily armed, federal law enforcement or military troops. That’s going to dissuade some people from getting out and exercising the right to vote.

[M]y concern is that we’re moving towards a status quo in which the cities of this country really feel like police states. And to me, a police state is a place where the presence of—whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement—is so heavy and the chill on people’s exercise of their rights is so acute that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave. . . . To me that kind of chill and that kind of change in behavior is what really marks life in a police state.