How the government is bracing to be led by a criminal fascist

In some ways, living through the second Trump presidential transition is much like the first. 

Everyone is trying to figure out which of his unhinged campaign promises will come to fruition first and which Trump true believers will be given portions of the government to wreck. 

But there’s one huge difference this time around: Donald Trump is a convicted felon who spurred his followers into a violent insurrection based on lies. The very text of the 14th Amendment bars him from holding office, but the United States Supreme Court decided it would be a bridge too far to actually enforce the Constitution when it comes to Trump. 

Regrettably, the majority of American voters also decided the whole convicted felon thing wasn’t a deal-breaker either. 

There’s no precedent for this, no roadmap for how American democracy might survive it. So now we’re watching government institutions try to strengthen themselves against the onslaught of personal and political illegality that Trump represents. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the military, which has to grapple with Trump’s vow to deport millions of immigrants. Trump has floated declaring a national emergency at the border, which his advisers believe would mean immigrants could be housed at military bases and military planes could be used for deportations. 

He also fully expects to use the military and National Guard, essentially deploying federal troops as a domestic police force to do his bidding. And Stephen Miller, arguably the most ghoulishly racist of Trump’s advisers—who is returning to the White House as Trump’s deputy chief of staff of policy—has already said that if states refuse to deploy their National Guard troops to help with mass deportations, Republican governors can just send their National Guard troops across the border into those unwilling states. 

None of this is theoretical. It’s what Trump already tried to make happen in 2020 when he wanted to use active-duty troops against people protesting after the death of George Floyd. 

Trump’s defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, publicly broke with Trump over it. Esper went on to join former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley—like Esper, both Trump appointees—in sounding the alarm that Trump is a fascist. 

But this time around, there won’t be an Esper or a Kelly or a Milley to tell Trump no. Trump wants “Hitler’s generals”—military personnel who will do whatever Trump wants, whether it is lawful or not. And installing compliant personnel won’t stop at the top. Trump plans to again implement Schedule F, removing civil service protections from many federal employees, meaning they could be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists. 

That’s why current Pentagon officials are scrambling to figure out what to do if Trump issues an unlawful order to active-duty troops, such as demanding they deploy domestically to put down protests. While Trump is planning to remove as many guardrails as possible, the military consists of over 2 million service members, all of whom are required to uphold the Constitution and disobey unlawful orders. 

Last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made a pointed statement that the troops were to obey “all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command.” 

It’s distressing that Austin has to specify that only lawful orders should be obeyed, but it’s just part of the new normal. There isn’t really anything left to stop Trump from issuing unlawful or unconstitutional orders, given that the conservatives on the Supreme Court granted him broad immunity for anything that can be said to be an official duty, and issuing orders to the military certainly falls under that. 

That immunity doesn’t extend to anyone except the president, however, which means that while Trump can’t get in trouble for issuing an unlawful order, the military personnel who carry out that order enjoy no such protections. 

It isn’t just the Pentagon trying to figure out how to protect itself from the lawlessness of a second Trump term. Federal public health officials are trying to get funds out the door and complete projects before Trump allows someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to utterly dismantle health protections and cut off funding. It’s critical to get as much money to state and local public health departments before that happens. 

Governors in blue states are also trying to Trump-proof things as best they can. Some of those actions are about protecting access to things like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, both of which have been targeted by Trump. 

Those types of actions aren’t new or surprising. Blue states have been making a concerted effort to protect abortion access since the fall of Roe v. Wade and to create safe havens for trans people. 

But that’s more about blue states countering red state efforts, not having to resist the will of the federal government or the president. With Trump returning to the White House, though, blue states face the possibility of being cut off from routine federal funding simply because Trump hates them. 

That’s why California is considering whether to create state funding mechanisms for disaster relief from things like wildfires and earthquakes. During his first term, Trump refused or severely restricted disaster aid to California, Washington, and Puerto Rico because those places lean Democratic. 

Contrast this with President Joe Biden’s evenhanded approach to ensuring that even the reddest of states received immediate FEMA funding after Hurricane Helene, an approach the administration maintained even as Trump repeatedly lied about disaster money being diverted to migrants. 

Or recall that Trump wanted to condition COVID funds to blue states on those states agreeing to his entirely unrelated policy positions on things like eliminating the capital gains tax. 

None of this is normal. Government institutions should not need to take action to protect against an incoming president. Trump should never have been allowed to run again and should have faced consequences for his myriad forms of criminal behavior. 

But once the Supreme Court insulated Trump from any fallout, it freed him to run and it freed him to win. Now, everyone else gets to suffer the consequences instead.