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Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:
One constant theme of conversations I’ve had over the last year has been the physical heaviness people feel in Trump’s America. I certainly felt it yesterday in the wake of that horrific murder — there’s nothing else to call it — of a mother by an out-of-control ICE officer in Minneapolis.
Today, though, in the wake of the Minneapolis murder, I want to focus on the physical toll of Trumpism to our nation and our collective daily psyche.
To me, there’s actually a simple explanation for that heaviness: It’s the weight of the shift from “zero to non-zero.” There are so many aspects of our daily life that we’d never had to weigh before; so many new possible horrors that we have to carry in our minds each day. We forget how much of the basic fabric of our country has been altered in the space of just a year, how many of our freedoms have been impinged, and how many things we took for granted that now we can’t.
A vigil last night in Minneapolis for Renee Nicole Good. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images)
Before last year, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that as a US resident walking the streets, regardless of immigration status, you’d be swept up by masked secret police and deported to a foreign torture gulag.
Before last year, if you were a dedicated federal employee there was a zero percent chance your department, bureau, or agency would be closed over the course of the weekend, with decades of work by thousands of people, who had carefully stewarded taxpayer dollars to accomplish a mission authorized and supported by bipartisan congresses across decades tossed in the “woodchipper” before any had the chance to object, dooming millions of the world’s most vulnerable to die in the years to come to feed the ego of a single tech oligarch.
Before last year, if you were a daycare worker, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that immigration agents (or right-wing influencers) would barge into the safe space you had worked so hard to create havoc and, in some cases, do physical violence.
Before last year, if you were an immigrant parent without a criminal record, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that dropping off your child at school would lead to your detention and immediate removal from your country.
Before last year, if you were a graduate student, professor, or medical researcher working on a long-term federally-funded study, one that had gone through the interminable approval processes and started up to help lives and advance the frontiers of our collective knowledge, you didn’t have to worry your funding would disappear overnight — that you’d be out of a job, your months or years of research thrown into the trash, your own professional trajectory destroyed and the lives of your research subjects upended in a matter of hours or a few days. Similarly, if you were a university administrator, you didn’t have to wake up each morning wondering if the federal government has, without warning or process, canceled the visas of your students.
Before last year, if you were an international student or here on a green card or long-term visa, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that exercising what you correctly considered your First Amendment rights to free speech would result in your expulsion from the country.
Before last year, if you were a dedicated nonpartisan prosecutor or federal agent, pursuing the best tradition of the Justice Department’s mission to do justice “without fear or favor,” there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that you’d be fired or removed simply for pursuing a valid case.
Before last year, if you were a parent you could have — effectively — zero doubt that the nation’s leading health professionals would act in the best interests of your children and your community, following the best science and recommendations they could to keep us all safe.
Before last year, if you were one of the thousands of dedicated museum workers, Smithsonian employees, Park Rangers, or historical interpreters tasked with telling the complicated story of our nation to visitors from around the world, there was — effectively — a zero percent chance that you would find yourself having to erase important figures from the nation’s story and instead tell history in the way that the President of the United States decreed.
Before last year, if you were an American, there was effectively a zero percent chance that you’d wake up to the news that historic parts of the White House itself were being destroyed without warning or consultation to feed the president’s ego.
Before last year, if you ran a legally independent nonprofit and weren’t engaged in some criminal activity or fraud, there was effectively zero chance that armed federal officers would show up at the direction of the White House, seize your building, fire your staff, and slap the president’s name on it.
Before last year, if Congress had discussed, debated, and passed a critical appropriation affecting your life — whether it was authorization for your government agency or a grant to help support your local community or something else — there was a zero percent chance that the Treasury wouldn’t follow through and pay the bill.
Before last year, if you criticized the president, there was a zero percent chance that the president would demand you be criminally prosecuted and proceed to fire anyone who refused until he found some flunky willing to indict you on kangaroo court charges.
Before last year, if you were the CEO of a healthy public US company, there was a zero percent chance that the US government would demand a share of your company in exchange for you being allowed to continue doing business.
Before last year, if you were a media executive, there was a zero percent chance you would have to pay a bribe — directly or indirectly — to the president to get a merger approved, a broadcast license renewed, or fire on-air talent who didn’t meet with the president’s personal approval.
Before last year, if you ran one of the hottest companies in the entire world, the maker of a product in demand everywhere, there was a zero percent chance that the US government would demand an unconstitutional export tax on your product to allow it to be sold overseas.
Before last year, if you were a fully documented legal US citizen, there was effectively a zero percent chance that a masked, armed federal officer would accost you walking on the street and demand “your papers, please,” and then arrest you.
If you were an ordinary non-famous professor, teacher, or librarian even a few years ago — not that long ago at all — there was effectively a zero percent chance that right-wing influencers, bad-faith parents, state governments, the White House, or trolling students would threaten your curriculum, dictate what books you carry in your library, record your classes to weaponize them on Fox News, protest their failing grade on national media, or have you fired for exercising free speech.
Before last year, if you were trying to use the bathroom, there was an effectively zero percent chance an armed police officer would demand to see your ID before allowing you into the women’s restroom.
If you were a federal judge, you knew that threats might come with the position, but there was a zero chance that the President of the United States would single you out for threats and encourage supporters to attack you for doing your job. Nor did you need to worry whether the US government officials appearing before you on behalf of the Justice Department would ignore your legally-binding court orders and lie to you in court.
And then there’s this week’s other big news: Before last year, if you were a NATO ally and partner of the United States, you never had to worry that one day the United States would begin, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, formulating military plans to seize your sovereign territory.
Not all of these changes and shifts are equal in importance, surely. Some are abstract, others very much tangible. Some personal, some communal. Surely, also, some of these shifts began to unfold before Trump returned to power — although in many cases his rise accelerated or encouraged the shift — and unfortunately some communities and populations have long had reasons to fear government in various forms or question the “protection” of the police, but never have Americans collectively experienced anything like the accumulation of mental weight we have in this last year.
All that weight is piled upon all that we also accumulated in 2020, from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th — the last, also disastrous year of another Trump presidency — and all that other mental weight we’ve accumulated that comes from the rising fear and collective understanding that because of GOP policies, far-right culture and media, and a nation that has lost its collective mind, you cannot count on being safe in the places where we should feel safest — synagogues, churches, schools, universities, offices, and more — and that when you kiss your children and send them to school, you can’t guarantee that they will come home at the end of the day.
That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday, is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism.
It’s the weight of non-zero.
As it turns out, that simple switch from zero to non-zero — even if it any or all of the above is still infinitesimally unlikely, it is no longer effectively zero. And that tiniest bit of switch, that binary shift from 0 to greater than zero, turns out to be something that we can all feel in our daily lives.
Before last year, if you were a mom, with a glovebox full of stuffed animals, driving your SUV through a peaceful residential street, eager to see your six-year-old child at the end of the day — a wife with no criminal record who had committed no federal crimes, not being sought by any authorities anywhere — a poet who cared about your neighbors — there was, effectively, a zero percent chance you had to worry about being shot in the face by masked, ill-trained, aggressive federal officers who would then pull their guns on a doctor who tried to help you and let you die in the street.
Now that chance is at least non-zero.
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