When Even Foreign Affairs Says the U.S. Is Authoritarian: The Architecture of Regime Change
In December 2025, Foreign Affairs
published an article by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt
titled "The Price of American Authoritarianism," arguing that the United
States is now an authoritarian country, not a functioning democracy,
and that whether it remains so depends on how institutions and citizens
respond in the coming months and years. This is a striking development. Foreign Affairs
is arguably the most influential foreign-policy magazine in the United
States, long a venue where the foreign-policy establishment talks to
itself, from George Kennan's anonymous "X Article" in 1947 to Samuel
Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" in 1993, and contributions by
figures such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin
Powell, David Petraeus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stanley McChrystal, and
Henry Kissinger.
That three of the most prominent scholars of democratic backsliding—the authors of How Democracies Die—now
say, in this flagship establishment journal, that the U.S. is already
an authoritarian regime, not a functioning democracy, marks an important
threshold. Whether this condition can be reversed, they argue, depends
on how citizens and institutions now respond. Yet this conclusion has
barely pierced mainstream coverage, which still tends to describe
Trump's second term as unusually hard-edged populism rather than a
completed regime change.
Days
after Levitsky's article appeared, political scientist Barbara F.
Walter—who worked on the CIA's Political Instability Task Force studying
civil wars and served on the advisory board analyzing insurgency
risks—published a January 14, 2026 essay titled "Stop Waiting for the
Midterms to Save Us." Walter argues that the United States is not merely
trending toward competitive authoritarianism but is already in
the most dangerous phase: the 6-12 months before a potentially
unfavorable election, when autocrats move most aggressively to rig the
system, weaponize state power, and sabotage institutions so that even if
they lose seats, they retain control. She warns that while Americans
wait for November 2026 to "save us," Trump's team is working to ensure
those elections cannot hurt them—through loyalist appointments to
election offices, preemptive fraud narratives, and institutional changes
designed to be irreversible.
The
first weeks of 2026 have thrown this system into stark relief: an ICE
agent killing a U.S. citizen on camera with video evidence contradicting
official accounts; Special Operations forces abducting Venezuela's
president; a single executive order withdrawing the U.S. from 66
international organizations and climate/IHL regimes; open threats to
"own" Greenland despite Danish warnings that would mean the end of NATO;
systematic use of lethal force by immigration agents resulting in at
least 25 shootings and six deaths with zero criminal prosecutions; and a
New York Times interview in which Trump declares that the only
limit on his global powers is "my own morality. My own mind." The
question is no longer whether the United States is drifting toward
authoritarianism. The question is whether we are willing to see—and
name—the regime we already live under, and the bipartisan paths that
brought us here.
1. The Silent Judicial Coup
Levitsky,
Way, and Ziblatt reassure readers that, unlike in Hungary or Turkey,
"courts in the U.S. remain robust and independent." That may have been
true in 2017. It is not true in 2026. In 2025, a little-noticed Supreme
Court decision—Trump v. CASA—quietly rewrote how federal courts can respond when a president breaks the law.
Before CASA,
if a district judge concluded that a federal policy was
unconstitutional, they could often issue a nationwide (universal)
injunction: a temporary order stopping the government from enforcing
that policy against anyone while the case moved up on appeal. The
administration attacked these orders as "judicial overreach" and argued
that lower-court judges should only be allowed to block a contested
policy as to the specific people who had sued. In Trump v. CASA
(2025), they got their wish. In a 6-3 emergency ruling on the Court's
"shadow docket"—without full briefing or oral argument, via an unsigned
order with Justice Barrett providing the rationale over a sharp dissent
by Justice Sotomayor—the Court held that universal injunctions exceed
the constitutional power of lower federal courts. From then on, district
judges could no longer halt a policy nationwide; they could offer
relief only to named plaintiffs or to members of a carefully certified
class.
In
plain terms: if a president announces an unconstitutional
mass-deportation or surveillance program today, a judge can still help
the people who manage to sue—but can no longer simply hit a "pause
button" for everyone else while the case is litigated.
L.G.M.L. v. Noem
shows what this looks like in practice. In August 2025, advocates
discovered that the administration planned to put at least 327
unaccompanied Guatemalan children on planes over Labor Day weekend and
send them to Guatemala, without giving them the hearings and protections
Congress guaranteed them under federal law. Lawyers scrambled: they
filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night, just
hours before the first flights. At 4:22 a.m., the federal judge on duty,
Sparkle Sooknanan, issued an emergency order stopping the government
from deporting the ten children named in the case.
Later
that day, after an urgent hearing, Judge Sooknanan expanded her order.
She said the government also had to pause removals for a larger class of
children: unaccompanied Guatemalan kids in federal custody who did not
yet have final deportation orders. On September 18, she turned that
temporary order into a preliminary injunction, finding that the
administration's supposed "reunification" plan likely violated the
Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by simply ignoring
the process Congress had laid out for unaccompanied minors.
The
ruling mattered enormously for those children. Some were literally
taken off planes and brought back into federal custody because of it.
But notice what it did not do. It did not stop the administration from
trying similar mass removals for children from Honduras, El Salvador, or
elsewhere. It did not protect Guatemalan children who were not yet in
the specific kind of custody covered by the order, or who entered the
system after the class was defined. Under the post-CASA rules,
the judge could not simply say: "This kind of secret weekend airlift is
illegal for any unaccompanied child, so you must stop doing it, full
stop."
Even
at its best, then, the case functioned as emergency triage for a
specific, defined group at a specific moment, not as a broad brake on
executive behavior held to violate the constitution. That is now the
norm. CASA and the shadow docket have turned federal courts
from institutions that could once stop a lawless program in its tracks
into institutions that can only carve out narrow pockets of safety for
those lucky enough to reach them in time. A judiciary that can no longer
issue broad, promptly enforceable injunctions is not the robust bulwark
Levitsky's comparative story presupposes.
2. Gaza, NAS, and Bipartisan Authoritarian Machinery
If CASA
is the silent judicial coup, Gaza and "New Anti-Semitism" (NAS)
frameworks are the core of the political and legal apparatus that Trump
now uses against universities, NGOs, and dissent—and they are bipartisan
in origin.
Gaza as Genocide, and as a Test of Law
By
late summer 2025, a striking convergence had emerged among the people
whose professional work is to distinguish genocide, ethnic cleansing,
and "mere" mass atrocity. The International Association of Genocide
Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution declaring that "Israel's policies
and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II"
of the Genocide Convention, citing indiscriminate and deliberate
attacks on civilians, the destruction of over 90 percent of Gaza's
housing, mass displacement, and the destruction of schools,
universities, and cultural institutions. The International Court of
Justice, in provisional orders on South Africa's case, found it
"plausible" that Israel's acts infringe "the right of the Palestinians
in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide," and ordered Israel to
prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian relief.
Leading
genocide and Holocaust scholars—many of them Israeli, Jewish, or from
survivor families—went further. Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American
historian and former IDF soldier, warned of a "systematic attempt to
make Gaza uninhabitable" and to destroy the institutions that allow a
group to sustain itself physically and culturally. Amos Goldberg
described what he saw as "the intentional destruction of Palestinian
society," arguing that the goal was not merely to defeat Hamas but to
"break the very possibility of life for Palestinians in Gaza." William
Schabas, perhaps the most influential living authority on the Genocide
Convention, called South Africa's case "arguably the strongest case of
genocide ever brought before the [ICJ]," pointing to both patterns of
conduct and "explicit statements and clear indications of policy" by
senior Israeli officials. In multiple interviews, Schabas added that
third-party states—including the United States, Germany, Canada, and
others—risk legal responsibility as accomplices to genocide if they
provide "material assistance of a significant nature" in the face of
this record.
This
was not a marginal view. It was the emerging consensus of the
professional community entrusted with guarding the legal and historical
meaning of "genocide." Yet U.S. policy under Biden did not fundamentally
change. Washington continued large-scale arms transfers and diplomatic
cover, vetoing ceasefire and accountability resolutions, pressuring the
ICC, sanctioning UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and joining
efforts to isolate UNRWA based on contested and, in many cases,
unsubstantiated allegations.
Biden
himself effectively acknowledged the moral stakes. In his farewell Oval
Office interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, he recounted a 2023 exchange
in which Netanyahu demanded heavy bombs and, by Biden's own telling,
made clear he intended to use them not only against Hamas fighters but
across Gaza's urban areas. Biden says he protested, "Bibi, you can't be
carpet bombing these communities," only to be told that the United
States had done exactly that in World War II in Dresden and Tokyo, and
that "it was justified." Biden replied that this was why the UN and
post-1945 rules were created, but when Netanyahu pressed, "Would you
really give me that line if it was your citizens and your children?"
Biden admits, "I had nothing to say. What could I say to that?"—and then
stopped resisting. Schabas's warning that the U.S. itself could one day
face findings of complicity is not an abstract law-school hypothetical;
it applies to decisions Biden has already publicly described.
NAS, Title VI, and Biden-Era Priming
While
this was happening abroad, a parallel architecture was being built at
home under the banner of fighting antisemitism. The Biden
administration, with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff as a high-profile
convenor, worked closely with organizations such as the ADL, AJC, and
ISGAP to promote a "new antisemitism" (NAS) framework that equated a
wide range of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and
"hate." Central to this effort was the informal adoption of the IHRA
working definition of antisemitism, which folds core political positions
(e.g., describing Israel as an apartheid state, calling for a
binational or single democratic state) into examples of
antisemitism—even though IHRA has never been enacted into U.S. law and
remains non-binding.
After
October 2023, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights
issued letters and guidance that effectively encouraged universities to
treat much pro-Palestine speech and organizing as potential Title VI
violations, on the theory that they created a hostile environment for
Jewish students. Legal analyses and reports by the AAUP and civil-rights
clinics show that OCR staff and informal "Dear Colleague" messages
treated slogans like "From the river to the sea" and "intifada" as
presumptively suspect, priming administrators to see Palestine
solidarity as a compliance risk.
The
result was an unprecedented wave of campus repression in 2024-25.
Encampments at Columbia, UCLA, UT Austin, Emory, and elsewhere were
cleared with heavy police force, often at the urging or with the
blessing of Democratic officials such as New York mayor Eric Adams and
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who framed the protests as
infiltrated by "Hamas supporters" and hotbeds of antisemitism. At the
federal level, high-profile House hearings dragged the presidents of
Harvard, Penn, and MIT into McCarthy-style show trials in which they
were accused of enabling "genocidal antisemitism" and pressed to promise
bans on wide swaths of pro-Palestine speech. All three ultimately lost
their jobs—even though, by that point, their own administrations had
already suspended or derecognized groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and
Students for Justice in Palestine on multiple campuses.
Crucially,
the underlying factual record did not match the panic narrative.
Systematic reviews of Title VI complaints and incident reports found
that the vast majority of cases involved speech, protest chants,
disruptions, and "atmosphere," not adjudicated patterns of physical
attacks on Jewish students by Gaza protesters. By contrast, multiple
documented incidents involved violence against Gaza protesters,
including Jewish ones: chemical "skunk spray" attacks at Columbia,
baton charges and rubber bullets at other encampments. In other words, a
legally and rhetorically inflated antisemitism panic—tied explicitly to
Gaza and NAS—was used to normalize police repression and administrative
sanctions against a largely nonviolent student movement.
Trump's Escalation
When
Trump returned to office in 2025, he inherited this apparatus and
turned it into a blunt authoritarian instrument. Building on the NAS
framework and Biden-era OCR guidance, the administration and allied
Republicans have:
-
Launched
sweeping Title VI investigations of universities, threatening to cut
billions in federal funding and strip tax-exempt status from
"antisemitic" institutions.
-
Pushed
legislation to impose civil and even criminal penalties on universities
deemed insufficiently aggressive in policing "antisemitic" expression,
using IHRA-style definitions that collapse core criticisms of Israel
into hate.
-
Backed
Project Esther and related initiatives that formally label a dense web
of campus groups, NGOs, and community organizations as a "Hamas Support
Network," institutionalizing earlier smear campaigns about students
"helping Hamas" as an official domestic-terrorism frame.
What
Levitsky's otherwise powerful analysis of Trump's war on universities
omits is this genealogy. Trump 2.0 has not invented the legal tools he
now uses to cow higher education, museums, and cultural institutions. He
is wielding and radicalizing Biden-era NAS and Title VI/IHRA machinery
forged in the crucible of Gaza. Any account that treats the current
moment as the work of one party, acting on a blank slate, fails to see
how liberal and centrist actors helped build the infrastructure of
today's authoritarianism, even if they did not intend the result.
Critically,
the same "terrorism" framing used to delegitimize Gaza solidarity is
now being deployed against immigration enforcement critics. Renee Good,
the U.S. citizen killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, was immediately
labeled a "domestic terrorist" by Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem
for allegedly "weaponizing her vehicle"—the same rhetorical move used to
cast pro-Palestine protesters as violent extremists despite evidence to
the contrary.
3. Threat Inflation and Intelligence Inversion: The Tren de Aragua Case
In
March 2025, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a wartime
statute unused since World War II—claiming that Venezuela's Tren de
Aragua (TdA) gang had "thousands" of members who had "unlawfully
infiltrated the United States" and were "conducting irregular warfare
and undertaking hostile actions." He declared that TdA was "aligned
with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime," and that Venezuela
had become a "hybrid criminal state" invading the U.S. Attorney General
Pam Bondi called TdA "a foreign arm of the Venezuelan government" and
"a highly structured terrorist organization," not a street gang.
Hundreds
of internal U.S. government records obtained through FOIA requests and
published by WIRED in partnership with Property of the People tell a
starkly different story. Intelligence taskings, law-enforcement
bulletins, and drug-task-force assessments from throughout 2025 show
that agencies spent much of the year struggling to determine whether TdA
even functioned as an organized entity in the U.S. at all—let alone as a
coordinated national security threat.
Internal
tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite "intelligence
gaps" in understanding how the group operated on U.S. soil: whether it
had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflected any
coordination beyond small local crews, and whether U.S.-based incidents
pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous,
profit-driven criminals. The documents warn that key estimates—such as
the number of members operating in the U.S.—were often inferred or
extrapolated by analysts due to a lack of corroborated facts.
A
May 2, 2025 national intelligence tasking order, issued by managers
overseeing counterterrorism, cyber, narcotics, and transnational crime,
underscores the breadth of these gaps, citing unresolved questions about
whether TdA had access to weapons beyond small arms, relied on
bulk-cash shipments or cryptocurrencies, or was supported by corrupt
officials overseas. It flagged a lack of insight into how TdA might
respond under pressure or shift tactics in response to intensified U.S.
enforcement.
Regional
drug-task-force assessments were even more cautious. A July 2025
Northern California HIDTA bulletin acknowledged that available
intelligence failed "to meet the Department of Justice definition of a
drug trafficking organization," adding that TdA subsets "appear to
operate independently of each other and do not appear to operate as part
of a larger coordinated effort." TdA members were "not known to have
assigned roles," and "leadership formation has not yet been identified."
A separate assessment covering North Texas and Oklahoma identified
Mexican cartels as the dominant narcotics threat, while characterizing
TdA activity as "street level."
Customs
and Border Protection produced more aggressive assessments, quickly
ascribing TdA with both the "capability and intent" to carry out attacks
inside the United States and ranking it among the "most capable"
foreign terrorist groups—above Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Corps—while acknowledging it had no knowledge of any "specific or
credible threat." A longer CBP assessment warned readers on its
interagency network that its findings relied on "analytical judgments
that are not fact, knowledge, or proof," and might not always
distinguish in print between assumption and fact.
The
same report acknowledges significant uncertainty about TdA membership
figures. Over a 22-month period, CBP's own detection methods identified
no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. To reach the
"thousands" figure cited by Trump, analysts relied on a "sample set of
interviews," extrapolating that "upwards of 3,000" TdA members must have
crossed the border during that period—an estimate based on the
assumption that roughly "one-half of one percent" of all Venezuelan
migrants who entered the U.S. through the southwest border had ties to
TdA.
Most
significantly, a classified National Intelligence Council
assessment—representing the consensus view of most U.S. intelligence
agencies—found no evidence that TdA was directed by the Venezuelan
government. When asked about the findings, the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence dismissed the assessment as the work of "deep
state actors" acting in conjunction with the media.
This
pattern mirrors the Gaza case: when expert consensus contradicts the
administration's narrative, the experts are attacked, sidelined, or
ignored, while more compliant agencies produce inflated threat
assessments built on acknowledged speculation. The Alien Enemies Act
invocation—premised on the claim that Venezuela is directing TdA as a
state proxy—has already been found unlawful by at least one federal
court precisely because the government's own intelligence does not
substantiate the factual predicate. Yet mass deportations under the Act
continue, with at least 137 Venezuelan deportees whose whereabouts are
unknown despite judicial and congressional scrutiny.
4. State-Sanctioned Violence and the Feedback Loop: ICE's 25 Shootings in One Year
Barbara
Walter's framework for understanding incipient insurgency emphasizes
that autocrats use violence strategically: "isolated incidents" escalate
and are used to test boundaries and terrorize potential resisters. Each
act of violence that goes unpunished signals to enforcers that more is
permitted. Since January 2025, ICE and CBP agents have been involved in
at least 25 shootings, resulting in six deaths and multiple severe
injuries. Not a single agent has been criminally charged. This is not a
series of tragic but defensible split-second decisions. It is systematic
state-sanctioned violence.
The Pattern: Shoot, Claim Terrorism, Suppress Evidence, Drop Charges
Of
at least 25 ICE and CBP shootings documented since January 2025—six of
them fatal—agents have claimed in at least thirteen cases that civilians
"weaponized" their vehicles to justify lethal force. The government has
charged multiple survivors with assaulting or attempting to murder
federal officers. Yet as of January 2026, not a single one of these prosecutions has resulted in conviction.
Charges have been quietly dropped in multiple cases; in the one case
that went to a jury trial, the defendant was acquitted on all counts.
Meanwhile, zero agents have been criminally charged, despite clear legal
authority for state prosecution and repeated calls from legal scholars
and lawmakers.
Use-of-force
experts and federal guidelines make clear that shooting into a moving
vehicle is justified only when there is gunfire from the vehicle or a
truly unavoidable collision—and even then, officers are trained to move
out of the path rather than shoot, because disabling the driver creates
an uncontrolled hazard. If any of these 25 shootings met that threshold,
the administration would have released full footage, won convictions,
and used the cases to vindicate its agents. Instead, it has suppressed
bodycam evidence, dropped charges, and refused to investigate agents—the
behavior of a regime that knows its claims cannot survive scrutiny.
Consider what the Trump administration did with the Charlie Kirk assassination attempt:
an attack by a disturbed individual with no connection to Democrats was
immediately weaponized to blame Democratic "rhetoric," threaten
lawsuits against media critics, and demand the firing of late-night
hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. The administration used it for months as proof
that "Democrats are the real violent extremists," playing footage on
loop at rallies and in campaign ads.
If even ONE of the 25 ICE/CBP shootings involved genuine attempted murder of an agent,
the administration would release full bodycam footage immediately, play
it on Fox News every hour for weeks, show it at Trump rallies, and use
it to justify every subsequent shooting and aggressive enforcement
action. It would become the centerpiece of the 2026 midterm campaign:
"Democrats want to abolish ICE—the agency protecting our heroes from
terrorist car attacks!"
We have the opposite:
bodycam footage suppressed, charges quietly dropped, one jury
acquittal, and administration officials smearing dead citizens and
investigating their families. This is not absence of evidence—it is
evidence of absence. The Trump administration knows how to exploit real
or imagined threats. The fact that they hide footage and drop charges
proves they know the shootings cannot be justified.
The Killing of Renee Good
On
January 6, 2026, in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and
killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of
three, after she parked her SUV perpendicular to the street, blocked an
ICE convoy for several minutes, and attempted to drive away. Within
hours, Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good a "domestic
terrorist" who had "weaponized her vehicle" and tried to run over
agents. Noem repeated this characterization at a press conference the
next day.
Multi-angle forensic analyses by CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post
tell a different story. By synchronizing home-surveillance video,
bystander footage, and Ross's own phone recording, CNN showed that as
Good turned her wheels to the right and accelerated, Ross moved to the
left side of the SUV, drew his weapon, and fired three shots into the
driver's window as the vehicle passed, with his feet clearly on the
pavement and his body outside the car's path. The New York Times's
forensic video analysis likewise concluded that "the vehicle appears to
be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire," and that
synchronized clips show "the agent is not being run over. In fact, his
feet are positioned away from the SUV." Use-of-force experts interviewed
on CNN noted that DOJ policy instructs officers to move out of a
vehicle's path and de-escalate, and that firing from the side into a car
moving away is very difficult to square with a claim of imminent mortal
danger.
Despite
this evidence, the administration has not retracted its account. Trump,
Vance, and Noem continue to call Good a "domestic terrorist." The
Justice Department has declined to investigate Ross while redirecting
investigative energy toward Good's widow and her community ties to
activist groups—a punitive investigation into the victim's family rather
than the shooter. Six federal prosecutors resigned rather than carry
out these directives.
Hours
after the killing, masked ICE and CBP agents led by CBP head Craig
Mivino entered Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis at dismissal time,
tackling students, pepper-spraying bystanders, and handcuffing two staff
members, prompting the district to cancel classes for the rest of the
week. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, drawing on a
months-long Senate investigation of ICE/CBP force, described the
agencies as being turned into a "nationwide paramilitary force with vast
resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims," and
said the Minneapolis events "smack of a cover-up," noting that DHS was
blocking state and local police from investigating the shooting.
The Martinez Case and Agent Impunity
In
October 2025 in Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar
Martinez, a U.S. citizen, five times after agents claimed her car had
rammed and boxed in their vehicle. Martinez was charged with forcibly
assaulting a federal officer. But in November, the Justice Department
moved to dismiss all charges, and in December a federal judge denied a
request to release body-camera footage from the incident.
At a November hearing, defense counsel confronted Exum with his own text messages sent shortly after the shooting:
-
"Cool, I'm up for another round of **** around and find out. Lmao"
-
"I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys"
-
"Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao."
Exum admitted he turned his bodycam on only after
the shooting, leaving it on the passenger seat because he believed he
would be a "target" if people saw it recording. Despite this record of
apparent gloating and evidence manipulation, Exum has not been charged.
Martinez, shot five times by an agent who joked about his "15 mins of
fame," faced terrorism charges that were quietly dropped when it became
clear the government could not prove its case.
Blinded Protesters: "Less-Lethal" Weapons as Instruments of Terror
At
a January 10, 2026 protest in Santa Ana against ICE and the Good
killing, Homeland Security officers fired "less-lethal" projectiles into
protesters' faces at close range:
-
Kaden Rummler, 21,
lost vision permanently in one eye after being shot point-blank while
holding a loudspeaker. Doctors found plastic, glass, and metal fragments
in his skull and stomach that could not be fully removed, creating
ongoing risk of metal poisoning.
-
Britain Rodriguez, 31, was shot in the face at the same time; he also suffered severe eye damage and temporary blindness in one eye.
DHS
claimed protesters were throwing rocks and fireworks; local police said
they were only aware of traffic cones being thrown. DHS has
characterized Rummler's permanent blindness as a "cut" and described the
protest as a "riot." No DHS officer has been investigated.
The Jedeed Hiring Scandal: How ICE Became a Paramilitary Force
In
January 2026, journalist Laura Jedeed published an account of applying
to ICE as an experiment. Despite being an openly anti-ICE writer with a
public record of criticism, completing zero background-check paperwork,
and likely failing a drug test, ICE's online portal showed her as having
passed all checks and assigned her a start date of September 30, 2025.
The portal displayed: "EOD: Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!"
When
DHS called her report "such a lazy lie," Jedeed posted video receipts
from ICE's own system corroborating her account. DHS has not responded.
Jedeed revealed a detail she had initially withheld: "Jedeed is a Syrian
surname; my family immigrated in the 1980s. This detail delayed my
military clearance for several months back in 2005." If ICE had actually
run a background check, this would have been flagged. It wasn't.
ICE
doubled its workforce from 10,000 to 22,000 agents in under a year,
cutting training from 13 to 6 weeks. Current and former ICE agents
interviewed by TIME expressed concerns about the Good shooting and
broader operations. One said, "I'm embarrassed." Another noted that Ross
had a prior vehicle incident that should have disqualified him from
fieldwork. The agency's explosive growth, collapse of vetting standards,
and elimination of accountability mechanisms have created precisely the
conditions Barbara Walter describes as characteristic of regimes moving
from "incipient insurgency" toward open authoritarian violence:
under-trained, ideologically selected enforcers deployed without
oversight, who learn through repetition that lethal force brings no
consequences.
Why This Time Is Different: The Missing Floyd Effect
After
George Floyd's killing in 2020, video evidence sparked a national
uprising, forced institutional responses, and led to a murder
conviction. After Kent State in 1970, a presidential commission called
the shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable"; while no one was
convicted, there was public contrition and investigation.
In 2026, we have:
-
Clear video evidence of unjustified killings (Good, forensic analysis by three major outlets)
-
Systematic lying by top officials (Trump, Noem, Vance) that persists despite debunking
-
Zero federal investigation of shooters
-
Active persecution of victims' families (Good's widow investigated, six prosecutors resign in protest)
-
One jury acquittal when a "weaponized vehicle" case actually goes to trial
-
Multiple dropped charges when prosecutors realize they can't win
Yet
there is no Floyd-style response. No mass protests, no institutional
crisis, no resignations of senior officials, no criminal charges.
Why? In 2020, Democrats were in opposition and believed the system could be restored. In 2026, after Foreign Affairs
has declared the U.S. already authoritarian, Democratic elites appear
to have internalized that serious confrontation is "futile or
electorally suicidal" in a competitive-authoritarian context. They fear
retaliation (investigations, funding cuts, terrorism charges), donor
pressure, and normalization fatigue. Polling shows public disapproval of
ICE and the Good shooting, but not the collapse that would force a
systemic response.
When
asked directly whether there is precedent for federal agents killing
citizens with fabricated justifications that survive forensic debunking,
mainstream systems default to silence—because acknowledging that truth
would mean acknowledging regime change.
5. Coast Guard, Posse Comitatus, and Court-Baiting
The judiciary's practical inability to restrain executive lawlessness extends beyond CASA to direct defiance through relabeling and jurisdictional gaming. On December 23, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Illinois
that the president's deployment of federalized National Guard troops to
Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities "likely lacked authority" under
10 U.S.C. § 12406 and violated the Posse Comitatus Act because there was
no "rebellion" or equivalent trigger and the activities were clearly
law enforcement, not mere "protection."
The
administration's response was not compliance but circumvention. Within
days, troops were withdrawn from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland—then
immediately redeployed under different labels: "logistical support,"
"infrastructure protection," or via Coast Guard units (which are
technically exempt from Posse Comitatus). This forced new rounds of
litigation, a tactic legal scholars call "court-baiting": doing what the
Court forbade under a slightly different legal wrapper to exhaust
judicial capacity and erode the Court's effective authority without a
single headline moment of explicit defiance.
The
administration has also asserted that even if a deployment violates
Posse Comitatus, the president cannot be prosecuted because directing
the military is a "core constitutional function" covered by absolute
immunity—a new doctrine that shields precisely the kind of domestic
military use the PCA was designed to constrain.
Meanwhile, in September 2025, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo
that expanded immigration agents' power to stop people based on what
critics call racial profiling. The 6-3 decision stayed a lower-court
injunction that had restricted ICE agents in Los Angeles from making
stops based solely on race, ethnicity, language, or job type. While the
Court reaffirmed that the Fourth Amendment requires "reasonable
suspicion" for immigration stops, by lifting the injunction it allowed
agents to use race, language (Spanish), job type (car wash,
construction), and location as factors in a "totality of the
circumstances" analysis.
Justice
Sotomayor's dissent warned: "We should not have to live in a country
where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish,
and appears to work a low wage job." The practical effect is a two-tier
Fourth Amendment: most Americans retain protection against stops unless
police have individualized suspicion of them specifically committing a
crime; Latino/Hispanic Americans and immigrants can be stopped based on
broad demographic profiles that describe millions of innocent people, as
long as agents invoke "immigration enforcement."
The
system is already in a condition where the Supreme Court's capacity to
restrain the executive is practically hollowed out by speed, relabeling,
and venue shopping, even though the executive has not yet openly said
"we will ignore the Court." The judiciary can identify illegality but
cannot stop it.
6. Venezuela, Treaties, Greenland: "My Own Morality" as the Only Limit
The
same personalist logic that animates domestic paramilitary operations
and court-baiting appears in Trump's approach to foreign policy. In his
January 8, 2026 interview with the New York Times, Trump was asked whether there were any limits on his global powers as commander in chief. He replied:
"Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me… I don't need international law."
Pressed
on whether his administration needed to abide by international law, he
offered a perfunctory "I do," then immediately added, "It depends what
your definition of international law is," making clear that, in his
view, he is the arbiter of when such norms apply.
Venezuela: Decapitation and Occupation
In
early January 2026, U.S. special-operations forces carried out a
lightning operation in Caracas to remove President Nicolás Maduro and
bring him to New York for trial, without congressional authorization and
in obvious violation of the UN Charter's prohibitions on the use of
force and interference in another state's political independence. The
administration has moved to seize effective control over Venezuela's oil
revenues. Senator J.D. Vance boasted that the United States will
"control the purse strings" and sell Venezuela's oil "indefinitely" to
recoup its "investment." Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller asserted
that international law is "largely irrelevant" to great powers and that
the U.S. has the right to "govern and control Venezuela" as a matter of
strength.
66 Treaty Withdrawals
Almost
simultaneously, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United
States from 66 international organizations and treaty-based bodies,
including 31 UN entities and 35 other institutions, many of them central
to global climate, health, and environmental cooperation. The White
House framed these as "wasteful" or "anti-American" organizations that
infringed U.S. sovereignty, and did not return to the Senate to seek
repeal of prior consent for the underlying treaties. This is a sweeping,
unilateral retreat from the post-1945 institutional order that previous
administrations of both parties built.
Greenland: The End of NATO?
On
Greenland, Trump insists that "ownership is very important," that
Greenland "must become part of the United States," and that "ownership
gives you things… that you can't get from just signing a document."
Asked whether acquiring Greenland or preserving NATO is a higher
priority, he concedes "it may be a choice." The Danish prime minister
has warned that any U.S. military attempt to seize Greenland would mean
"everything stops… the end of NATO," because it would amount to an
attack on an ally's territory.
Taken
together, Venezuela's decapitation, the mass treaty withdrawals, and
the Greenland threats are not isolated foreign-policy disputes. They are
the external face of the same personalist regime that deploys ICE as a
paramilitary at home, that treats Gaza as a zone beyond law, and that
has repurposed civil-rights law into an instrument for disciplining
universities. They enact precisely the worldview Trump described to the Times: law and multilateral constraint are subordinate to his "own mind," and power, not rules, is the decisive fact.
7. Beyond "It's All MAGA": A Fuller Accounting
Levitsky,
Way, and Ziblatt are right about several crucial points. They correctly
describe the United States today as a competitive authoritarian regime,
not a healthy democracy. They emphasize the importance of broad,
cross-ideological coalitions to defend the remaining spaces of electoral
and civic competition. And they warn, rightly, that if Trump
consolidates further control over the security state and bureaucracy,
subsequent elections may become increasingly hollow.
But the analysis needs to go further in three ways.
First, on institutions: The judiciary is not the robust bulwark their comparative narrative assumes. Trump v. CASA
and the Supreme Court's shadow-docket practices have radically narrowed
courts' ability to issue broad, timely injunctions, transforming even
heroic litigation into case-by-case triage. Trump v. Illinois found Posse Comitatus violations, yet the administration simply relabeled deployments and forced new litigation. Vasquez Perdomo
created a two-tier Fourth Amendment that licenses racial profiling in
immigration enforcement. The judiciary has, in effect, participated in
its own partial disarmament, obviating the need for an overt purge.
Courts can now identify illegality but cannot stop it.
Second, on responsibility:
The apparatus of repression Trump now wields did not spring fully
formed from MAGA. Biden-era decisions on Gaza—continuing arms transfers
despite IAGS, ICJ, and leading genocide scholars' warnings—the embrace
of NAS and IHRA frameworks, the use of Title VI and Dear Colleague
letters to police Palestine solidarity, and bipartisan participation in
campus crackdowns and McCarthy-style hearings all pre-legitimated key
tools and narratives. The war-on-terror framing that cast Gaza
protesters as terrorist sympathizers is now applied to immigration
enforcement critics: Renee Good labeled a "domestic terrorist," Tren de
Aragua hyped as "invasion" despite intelligence showing fragmented
low-level crime. Trump is accelerating and expanding a machinery that
liberal and centrist actors helped construct.
Third, on scope:
Foreign policy is not a separate theater. Gaza, Venezuela, Greenland,
the 66 treaty withdrawals, and sanctions against the ICC and UN
officials are not sideshows; they are arenas where the regime practices
and demonstrates its contempt for law and its fusion of security and
private economic interests. The same logic that justifies shielding an
ally's genocide—and that leads William Schabas to warn that the U.S. and
Germany themselves may face findings of complicity—also animates ICE's
domestic killings, the criminalization of Gaza protesters, and the
casual assertion that only one man's "own morality" can restrain
American power.
Barbara Walter's warning validated:
Her January 14 essay said "the next eleven months aren't about what
happens in November—they're about whether we'll have free and fair
elections at all." The evidence since then—the Good shooting and its
cover-up, the Jedeed hiring scandal revealing ICE's collapse into an
untrained paramilitary force, court-baiting on Posse Comitatus, the 66
treaty withdrawals, Trump's Alien Enemies Act invocation built on
intelligence his own agencies say doesn't exist—shows she was right: the
regime is not waiting for midterms; it is entrenching through violence,
lies, and institutional sabotage.
The missing piece in both analyses: Neither Levitsky nor Walter fully integrates the speed and visibility
of the collapse. We are not discovering authoritarian practices through
investigative deep-dives years later; we are watching citizens killed
on video, watching forensic evidence published in real-time
contradicting official accounts that persist anyway, watching the
president joke about canceling elections on the January 6 anniversary
after pardoning all January 6 defendants, watching 25 ICE shootings with
zero agent prosecutions and zero victim convictions—and watching
institutional response collapse in real-time too.
When
mainstream information systems are asked whether there is precedent for
federal agents killing citizens with fabricated justifications that
survive forensic debunking, they default to silence—because
acknowledging that truth would mean acknowledging regime change.
Democratic leaders issue statements but do not mobilize mass resistance
or institutional confrontation, having internalized that in a
competitive-authoritarian context, serious opposition triggers
retaliation (investigations, funding cuts, terrorism charges) without
guaranteed success.
What this means for strategy:
A realistic strategy must start from a fuller picture: a personalist,
kleptocratic, NAS-driven, post-legal regime operating across domestic
and international domains, built on bipartisan foundations and now
openly contemptuous of both international and constitutional law.
Electoral coalitions and civic mobilization remain essential. But they
will fail if they assume: (1) courts can constrain the executive; (2)
video evidence and journalism still trigger accountability; (3) the
opposition party will fight rather than issue statements; (4) the
midterms will save us if we just wait patiently.
A
realistic resistance must operate as if in competitive-authoritarian
space: protecting local election infrastructure, building parallel
institutions, preparing for contested results, documenting abuses in
real-time for future accountability, and naming openly what
establishment institutions will not—that this is no longer a democracy
experiencing stress, but a regime that has already changed type. The
question is not whether we can prevent democratic backsliding. The
question is whether we can recognize, name, and resist the authoritarian
regime we already live under, and whether enough institutions and
citizens will act on that recognition before the 2026 midterms are
rigged, delegitimized, or rendered irrelevant.
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Gaza, Genocide, and Complicity
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2025.
Legal
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House
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International
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Tren de Aragua: Threat Inflation and Intelligence Manipulation
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Documents
obtained by Property of the People through FOIA requests: intelligence
taskings, law-enforcement bulletins, HIDTA assessments, CBP reports,
National Intelligence Council memo (2025).
Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Aragua, March 2025.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) public statements dismissing NIC assessment as "deep state," 2025.
ICE and CBP Shootings: State-Sanctioned Violence
"List of shootings by U.S. immigration agents in the second Trump administration." Wikipedia, continuously updated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immigration_agents_in_the_second_Trump_administration
Renee Good Killing (Minneapolis, January 6, 2026)
Wang, Philip. "'I'm Embarrassed': ICE Agents Speak About the Shooting in Minneapolis." TIME, January 14, 2026.
CNN. "How the ICE shooting unfolded, step by step" / "New video reveals ICE agent's POV on MN shooting." January 10, 2026.
New York Times. "Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis." Video forensic analysis, January 7, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis-ice-shooting-video.html
New York Times. "Video Analysis of ICE Shooting Sheds Light on Contested Moments." January 15, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/video/ice-shooting-renee-good-minneapolis-videos.html
Washington Post. "Video shows ICE agent in Minneapolis fired at driver as vehicle moved away." January 8, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/08/video-ice-shooting-minneapolis/
TIME. "Fatal ICE Shooting Sparks Scrutiny of Killings in Trump's Crackdown." January 11, 2026. https://time.com/7345319/ice-shootings-renee-good/
ABC News. "'A beautiful light': Renee Good's family mourns her death amid push for answers." January 14, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/US/beautiful-light-renee-goods-family-mourns-death-amid/story?id=129218073
New York Times. "Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim's Widow." January 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resignation-ice-shooting.html
Democracy Docket. "After Minneapolis, Trump ushers in death of independent federal law enforcement." January 15, 2026. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/trump-justice-department-renee-nicole-good-death-independent-federal-law-enforcement/
Tapper, Jake. Interview with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. CNN, January 11, 2026.
Hayes, Chris. Segment with Sen. Richard Blumenthal on ICE/CBP force and Roosevelt High School raid. MSNBC, January 2026.
Killing of Renee Good. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Renee_Good
Marimar Martinez Shooting (Chicago, October 4, 2025)
Fox
32 Chicago. "Marimar Martinez update: Bodycam video ordered withheld in
Border Patrol agent shooting case." December 19, 2025.
Court documents and testimony regarding Agent Charles Exum's text messages and bodycam conduct (November 2025 hearing).
Santa Ana Protest Blindings (January 10, 2026)
Los Angeles Times. "Second man says Homeland Security blinded him at anti-ICE rally." January 16, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-16/second-man-says-homeland-security-blinded-him-at-anti-ice-rally
Fox
LA. "Anti-ICE protester claims he's blind one eye after federal officer
shot him with non-lethal weapon in Santa Ana." January 12, 2026. https://www.foxla.com/news/anti-ice-protester-claims-hes-now-blind-after-federal-officer-shot-him-nonlethal-weapon-santa-ana
YouTube. "O.C. protestor blinded by federal agent." January 13, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t5GfQgGI7w
Other ICE/CBP Shooting Cases
KOMO News. "Man acquitted of assaulting federal agents in Camano Island ramming incident." January 12, 2026. https://komonews.com/news/local/ice-arrest-convicted-felon-illegally-present-in-the-us-acquitted-of-ramming-4-ice-federal-agents
Fox News. "Alleged Tren de Aragua associate charged after Border Patrol shooting in Portland." January 11, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/doj-charges-illegal-immigrant-tren-de-aragua-ties-after-border-patrol-shooting-portland
Los Angeles Times. "ICE agent who killed L.A. man accused of child abuse, racism in prior lawsuits." January 16, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-16/ice-agent-los-angeles-shooting-court-records
Legal Analysis on ICE Shootings
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"Immigration Agents Are Shooting People. Is It Legal?" The Trace, January 11, 2026. https://www.thetrace.org/2026/01/ice-shooting-legal-prosecution-federal-agent/
Connecticut Public Radio. "What if an ICE shooting happened in Connecticut? A legal expert explains." January 15, 2026. https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2026-01-15/what-if-an-ice-shooting-happened-in-connecticut-a-ct-legal-expert-explains
ICE Hiring Scandal (Laura Jedeed)
Jedeed, Laura. "I Applied for a Job at ICE. They Offered Me One—Without a Background Check." Slate, January 2026.
Jedeed, Laura. "The Trump Administration Is Calling the Viral Story of My ICE Job Offer a Lie. Good Thing I Kept the Receipts." Slate, January 16, 2026. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-trump-administration-dhs-minneapolis.html
Yahoo News. "'Anti-ICE' Reporter Drops Proof That Agency Hired Her After DHS Called Her Story a Lie." January 15, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/anti-ice-reporter-drops-proof-145019148.html
Yahoo News. "DHS Picks Fight With Reporter Who Exposed ICE's Shoddy Hiring." January 14, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dhs-picks-fight-reporter-exposed-184408659.html
Polling on ICE, Immigration, and Trump
ABC
News. "Majority of Americans say ICE agent's shooting of Good was
unjustified or inappropriate." Poll results, January 15, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/majority-americans-ice-agents-shooting-good-unjustified-inappropriate/story?id=129253596
Axios. "Trump's immigration erosion worries his team." January 16, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/01/16/trump-polling-immigration-approval-rating-ice-noem
New York Times. "Opinion | 'Bad, Bad News for the G.O.P. Over the Long Haul'" (on ICE shooting polling). January 15, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/opinion/ice-shooting-trump-republicans-polling.html
Reuters. "Republicans split on Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows." January 15, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/republicans-split-trumps-aggressive-immigration-crackdown-reutersipsos-poll-2026-01-15/
Forbes. "Trump Approval Rating: Views Of Immigration Handling Plummeted After ICE Shooting." January 15, 2026.
The Hill. "46 percent in new poll support abolishing ICE, 43 percent oppose." January 13, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5687229-ice-trump-administration-support-poll/
Chicago Operations and Fourth Amendment Violations
ABC7 Chicago. "Family 'unlawfully' detained by ICE at Millennium Park now separated, court filing says." October 1, 2025.
CNN. "Chicago apartment ICE raid: Tenants detained for hours and separated from children." October 3, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid
Posse Comitatus, Military Deployments, and Court-Baiting
Trump v. Illinois, 25A443 (December 23, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court emergency order. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a443_new_kkg1.pdf
The Hill. "Pritzker: 400 Texas National Guard headed to Illinois, Oregon." October 5, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5540091-pritzker-national-guard-illinois-texas-oregon/
Al Jazeera. "Governor slams 'Trump's invasion' as troops deployed in Illinois." October 6, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/6/governor-slams-trumps-invasion-as-troops-deployed-in-illinois
Democracy Docket. "Trump: 'We shouldn't even have an election.'" January 14, 2026. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-we-shouldnt-even-have-an-election/
POLITICO. "Judge limits warrantless immigration arrests in DC." December 2, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/02/immigration-arrests-order-dc-00674125
Fourth Amendment and Immigration Stops
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, 25A169 (September 8, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court opinion. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf
SCOTUSblog. "Supreme Court allows federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in Los Angeles." September 15, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/supreme-court-allows-federal-officers-to-more-freely-make-immigration-stops-in-los-angeles/
SCOTUSblog. "'Roving patrols,' reasonable suspicion, and Perdomo." September 18, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/roving-patrols-reasonable-suspicion-and-perdomo/
UCLA
Latino Policy & Politics Institute. "SCOTUS Opens Door to Racial
Profiling in Immigration Enforcement." September 9, 2025. https://latino.ucla.edu/scotus-ruling-opens-door-to-racial-profiling-in-immigration-enforcement/
American
Immigration Council. "How the Supreme Court's Latest Decision Clears
the Way for Racial Profiling in Immigration Raids." September 8, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/supreme-courts-decision-racial-profiling-immigration-raids/
PBS
NewsHour. "Supreme Court ends restrictions on LA immigration stops set
after agents swept up U.S. citizens." September 8, 2025.
Constitutional
Accountability Center. "CAC Release: Supreme Court Ignores History in
Favor of Its Own Rule for Warrantless Home Entries." January 13, 2026. https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/cac-release-supreme-court-ignores-history-in-favor-of-its-own-rule-for-warrantless-home-e
Democracy Forward. "The People's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court: 2025-2026." December 14, 2025. https://democracyforward.org/work/research/peoples-guide-scotus-25-26/
Venezuela, Treaty Withdrawals, Greenland
Sanger,
David E., Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. "Trump
Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by 'My Own Morality.'" New York Times, January 8, 2026.
People. "Trump Says 'My Own Morality' Is 'the Only Thing' Stopping Him from Global Supremacy." January 8, 2026. https://people.com/donald-trump-says-morality-only-thing-stopping-global-supremacy-11881997
YouTube. "Trump Says His Only Limit on His Global Powers Is His 'Own Morality.'" January 8, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysZJUjhnt3M
Reuters. "US oversight of Venezuela may last years, Trump tells NYT." January 8, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-us-oversight-venezuela-could-last-years-nyt-reports-2026-01-08/
NPR. "Why is the U.S. pulling out of 31 U.N. groups? And what's the impact?" January 8, 2026.
Verfassungsblog.
"Retreating from Internationalism: The Announced U.S. Withdrawal from
Many International Entities." January 9, 2026.
White
House Fact Sheet. "President Donald J. Trump Withdraws the United
States from International Organizations that Undermine U.S.
Sovereignty." January 6, 2026.
Earth.org. "US Withdraws From 66 Int'l Bodies, Including Key Climate Treaties." January 8, 2026.
Trump's Election Comments and Midterms
Popli, Nik. "Trump Floats Cancelling 2026 Elections, Then Insists He Won't." TIME, January 6, 2026.
People. "Trump Gripes About 2026 Midterms: 'We Shouldn't Even Have an Election.'" January 15, 2026. https://people.com/donald-trump-gripes-about-2026-midterms-saying-when-you-think-of-it-we-shouldn-t-even-have-an-election-118862
YouTube. "Trump Suggests U.S. Cancel November's Midterms Due to Poor Polling." January 15, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCqEWYYd54
Targeting of Political Opponents
Axios. "Trump slams 'radical left' after signing 'organized political violence' memo." September 26, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/26/trump-organized-political-violence-radical-left
Democracy Docket. "Trump Took Key Steps Into Authoritarianism This Week." September 25, 2025. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/trump-authoritarian-push-comey-indictment-nonprofit-executive-orde/
Wikipedia. "Targeting of political opponents and civil society under the second Trump administration." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponents_and_civil_society_under_the_second_Trump_administration
Japan Times. "Trump's war on the left: Inside the plan to investigate liberal groups." October 9, 2025.
BBC. "Trump promised retribution—how far will he go?" September 27, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q74pxx871o
Los Angeles Times. "In Trump's 'domestic terrorism' memo, some see blueprint for vengeance." September 27, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-09-27/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-some-see-blueprint-for-vengeance
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