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.

Bibliography

Regime Diagnosis and Democratic Backsliding

Levitsky, Steven, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt. "The Price of American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs, December 2025.

Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.

Walter, Barbara F. "Stop Waiting for the Midterms to Save Us." Here Be Dragons: Warning Signs from the Edges of Democracy (Substack), January 14, 2026. https://barbarafwalter.substack.com/p/stop-waiting-for-the-midterms-to

Walter, Barbara F. How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. Crown, 2022.

"How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy." New Yorker Political Scene podcast, December 11, 2025.

Supreme Court: CASA, Shadow Docket, and Judicial Disarmament

Trump v. CASA, Inc., 24A884 (June 27, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court opinion. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

Congressional Research Service. "Trump v. CASA, Inc. and Nationwide Injunctions During the Second Trump Administration." CRS Legal Sidebar, July 15, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48600

"CASA's Complete Relief Paradox." Harvard Law Review, Vol. 139 (December 9, 2025). https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-139/casas-complete-relief-paradox/

"Reining in Relief: Trump v. CASA and the Judicial Retreat from Nationwide Injunctions." Columbia Law Review Online, January 2, 2026. https://www.culawreview.org/journal/reining-in-relief-trump-v-casa-and-the-judicial-retreat-from-nationwide-injunctions

Sohoni, Mila. "What Trump v. CASA Means for the Future of Universal Relief in Administrative Law." Yale Journal on Regulation (Notice & Comment), July 14, 2025. https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/what-trump-v-casa-means-for-the-future-of-universal-relief-in-administrative-law/

"Trump v. CASA and the Future of the Universal Injunction." SCOTUSblog, July 1, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/trump-v-casa-and-the-future-of-the-universal-injunction/

Coglianese, Cary, et al. "Judicial Remedies After CASA." The Regulatory Review (University of Pennsylvania), August 10, 2025. https://www.theregreview.org/2025/08/11/coglianese-wiener-judicial-remedies-after-casa/

"How New Restrictions on Universal Injunctions Could Change Litigation Strategies." ArentFox Schiff client alert, August 14, 2025. https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/alerts/how-new-restrictions-universal-injunctions-could-change-litigation-strategies

Brennan Center for Justice. "Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker—Challenges to Trump Administration Actions," 2025-26. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/supreme-court-shadow-docket-tracker-challenges-trump-administration

Brennan Center for Justice. "Supreme Court Must Explain Why It Keeps Ruling in Trump's Favor." August 14, 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-must-explain-why-it-keeps-ruling-trumps-favor

L.G.M.L. v. Noem (Guatemalan Children Case)

L.G.M.L. et al. v. Kristi Noem et al., case documents and summaries: National Center for Youth Law; National Immigration Law Center; Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights; ICAP at Georgetown Law; Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.

Gaza, Genocide, and Complicity

International Association of Genocide Scholars. "Resolution on the Situation in Gaza." August 31, 2025.

International Court of Justice. Provisional measures order, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), January 26, 2024.

Human Rights Watch. "Gaza: World Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide." January 26, 2024.

Schabas, William. Interview with European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). "US, Germany, and Others Could Be Held Liable as Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza." August-September 2025.

Schabas, William. Interview with Middle East Eye on ICJ, Gaza genocide, and third-state complicity. November 27, 2025.

Bartov, Omer. "Gaza and the Threat of Genocide." The New York Review of Books, November 2024.

Goldberg, Amos. "A Genocide in Gaza." Haaretz, December 2024.

Al Jazeera. "Why did genocide scholars association say Israel's war on Gaza is genocide?" September 3, 2025.

O'Donnell, Lawrence. Interview with President Joe Biden. MSNBC, January 2025 (recounting Netanyahu bombs conversation).

New Antisemitism (NAS), Title VI, and Campus Repression

U.S. Department of Education. Letter from Secretary Cardona regarding antisemitism and Title VI. May 3, 2024.

American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "Discriminating Against Dissent: Restrictions on Campus Protest in the Gaza War Era." November 2025.

Legal and academic analyses on "Efforts to Weaponize Title VI against Pro-Palestine Speech on Campus" (various sources, 2024-2025).

House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Staff report on campus antisemitism and related hearings (Comer, Stefanik, et al.), 2024-2025.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). "Working Definition of Antisemitism" (adopted 2016, various subsequent applications).

Tren de Aragua: Threat Inflation and Intelligence Manipulation

Cameron, Dell and Ryan Shapiro. "Trump Warned of a Tren de Aragua 'Invasion.' US Intel Told a Different Story." WIRED, January 14, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/trump-warned-of-a-tren-de-aragua-invasion-us-intel-told-a-different-story/

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

"ICE Agents Can Be Charged With Murder." The American Prospect, January 6, 2026. https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

"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

END

Sunday, January 18, 2026

When Even Foreign Affair Says the US is Authoritarian: The Acrhictecture of Regime Change