The media missed the story on Pete Hegseth. Even Rachel Maddow, patron saint of the Big Picture, missed it. The real reason Trump appointed a sloppy drunk to head the U.S. Department of Defense weren’t the obvious ones, that Hegseth looked good on TV, or Trump identified with a stupid, opportunistic bully who abuses women.

Both true, but no. Hegseth is there because when Trump orders him to deploy the military against protesters, or, frankly, against anyone Trump wants to hurt, Hegseth won’t spout nonsense about that pesky constitution. He’ll say: Yes, sir! Maybe Pete will even salute.

As crazy as the other appointments are, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now likely to sail through Congress. Even if one founders, the damage has been done. Nobody seems capable of stopping or even slowing Trump’s coup d’etat, at least until the midterms. And then it may be too late.

Immigration is where every ugly impulse that has risen is now converging. According to New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, and deployment of infantry troops, is likely to be the prelude to wider use of the military domestically. Radicalization of the military will consolidate Trump’s power, said Ben-Ghiat, another reason for the appointment of Hegseth, whose hardcore views match his tattoos, including “Deus Vult” (God wills it) a cry uttered during the Crusades linked to white supremacist groups.

As a journalist, it’s hard to write this. But it’s become clear that the language of American journalism cannot encompass the rise to power of Donald Trump. I’ve been looking to historians for perspective. There are precedents and patterns, as clearly delineated in Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen. The task is seeing if Trump’s actions match the template.

Every action since Inauguration Day shows that Trump is determined to do all the things he couldn’t pull off during his first administration, only this time he has the Project 2025 people to make it all happen. The line from spoiled rich boy to autocrat is a straight one. Trump wants to be a dictator.

Yet Americans seem paralyzed. The New York Times recently published an essay by Ross Barkan: “Goodby, ‘Resistance,’ The End of Hyperpolitics is Over.” While Barkan was right to remark on the country’s apparent listlessness, his interpretation was off. First, nobody knows what hyperpolitics is, and the use of this obscure term signals that there is - wait for it - A Big Idea. Barkan is one of those trend guys, and the trend he sees now is that “accommodation and acceptance are…the watchwords.”

These are indeed the watchwords if you’re a tech overlord, or if you write for the New York Times and you’re trying to come up with a Big Idea. There is, certainly, a sense of deflation. More than that, people are in despair. One Trump term was a fluke. A second is betrayal by your friends and neighbors.

It’s unclear what anyone can do when Republicans control the House and the Senate. The Supreme Court has been hijacked. If a majority upholds the constitution or the law, it’s a bonus, but nothing you can expect.

What have we got? Federal judges? Biden appointed 235, but let’s not forget that Trump got 226 in. So the courts are a crapshoot. It’s all about the midterms, and as one Democratic organizer said recently, if the midterms don’t turn things around, put a fork in the U.S., we’re done.

Why would anyone march on Washington under such conditions, especially wearing silly pink pussy hats? If Antifa, or the Rent-a-Riot folks, as we used to call them in San Francisco, show up, or Heaven forfend, Black Lives Matter protesters, Trump will call out the 82nd Airborne. (He must have heard the name in a movie and thinks they have parachutes.) This time, they will have orders to shoot. Maybe in the legs, as he once ordered. Maybe somewhere else. This time, there is no General Mark Milley to stop them. Unless someone else risks Hegseth’s ire, the soldiers will come.

Street demonstrations won’t matter unless they represent a massive groundswell of public sentiment and we’re not there yet. Let me tell you something else that doesn’t matter: canceling your subscription to the New York Times or the Washington Post. One more? Leaving Facebook. Jeff Bezos does not care about your gesture. He only cares about Trump supporting Blue Origin and not cracking down on Amazon for being a monopoly. Zuckerberg doesn’t care if a thousand or ten thousand of you leave, either. He has billions of Facebook users, and as we know, too many billions of dollars.

On the other hand, you do care. If you leave Facebook, you lose part of your community. Community is what we have now. You are, as my mother used to say, cutting off your nose to spite your face. X, well, that’s another story. It is repellent. I stay on it because there are still journalists there, political consultants like the dapper and insightful Stuart Stevens, and the novelist T.C. Boyle. You don’t have to. Why would you? Maybe to see the priorities of Elon Musk and his disinformation trolls? Masochistic, but I applaud you. And me.

Clearly the midterms are the priority. Grassroots activists are trying to recapture school boards. They are working on registering Democrats and progressives through organizations like Field Team 6, which is not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and as a result, not bound by party vagaries.

There are other levers, according to Ben-Ghiat, whose research focuses on authoritarian regimes. This week, she hosted a podcast on Substack with Dartmouth sociologist Brooke Harrington, an expert on the super-rich, the men who are now, as we know, running the country.

Harrington acknowledged that it’s difficult to rein in oligarchs. They have so much money, a few million here or there doesn’t matter. But they are vulnerable to - wait for it - embarrassment. Harrington compared people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to middle schoolers. They engage in status competition. (“How many private jets do you have?”) They get off on bending others to their will. (See Trump, Donald; Thiel, Peter.)

What the rest of us can do, according to Harrington, is deny these middle schoolers the adulation they demand. “Get up in their faces and say, no, we don’t accept you,” she said. “They care about that stuff deeply so we should give it to them, good and hard.”

Harrington’s advice mirrored the words of Stuart Stevens, the writer and political consultant who co-founded the Lincoln Project. Stevens told a reporter this week that during the cabinet hearings every single Democrat should have asked two simple questions of Trump’s cabinet appointees: Did Trump lose the election in 2020? and Should the Jan. 6 insurrectionists be pardoned? Let the answers speak for themselves. It’s called messaging, guys. You know about that, right? (Stevens recently formed another group expressly aiming to counter the disinformation economy. It’s called Resolute Square.)

Both strategies make sense. Quoting Jonathan Last in The Bulwark, Jason Dinkins in The New Republic explained the strategy this way: Identify all of the real problems in the U.S. and make it clear that Trump is failing to solve them. Because he failed in the first term and he will fail more. Housing? Check. Infrastructure? You gotta be kidding. Check.

Among the rich, embarrassment truly is a potent weapon, or Ivanka Trump would still be working for Daddy. I sensed this about a decade ago, when I moved back to the east coast after spending most of my adult life in the American West. I hadn’t just lived in the West, I studied it. I walked desert arroyos with ecologists and park biologists. My heart caught as I saw, for the first time, wolves in Yellowstone. When men disappointed or friends betrayed me, the Western landscape felt like the one true love of my life. We believed in that sort of thing, if you recall, when we were younger.

When irate readers wrote letters to the editor, they usually called me a Communist rather than attacking me for being a woman, and even more suspect, a woman with a foreign-sounding name. I believed this was because the culture of the West retains the openness of the frontier, where Bernard DeVoto famously said that a person can reinvent himself (or herself). People don’t care where you come from, unlike the class-ridden East.

I also believe that I didn’t get personally attacked because I knew my shit. Growing up in Manhattan, my mother had yanked me out of public school, where my teenage aspirations consisted of smoking cigarettes and chasing boys, and plunked me into a girl’s private school. Once I got over my disappointment that my classmates didn’t want to be juvenile delinquents, I learned how to study. I even learned how think.

But I still have what one might call an attitude. That’s why, when I came back to New York and saw an ugly fountain being built outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Koch name on it, I thought, Goddammit, no. This is wrong. The Met was where I had escaped my miserable teenage life to hide among the Rembrandts, and the Koch brothers were an atrocity, petroleum product moguls dedicating their fortunes to getting rid of environmental laws and the administrative state in general. Dirty money, and the Met should have refused it. Plus, the fountain was characterless and out of tune with the museum’s Gothic Revival building.

I emailed girls from my class, asking them if they’d participate in a demonstration. My idea was that we dress like the older graduates I’d seen back in our school days, elegant women wearing natty suits and spectacular hats worthy of Wimbledon. “Let’s call it the Rogue Deb demo!” I wrote with naive enthusiasm. I hadn’t been a debutante (well, obviously) but most of the girls could have been. Perhaps there was a hint of sarcasm but it was a great idea. A demonstration by girls from our school would absolutely, certainly have made The New York Times.

Alas, as editors pretentiously write when turning down a manuscript, my brilliant idea was met with polite silence. I would always be that public school girl. Besides, David Koch had already plastered his name on a theater building at Lincoln Center. That hadn’t been outrageous enough to shake up cynical New Yorkers. Donald Trump, I have always believed, is the apotheosis of New York and its worship of money uber alles, but that’s another story.

Still, according to Harrington, my instincts were sound. Just as Trump enacts ritual humiliation on his minions, it is time for us to ritually humiliate Trump and his craven yes men and women in Congress, along with the pathetic Tech Broligarchy, dorks who believe that because they were in the right place at the right time, they are brilliant. They are not, most of them, and virtually none have the requisite knowledge of history or politics. They certainly are not qualified to run the country. Elon Musk, in particular, appears to be ingesting enough ketamine to qualify as a Club Kid at the Palladium (they didn’t end well) and everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t do a great job running Facebook. Frankly, Zuckerberg strikes me as a fucking idiot. Must we be held hostage by these men we wouldn’t have dated in high school?

Perhaps it is hopeless. I’ve now read all of the advice out there, and admittedly most of it is pretty weak. While some of us may want to try to reason with our Trumpy friends (frustrating, I know), run for school board (hell on earth), or register voters (worthy; do it!) I personally am hoping for relentless, hard-hitting questions on corruption from reporters, along with clear, consistent messaging by Trump’s opponents. If the Democrats can’t do it, then somebody damn well should. Maybe Stuart Stevens will figure it out.

But I don’t believe Barkan was right about the country’s complacency. The overwhelming feeling I see is disgust. Sentient Americans feel stunned and defeated. Once was a fluke. Twice? Winning the popular vote? We are surrounded by lunatics and morons.

And yet we are stuck here for the nonce. Because many of us are atavists, not activists, and still believe in the law, we may be relying too much on lawyers to save democracy. Barkan alluded to this when he wrote:

What comes next might be a more conventional politics — one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type. When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Mass protest wasn’t required, nor were calls for a fresh antifascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seemed to be saying, implicitly, that this was enough: action without performance.

The cyclical nature of American politics promises that even Trump’s moment in the sun will last only so long. If he stumbles, 2026 may see more Democrats in Congress and an end to the G.O.P.’s ability to pass significant legislation. What is probably not soon returning, regardless, is the white-hot activism of the last decade. Politics will be the static, crackling in the background. It won’t be everything, anymore.

What Barkan writes here is dangerous. Legal action is not enough to preserve civil society. The law cannot withstand people who don’t recognize its authority. A coup d’etat is taking place in real time, here, in America. Some idiot in Congress has already proposed legislation for a third term.

If Trump and the authors of Project 2025 have their way, we’ll be living in a different country and I promise you, you won’t like it.

Rogue debs, you have another chance. Grab your hats!

(This is not me but I dig the chapeau.)

Journal of the Plague Years is a magazine of literary journalism that sifts signal from noise. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.