It’s Time to Prepare for the Worst

Trump will probably win. What can small-d democrats do to get ready?

If you’re going to suffer through tonight’s Republican convention, you might as well do it with us. We’ll be livestreaming here.

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(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Sandbags

Yesterday Bill and Tim talked about not giving up hope vs. being resigned to a Trump presidency. And I get that. Despair is a sin.

But let us be realists. Donald Trump is likely to be returned to the White House. He is likely to win a popular plurality. The Supreme Court has told him that he is immune from criminal consequences for official actions he takes as president. He has shed the grownup Republicans who, during his first term, tried to keep him from breaking too many laws. And he is likely to return to power with Republicans also having control of the House and Senate.

It would be nice to hope that the floodwaters stop rising before they destroy the dam. But in the meantime, the people with power should start filling sandbags and trying to reinforce the levies.

What does that mean?

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First, it means that Sonia Sotomayor should retire immediately.

Sotomayor is 70 and has been living with diabetes since childhood. It is possible she could serve another five, or ten, or fifteen years, even. But what if she couldn’t?

Despite only holding the presidency for four years, Donald Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court. In a second term, Trump would be likely to appoint at least two more, giving him his own flat-majority on the Court. If Sotomayor were to fall ill and be forced to retire during Trump’s next term, that would give Trump six justices that he had personally appointed—more than any president in the modern era.

Is there a meaningful difference between a 6–3 “conservative” majority and a 7–2 “conservative” majority? Between Trump holding leverage over five justices rather than six? I’m not sure. But I am sure that none of us should want to find out.

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The court-martial system is also worth looking at. The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision has created a situation in which the commander-in-chief can give illegal orders and it is then up to individual members of the military to either carry them out—and hope for a presidential pardon—or refuse them, and be willing to face court-martial.

This incentive structure makes it likely that Trump will seek to put pressure on the court-martial system to make it harder for soldiers to refuse illegal orders. The White House and DoD ought to be coming up with ways to insulate court-martial proceedings from presidential pressure.

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Trump is likely to test the extent of his pardon power, so people in the pro-democracy legal space ought to be preparing for this eventuality now.

The president’s power to pardon does have some limits. For instance, as of right now it applies only to federal charges. But it is not hard to imagine Trump defiantly attempting to broaden it to state-level offenses, too, as he seeks to punish and subdue predominantly Democratic states. To those who insist that this is impossible—that Trump’s White House lawyers would stop him, that the Department of Justice would stop him, that the courts would stop him, that the Supreme Court would stop him—I would say, two things.

First, that doesn’t mean he won’t try. And second, your confidence in the strength of those guardrails is badly misplaced. This Supreme Court turned the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause into a dead letter and invented presidential immunity out of thin air. Don’t tell me that they couldn’t simply expand the pardon power for no reason.

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When gaming out worst-case scenarios, one of the worstest concerns the National Guard.

The National Guard is a hybrid organization. It can be called on to fight in foreign wars, but can also be used for domestic law enforcement. There are 50 state National Guards, which can be activated by their respective governors, but the president can also, in theory, activate state National Guards.

The nightmare scenario is this: What happens if President Trump attempts to activate and domestically deploy a state National Guard contrary to the wishes of the governor?

It’s not hard to envision such a scenario. Let’s say there are anti-Trump protests in Seattle. Trump tries to activate the Washington State National Guard to quell them. Governor Jay Inslee does not want the Guard out in the streets of Seattle. What happens?

This is a live question and it’s not clear if the president, through DoD, can override the orders of the governor, or if the DoD’s power over state National Guards is limited to pulling federal funding of them.

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In the comments today, I’d like you to discuss what can be done—both at the federal level and at the state level—to prepare for Trump’s next term. What other areas of concern should the big brains in the pro-democracy space be targeting? What are the vulnerabilities in the system that Trump is likely to exploit? And how might they be buttressed?

And if you’re new here and want to join the conversation, come and part of Bulwark+. It’s nothing but puppy dogs and rainbows.

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2. J.D. Vance

Well, it finally happened. A rich person finally bought his way onto a presidential ticket.

Of all J.D. Vance’s hypocrisies, the best is that this proud, self-described hillbilly is the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel—the gay Silicon Valley tech titan who wants to live forever using the blood of young people.

Thiel personally wrote the checks that pushed Vance across the finish line for his Senate seat. No, really. Thiel spent more money on Vance’s Senate campaign than anyone, ever, on a single Senate race.

Thiel bought Vance’s Senate seat for him in the hope that Vance could then get on the ticket with Trump and—fingers crossed!—wind up in the White House some day. What an amazing investment.

That Vance positions himself as the champion of the downtrodden, “traditional,” white masses while owing his selection entirely to a super-weird, gay tech billionaire is perfection.

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3. Water Is Wet

Newsflash: Militias love political violence.

Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organize, recruit, and train.

“An attack on President Trump was an attack on us, people like us—like-minded American patriots,” says Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), in a video posted to TikTok on Sunday. APIII is a decentralized militia network with chapters across the US. “There comes a point in time where everybody in this group needs to start being accountable for what they’re doing to help grow the organization and building a network of like-minded people in their area. Because they’re coming for us.”

Seddon goes on in the video to say that he’s looking at coordinating a meeting with other militias around Pennsylvania. “This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,” says Seddon. “Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.” . . .

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, says that this type of rhetoric has been pretty commonplace in online spaces since 2020, especially since January 6. But she’s particularly concerned about the heightened rhetoric in tandem with aggressive recruitment efforts by militia groups, who historically have opportunistically pounced on moments of national chaos to encourage organizing and training. Paul says the confluence of militia activity and heightened rhetoric could inspire “individuals who are susceptible to online influence and acceleration” who “could be triggered to act on their own.” She also sees militias’ emphasis on organization over knee-jerk calls for retaliatory violence as a sign that the movement is focused on long-term goals and growth.

In the past year, APIII has made a significant recruitment push across major social media platforms, such as Facebook, X, TikTok, and even NextDoor, according to research from the Tech Transparency Project shared exclusively with WIRED. Despite featuring “Three Percenters” in its name—a clear nod to the militia movement—APIII touts a disclaimer on its website insisting that it is not a militia. That’s in line with the broader trend seen since January 6, 2021, when paramilitary activists scrambled to distance themselves from the militia movement implicated in the Capitol riot.

But groups like APIII have increasingly been trying to rebuild the militia movement from the ground up, urging people to get organized in their communities. According to Seddon, APIII and the Light Foot Militia, another decentralized paramilitary group with chapters nationwide, have been coordinating closely. Last month, a video circulated on TikTok and Facebook purporting to show a training meetup with APIII and Light Foot in an undisclosed location. About 100 heavily armed men and women in fatigues are shown standing in formation. Text over the video reads: “Now is the time to join a MF’in Militia, Not a Political Party,” and “We came into this world screaming covered in blood and will be leaving the same way. No retreat no surrender.”

Read the whole thing.