Move Fast and Break Everything

Guest essay by Kimn Neilson

In that astonishing interview Stephen Miller gave to Jake Tapper at CNN in the first week of the year, he seemed to be advocating the use of all kinds of economic and military force in the relations between the U.S. and other countries, but in retrospect it sure looks like it is his roadmap for the domination of people living in the U.S. as well.

Is it really possible that the Trump administration is consciously, methodically basing its actions on those of the Third Reich? With the murder of another Minneapolis resident it’s beginning to look like (and I can’t believe how impossible this sounds to me) ICE agents have been instructed: we have to kill a few people; try to make it look at least partly justified; don’t worry, no one will be held accountable. And be sure to keep up on your arrest quotas!

One phrase stood out to me in that Miller/Tapper interview. Here is the quote: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Besides the weirdly condescending insert of “Jake” (I’m going to explain to you how it really works), there’s that phrase “iron laws,” which immediately brings to my mind the kind of language used by the Nazis. Strength, force, power, iron laws. It joins words that were already floating around in my mind this month as Trump explained why we needed to annex Greenland, why we needed to suddenly invade Venezuela: lebensraum—living space, the phrase Hitler used to describe why the Germans needed to invade other countries; blitzkrieg—lightning strike, the type of warfare they were using to achieve their goals.

Then I read that Trump himself used that same phrase, iron laws, to explain his invasion of Venezuela. So these guys really are sitting around throwing these words out to each other. Did they decide that the new year was the perfect time to start throwing this kind of language at us? And are the developments in Minneapolis the test run for a plan they hope will obliterate any future considerations of law, courts, elections, civil rights, the Constitution?

The other echo I heard in that quote from Miller, from that insertion of “Jake,” is the ending of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, where a cop, Jake’s friend from his own time on the force, tells him to move on from the scene that had just played out, Faye Dunaway being shot and killed by another cop; he says, famously, “Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Jake, it’s the power, strength, force, it’s the iron laws . . .

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot lately. Jake is trying to protect Faye Dunaway’s character, Mrs. Mulray, and unravel the mysterious death of her husband and he keeps thinking he is just a few steps from figuring the whole thing out. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mulray is slowly trying to work out if she can trust him and is frustrated by his limited understanding. She tries to tell him how dangerous her father, Noah Cross, is: “You don’t know how crazy,” and he doesn’t. As she is trying to flee, he tells her to leave it to the police and in a final desperate moment of terrified exasperation, she cries out, “He owns the police,” and moments later she is dead and her father is scooping up his daughter/granddaughter and whisking her away.

I think right now, today, we do know how crazy. Even those Republicans in Congress keeping mum know how crazy.

In Stephen Greenblatt’s rather brilliant Tyrants: Shakespeare on Politics, which he wrote in response to Trump’s first term and which is prescient on the ways in which this second term is so much worse, he enumerates (in a chapter called “The Enablers”) the different ways people respond to a tyrannical leader:

Some are “genuinely fooled.”

Some “feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence.”

Some cannot keep in mind that the tyrant “is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.”

Some “trust that everything will continue in a normal way. . . . They fail to realize quickly enough that what seemed impossible is actually happening.”

Some “are confident that they will stay one step ahead of the tide of evil or manage to seize some profit from it.”

Some “carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble, others with gusto. . . . The tyrant never lacks for such people.”

Take every person enabling Trump and find the right slot. Oh, but wait, keep in mind that this is Greenblatt’s description of Shakespeare’s depiction of the reign of England’s Richard III.

I can’t defend this logically but I get the feeling that what will maybe, if we’re lucky, shift things for us is the Republicans in Congress beginning to act. The Supreme Court isn’t properly defending the Constitution or even acting sensibly—see the Citizens United case from 2010 that decided that a corporation is a person. The lower courts are slowly contending with hundreds of cases, some against the Trump administration and some instigated by it, and there have been a number of positive outcomes, funds restored, fired staff brought back, but it is slow and one thing about this administration is that they are on speed. (Or something. On Washington Week with the Atlantic recently, Jeffrey Goldberg, the reporter who was serendipitously mistakenly included in that famous classified chat about bombing in Yemen, said, so quietly that I only heard it because another panel member repeated it while laughing: it’s like they are playing Risk on ketamine.)

I imagine some Republican members of Congress are genuinely high on the world view being acted out by Trump. True believers. The question is how many aren’t, how many are biding their time, waiting for that subtle, or not so subtle, historical shift that will make it safer to say and vote on what they actually believe to be in the best interest of the nation. Like the courts, Congress has been quietly sending funds back into government agencies and scientific research. Administration ideas like let’s prosecute/persecute Jerome Powell aren’t getting wholehearted support. And apparently one of the reasons Trump backed way down about Greenland at Davos was that, besides bad polling numbers and the stock market plummeting, Republicans in Congress, watching those midterms approaching, were furiously back channeling about it to the White House. Now if they could only start front channeling . . .

Of course, if there is even a small Democratic wave in the midterms (and if the midterms, unmolested, take place), the Republicans can continue to duck and let the other side force the whole body into a semblance of sanity. But my hope is that the cover that would give them would allow for a more decisive transformation and we can look back, sooner rather than later, at that whole crazy decade (not an era, not a great depression, not a world war) and think, as a nation, whew, that was close.

When Trump explained that his extreme aggression toward Greenland was because he was snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly called that a canard, as if someone else had accused Trump of it. The quickness and weirdness of that gives me hope. They are nervous. (Also: in his speech at Davos, Trump repeatedly confused Greenland and Iceland. I don’t know why that gives me comfort, but it does. Maybe because it’s the way his attention wanders around. Maybe, for now, Greenland is safe.) A New York Times article about this contained the understatement of the week: “the message injected a new level of uncertainty into Mr. Trump’s thinking.” We can be sure that new levels of uncertainty into Trump’s thinking will be ceaselessly injected until the moment he is one way or another gone.

That one-day general strike in Minneapolis on Friday was so impressive and leads to the possibility of enough momentum to turn that at some point into a nationwide general strike. I remember my mom, when I was a kid, explaining to me that the 1934 Longshoremen’s Strike, which began in San Francisco and led to other Longshoremen’s strikes (including in Minneapolis) and finally to a real general strike, in turn led to the New Deal. Just saying . . .

I wonder how many years will have to pass before the Smithsonian (if it is allowed to continue) will feature an exhibit on the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history. The enormous amount of reach and power to force that to not happen will perhaps be whittled down by that magnificent counterforce, time. Can’t you imagine it? The different personalities involved, the timeline, comparisons to previously famously corrupt administrations. The lineages that lead back—Nixon (Roger Stone), McCarthy (Roy Cohn)—the long view, seen, perhaps, at a more dispassionate distance. History. I might not live long enough to witness this but I’m pretty sure it is at some point going to happen, and that, my friends, is today’s bit of optimism about this whole sad, racist, destructive period we are living through.

Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Norton (2018)