Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at Nassau Coliseum, September 18, 2024, in Uniondale, New York.
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?
Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?
What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.
What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?
LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.
They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.
Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?
What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?
A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.
An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.
Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.
That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?
WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?
What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”
What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?
Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?
Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?
HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?
Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.
In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.
What will you do?
DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.
What do you say?
You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?
You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?
You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?
You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?
Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?
Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?
Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?
You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?
You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?
By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?
Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?
Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?
Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?
Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?
Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”
Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?
Donald Trump is elected president.
What are you prepared to do?
