One of the most consistent themes of Donald Trump’s rise to power has been the utter fecklessness of his opposition. The Republican establishment’s pick of nominee in 2016, Jeb Bush, turned out to be a helpless buffoon. Then the Democrats picked Hillary Clinton as Trump’s opponent, who turned out to be the second-most unpopular nominee in the history of polling (behind only Trump himself).
Worse still, when Trump lost in 2020 and cooked up a conspiracy to overthrow the government, Joe Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland frittered away half a presidential term before appointing a special counsel to prosecute him—giving Trump’s hack appointees on the Supreme Court the time they needed to delay justice until it could be denied entirely.
Now that Trump is president again, elite institutions of all descriptions are melting like snow before a hot stream of urine. Columbia University attempted to buy him off with $400 million, and Paramount settled a completely preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes with $16 million of its own. The Democratic leadership in Congress is clearly hoping they can keep their heads down and cruise to a midterm victory without having to do anything that could impede Trump, even as he openly plots to rig the election.
But not every opponent is a mewling coward. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently demonstrated this with a firm stand against Trump’s planned invasion of the state.
The idea was to whip up one of Trump’s usual unhinged rants about crime in Chicago—it’s a “hellhole,” he claimed, the “MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”—as a pretext for sending in Texas National Guard troops, along with ICE agents, to do some of his classic autocratic theater. As we saw in Washington, D.C., armed soldiers would be standing around doing nothing much in particular, except deeply unsettling passersby, while ICE goons would set about black-bagging random brown day laborers at Chicago hardware stores.
It should be emphasized that sending National Guard troops from one state to another without the governor’s permission is wildly illegal, and arguably an act of war.
Pritzker—unlike D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been hiding under the bed—was having none of it. In a bracing speech, he pointed out the obvious. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.” (The actual murder capital of the world is Colima, Mexico, whose homicide rate is nine times higher than Chicago’s. As my colleague Harold Meyerson recently pointed out, Jackson, Mississippi has a murder rate 5.5 times that of Chicago, but that didn’t stop the state’s governor from sending his National Guard troops to D.C.) “Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk,” Pritzker added.
After some waffling, Trump demanded that Pritzker call him. Pritzker refused once more, assuming correctly that Trump would lie and say he had been invited in. “He’s going to end up in court, and that will be a fact that they will use in court,” Pritzker explained to reporters. “That the governor called to ask for help, and I’m sorry I’m not going to provide him with evidence to support his desire to have the court rule in his favor. I’m just not going to do that,” he said.
Now Trump appears to have backed down, and is reportedly considering sending the Guard to New Orleans instead, where the governor is begging for his state to be ground under the MAGA boot. This followed a ruling of a federal judge, on a suit filed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, that Trump’s deployment of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act—implying that doing the same, or even worse, in Chicago would also be illegal. By ordering that Guards be deployed to red states like Louisiana, however, Trump avoids being sued by another Democratic governor and being overruled by another federal judge.
Historians have been pointing out for a while now that Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship is wildly at odds with how it has been done in almost every other instance. As a rule, aspiring dictators do not mess with the health care system, or food aid, or rip out great chunks of their state capacity. You want the population bored, apathetic, and quiescent—not losing income, if not starving outright. Food riots are a common spark for dictatorships being toppled, from the French Revolution to Tunisia in 2010.
You also don’t want to obliterate the state bureaucracy, because you’ll need it to consolidate your rule. Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung involved bringing the bureaucracy under his direct control, not tearing it to shreds.
But Trump has done just that, with the gigantic cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and with all of Elon Musk’s Nazi teenagers crawling around in government agencies firing people by the thousands, ripping the wiring out of the walls, and uploading your Social Security information to an unsecured cloud server.
Would-be autocrats are most concerned with establishing firm control of the military, and Trump hasn’t done that either. Neither the U.S. military nor National Guard troops signed up to be MAGA brownshirts occupying American cities, and they certainly did not sign up to potentially fight citizen militias—if not other soldiers, which is where a full-blown confrontation between federal and state governments might end up. If these deployments involved more than standing around, I would expect mutiny in the ranks.
So far, Trump has beaten the odds, because just as has happened throughout his entire life, he has flagrantly flouted both norms and laws, and almost everyone in a position to oppose him just lets him do it. But as Pritzker proved, he does not actually have the power—yet—to impose a dictatorship in the face of determined resistance.
As Josh Marshall points out, American states are powerful institutions, with a lot of legal and institutional strength. Turning America fascist will be much more difficult if blue states learn from Gov. Pritzker.