Nineteen Months

The First Ten Weeks

It begins on a Monday.

On the twentieth of January twenty twenty five came a national emergency declaration at the southern border, an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, orders ending the application migrants had used to schedule asylum appointments, withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the revocation of Cuba's removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list, an order delaying enforcement of the ban on a Chinese-owned social media platform, orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico and restoring the name Mount McKinley, and the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency under the richest man on the planet. Unions and watchdog groups filed suit within minutes.

And roughly fifteen hundred pardons for people criminally charged over the attack on the Capitol on the sixth of January twenty twenty one, with fourteen sentences commuted.

Dwell on the pardons, because they establish the rule that governs everything after. What they say is not primarily about January sixth. What they say is that political violence committed in the right direction is retroactively legitimate. That is a rule, and once established it runs in both directions. By the summer of twenty twenty six one of the pardoned men was being arrested at a protest in Minneapolis, and nine people who had protested outside a Texas immigration detention facility were serving thirty to seventy years. The asymmetry is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. It is the construction of two separate legal universes, and which one a person falls into is determined by their politics rather than their conduct.

Four days in, on the twenty fourth of January, seventeen inspectors general were fired in a single night, without the thirty days of congressional notice the statute requires.

Stop there before moving on. Inspectors general are the internal audit function of the federal government. They are how waste, fraud, abuse and illegality inside an agency get found and reported to Congress. They are structurally independent for exactly that reason, and the notice requirement exists so that a president cannot do what was done that night. Firing all of them at once, in violation of the statute, in week one, is not a staffing decision. It is the removal of the instrument by which everything that came later would otherwise have been discovered.

Three days after that, a member of the National Labor Relations Board was removed and the board lost its quorum, which means it cannot decide cases. Two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were fired the same day. The Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal financial assistance, and a judge blocked it within a day. The next morning the Office of Personnel Management offered a deferred resignation buyout to roughly two million federal employees with a deadline nine days out.

Then the agencies themselves. The United States Agency for International Development was closed overseas on the fourth of February and effectively dissolved by the end of March, with the Secretary of State announcing that eighty three percent of its programs had been cancelled, about fifty two hundred contracts, after a six week review. The Department of Education announced layoffs cutting nearly half its workforce, and on the twentieth of March an executive order directed the Education Secretary to dismantle the department outright. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced more than eighty thousand job cuts. The Internal Revenue Service, six thousand. The Social Security Administration, seven thousand. The State Department cut fifteen percent of its staff and abolished the office of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

On the twenty first of February the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations were both removed, along with other senior officers. And on the twenty seventh of March an executive order excluded more than thirty federal agencies from federal labor law, stripping collective bargaining rights from roughly one million federal workers.

Look at that as a system rather than a sequence. Inspectors general. Labor boards. Civil rights commissioners. Career civil servants. Unions. Senior uniformed leadership. The internal human rights bureau. Every one of those is a body capable of refusing from inside the machine. None was defeated in argument or voted down. They were removed from the board in seventy one days.

That speed is a strategy and not an accident. When twelve major institutional removals happen in the same fortnight, no single one gets sustained attention, and the aggregate never gets covered at all because no reporter is assigned to aggregates. Anyone who claims to have tracked all of it in real time is misremembering.

And while it was happening, the Department of Government Efficiency was being given the data. Treasury payment systems in early February, blocked by a judge on the eighth. Social Security Administration records in March, blocked by a judge who also ordered deletion of personal data already obtained. Both blocks were lifted on appeal, and by June the Supreme Court had cleared the access and shielded the operation from public records requests as well. The agency doing this had existed less than a month and had no statutory authority anyone could point to.

It no longer exists. In November twenty twenty five, Reuters reported it had been quietly dissolved roughly eight months before its charter expired, its functions absorbed into the Office of Personnel Management. The demolition it performed was not reversed. Only the brand was retired.

The courts, in those first ten weeks, worked. The birthright citizenship order was blocked on the twenty third of January by a judge in Washington state who called it blatantly unconstitutional, and again on the fifth of February with a nationwide injunction. The funding freeze was blocked. The plan to put twenty two hundred aid employees on leave was blocked. The suspension of the refugee admissions program was blocked, with a judge ruling the president cannot nullify an act of Congress. Probationary firings across five departments were ordered reversed. The anti-diversity orders were partially enjoined nationwide.

The judiciary functioned. And on the fifteenth of March it was ignored.

The Alien Enemies Act and the Flights

That day the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight, a wartime statute enacted under John Adams, against the Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. A federal judge temporarily blocked it. The flights went anyway. More than two hundred Venezuelans and Salvadorans landed at a Salvadoran mega prison. The Salvadoran president had offered exactly that arrangement to the Secretary of State six weeks earlier, for a fee.

What that established became the template for everything after: a court order can be defied in practice while being litigated in theory, and by the time the litigation concludes the facts on the ground have changed and the people are in another country. Nobody was punished for it.

One of the men on those flights, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported by the government's own admission in error. His case became the test. A district judge ordered him returned. In April the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the administration must facilitate his release, while pointedly questioning what it would mean to require the government to effectuate it, which is the kind of hedge that sounds technical and functions as an escape hatch. The president hosted the Salvadoran president at the White House and both men said he would not be returned. A United States senator flew to El Salvador and was initially denied access to him.

He came back in June, after two months, and was immediately charged with human smuggling in Tennessee. Those charges were dismissed fourteen months later by a judge who found they were retaliation for having won the deportation case.

Nine to nothing at the Supreme Court, and it took two months and a senator on a plane.

Alongside the deportation machinery, and built by the same agency in the same weeks, came the speech arrests. On the eighth of March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and a lawful permanent resident, over campus protest activity, and moved to revoke his green card. He was held three months before a judge ordered his release. On the twenty fifth of March, agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral student, on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her visa had been revoked over an opinion piece she co-wrote in a student newspaper.

A lawful permanent resident and a graduate student. Neither charged with a crime. Both detained for speech. Seventeen days apart from the Alien Enemies Act flights. That was never two separate programs.

The Economic War Opens

The economic war opened in the same period and never really closed. Twenty five percent on Canada and Mexico and ten on China at the start of February. Delays, reinstatements, threats withdrawn within hours. Twenty five percent on steel and aluminum. Then on the second of April came the order the president called Liberation Day: a ten percent universal tariff on nearly all imports, plus higher country-specific rates a week later.

On the third of April a twenty five percent tariff on all imported automobiles took effect. The S and P five hundred fell over four percent and the Nasdaq five point two, the worst American session since twenty twenty. The next day China announced thirty four percent retaliation on all American goods and the Dow fell two thousand two hundred thirty one points. Then on the ninth the country-specific rates took effect with China at a hundred four percent, and hours later the president paused everything above ten percent for ninety days for every country except China, raising China instead to a hundred twenty five and then a hundred forty five. The S and P rose nine point five two percent that day, its biggest single-day gain since October two thousand eight.

Sit with that pair. The worst day since twenty twenty and the best since two thousand eight, six days apart, both caused by the same man's decisions about the same policy. That is not a trade strategy meeting resistance. That is a market pricing the absence of a strategy.

The United States Court of International Trade ruled the whole thing unlawful on the twenty eighth of May. Moody's downgraded the American credit rating in the same month. The economy had contracted at an annual rate of zero point three percent in the first quarter.

Underneath the tariff noise, something more structurally important had already happened. In late January a Chinese startup released an open weight reasoning model trained at a small fraction of the expected cost, and when markets absorbed what that implied, Nvidia fell around seventeen percent in one session, reported as the largest single-day loss of market value by any company in American history. The entire American artificial intelligence buildout, including the five hundred billion dollar data center project announced on the twenty first of January, is premised on compute scarcity. A cheap open model from a Chinese lab was a live demonstration that the scarcity might be a choice rather than a law. The buildout continued anyway, at enormous scale, and eighteen months later it would become the most contentious local political issue in the country.

The Rupture With Allies

The rupture with the rest of the world was fast and total. Nearly all foreign aid frozen in January, exempting military aid to Israel and Egypt. In February, meeting the Israeli prime minister at the White House, the president proposed long-term American ownership of Gaza and said Palestinians would have to leave. Sanctions on International Criminal Court officials.

The vice president told the Munich Security Conference on the fourteenth of February that Europe's greatest threat was internal, attacking European censorship and migration policy, and the room was near silent. Four days later American and Russian delegations opened talks on Ukraine in Riyadh with neither Ukraine nor Europe present. The next day the president called the Ukrainian president a dictator. On the twenty fourth the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea and Israel against a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion.

Then on the twenty eighth of February the Oval Office meeting with the Ukrainian president collapsed into a televised argument and ended early. Military aid was paused on the third of March. Intelligence sharing was suspended on the fifth. Both were restored on the eleventh after Ukraine accepted a ceasefire proposal in Jeddah.

An ally publicly humiliated, its intelligence feed switched off mid-war as leverage, and a vote alongside Russia and North Korea. In five weeks.

And on the twenty fourth of March, senior national security officials were found to have been discussing imminent strikes in Yemen in a commercial messaging group into which the editor of a magazine had been accidentally added. When the full text was published it showed the Secretary of Defense transmitting warplane launch times, strike packages and targets. Nobody was fired. The strikes themselves had begun on the fifteenth, and that campaign would kill a hundred fifty three civilians by the count of a British monitoring group, a figure the Pentagon itself confirmed to Congress seventeen months later.

By the spring the pressure had moved onto the universities. Columbia lost roughly four hundred million dollars in federal funding in March. In April, over a billion at Cornell, seven hundred ninety million at Northwestern, and more than two point two billion at Harvard, which sued. In May the Secretary of Homeland Security revoked Harvard's certification to enroll international students entirely, and a judge blocked it the next day.

In Texas, in June, a federal judge ended the state's twenty four year old in-state tuition policy for undocumented students within hours of a Justice Department lawsuit that Texas declined to contest. Two parties agreeing on an outcome and using a courtroom to execute it, with no adversarial process at all.

And in April, federal agents arrested a sitting Wisconsin state judge on obstruction charges for allegedly helping a man evade immigration agents in her own courthouse.

The Supreme Court spent that spring clearing paths. In April it vacated the class-wide injunction on Alien Enemies Act removals, requiring each person to sue individually, in the district where the government had chosen to hold them, which converts a single legal victory into two hundred separate legal problems. In May it allowed the removal of labor board members pending appeal. It allowed the end of Temporary Protected Status for roughly three hundred fifty thousand Venezuelans. At the end of May it allowed revocation of humanitarian parole for more than five hundred thirty thousand Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. In June it allowed rapid deportations to third countries.

Add those numbers. In six weeks the Court cleared the legal path to strip status from roughly eight hundred eighty thousand people who had been living in the United States lawfully. That is not enforcement against unauthorized presence. That is the retroactive removal of authorization.

Troops in the Streets

Then in early June the troops came out.

Protests against immigration raids began in Los Angeles on the sixth. On the seventh the president federalized the California National Guard over the governor's explicit objection and deployed two thousand troops. On the ninth he added roughly seven hundred Marines. California sued. On the thirteenth a federal district judge found a Tenth Amendment violation and ordered control returned to the state. An appeals court stayed that within hours. On the nineteenth the Ninth Circuit ruled the president could keep the Guard federalized.

That is the domestic-force version of the deportation flight template. A court finds the action unlawful. A higher court stays the finding. The deployment continues. By the time anything is finally resolved, it has ended on its own terms and the question of whether it was lawful has become academic. The troops came out of Los Angeles in July, on the administration's schedule, not a judge's.

On the twelfth of June a United States senator was forcibly removed, pushed to the ground and handcuffed for trying to ask the Secretary of Homeland Security a question at a press conference in that city.

Two days later, on the fourteenth of June, three things happened at once. No Kings protests were held in all fifty states. A military parade rolled through Washington marking the Army's two hundred fiftieth anniversary and the president's seventy ninth birthday. And in Minnesota a gunman impersonating a police officer shot two state legislators and their spouses in their homes, killing the Democratic-Farmer-Labor House leader Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

A parade, a mass mobilization against it, and a political assassination, on the same day. Hold that image, because it is the temperature of the whole period.

The Eleven-Day War With Iran

There was a war that June too, and it is easy to forget there were two. On the thirteenth Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities and military leadership, killing the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, the chief of the armed forces and several nuclear scientists. Iranian state television reported sixty killed. Iran fired back, and on the nineteenth a ballistic missile hit a medical center in Beersheba, injuring at least two hundred forty, with Iran saying it had targeted a military site nearby.

On the twenty first of June American B two bombers struck three Iranian nuclear sites. Iran's parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz. On the twenty third Iran fired missiles at the American air base in Qatar, all intercepted, and the president announced a ceasefire that neither side immediately confirmed. Then a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found the strikes may have set the program back only months. The president called it fake news. The Central Intelligence Agency director said the damage would take years to repair. Two arms of the same government giving incompatible public accounts of what their own bombs had accomplished.

That war ended in eleven days. The one that started eight months later has been running for six months.

And on the twenty seventh of June the Supreme Court did the single most consequential thing it did in the entire period, and almost nobody noticed at the time.

The Supreme Court and CASA

In Trump versus CASA it ruled six to three that federal district courts had been overusing universal injunctions, and narrowed the nationwide blocks on the birthright citizenship order to the named plaintiffs only.

Here is why that matters more than it sounded. Before that ruling, when a single plaintiff won, the policy stopped for everyone. That is what made judicial review a meaningful constraint on nationwide executive action, because one well-resourced plaintiff could protect millions of people who would never be able to sue. After CASA, in the main, each person has to establish their own right to relief.

It is a machine for making rights expensive. It does not overturn any right. It converts rights into things a person has to individually purchase access to, and the price is a lawyer. For undocumented immigrants, student visa holders, or federal employees who had just lost union representation, that price is prohibitive by design.

Watch for that pattern throughout. The government loses the case and wins the structure.

Three days before, on the twenty fourth of June, Zohran Mamdani took forty three and a half percent of first-choice votes in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary and Andrew Cuomo conceded. In a season defined by federal force and judicial narrowing, the largest city in the country nominated an open democratic socialist.

The Bill, and the Turn to Force

The summer brought legislation and a turn toward direct force.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed the Senate fifty one to fifty on the first of July with the vice president breaking the tie, passed the House two hundred eighteen to two hundred fourteen on the third, and was signed on the fourth. The signature domestic legislation of a term that has otherwise governed almost entirely by executive order squeaked through on a tie-break and four votes. Three weeks later the Rescissions Act clawed back roughly nine billion dollars in foreign aid and public broadcasting funds, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would shut down.

The Attack on Measurement

Then came the attack on measurement, which is a specific authoritarian marker and which happened in the most literal way possible.

On the first of August the July jobs report showed a sharp hiring slowdown with large downward revisions. Hours later the president fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, calling the numbers rigged.

Understand what category of thing that is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the agency that counts. Its independence is not a nicety, it is the precondition for anyone, including markets, being able to know what is happening in the economy. Firing the person who runs it because the number was bad is a statement that the number is meant to be an output of politics rather than an input to it.

Three weeks later the same logic reached the central bank. On the twenty fifth of August the president announced he was removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing alleged mortgage fraud. She disputed the allegations and sued. That fight would run more than a year, through a Supreme Court ruling in her favor and a second removal attempt, and it was still live this morning.

Statistics agency and central bank, in the same month, on the same theory: that institutions designed to be insulated from a president are in fact subordinate to him.

That August, Texas ran the country's most consequential redistricting fight. More than fifty Texas House Democrats broke quorum and left the state to block a mid-decade Republican map. The Texas House voted to issue civil arrest warrants for them. The Senate approved new lines while they were gone. They came back, the map passed, and the governor signed it on the twenty ninth. A three-judge federal panel would block it in November as a racial gerrymander, and the Supreme Court would allow it for the twenty twenty six midterms anyway. Three separate outcomes, and the one that governs is the last one.

Meanwhile the deployments escalated and changed character. On the eleventh of August an executive order declared a crime emergency in Washington, District of Columbia, federalized the Metropolitan Police Department and deployed eight hundred National Guard troops. Note the difference from Los Angeles. Los Angeles was framed as a response to unrest. This was framed as a response to crime, in a city with no unrest, and it federalized the police force itself. In September, troops to Memphis. At the end of September, troops to Portland, with the president describing the city as war-ravaged and authorizing what he called full force.

The immigration machinery expanded with it. The first detainees arrived at the Everglades facility in July. Raids on California cannabis operations produced more than two hundred arrests. The Department of Homeland Security removed age restrictions for new hires. In September, four hundred seventy five workers were detained at a Hyundai and L G battery plant in Georgia, most of them South Korean nationals, and South Korea opened a formal investigation into human rights abuses by American personnel.

And on the twelfth of September, agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González during a vehicle stop in Franklin Park, Illinois. Body camera footage later contradicted the agency's account of the officer's injuries. That was the first killing in what became a pattern. There would be four more over the following ten months, and in three of the four, video or subsequent investigation would contradict the agency's initial account.

The violence was not unidirectional, and an honest account says so. A gunman attacked a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas in July, wounding two officers and a border guard before being killed. In September a gunman fired on an immigration facility in Dallas, killing a detainee and wounding others before dying by suicide.

September: the Hinge

Then, on the tenth of September, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed by a sniper while speaking at a university in Orem, Utah. A twenty two year old was in custody within about two days and charged with aggravated murder, with prosecutors announcing they would seek the death penalty. A memorial service in Arizona drew more than ninety thousand people.

What happened in the twelve days after is the hinge of this entire period.

On the seventeenth, a broadcast network indefinitely suspended a late night program after the host's comments about the killing and public threats from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The next day the president told reporters the Commission should revoke the licenses of networks that cover him negatively. The show was restored on the twenty second after public backlash, which is a genuine and underrated instance of pressure working.

And on that same twenty second of September, the president signed a directive formally designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

Antifa is not an organization. It has no membership, no leadership, no legal existence. Designating it is not like designating a cartel. It is the creation of a category into which the government can place people according to its own judgment about their politics.

Everything downstream flowed from that. National Security Presidential Memorandum Seven, which court filings describe as directed at groups promoting anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. Those are not descriptions of criminal conduct. They are descriptions of belief, and one of them is an economic philosophy held by a substantial fraction of the planet. Then four European antifascist groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations in November. Left networks classified among three major categories of terror groups the following May. Undercover federal surveillance of protest groups including labor unions and the Sunrise Movement. And the Prairieland prosecutions, which produced sentences of thirty to seventy years.

I want to be precise here, because this is where analysis usually goes wrong in one direction or the other. A man was murdered. That is a real crime with a real victim and a real defendant facing a capital charge, and nothing about the political use of his death changes that. And: twelve days between a murder by a lone gunman and a presidential directive designating an entire diffuse political tendency as terrorist is the classic sequence. It is not evidence that the killing was anything other than what it appears to be. It is evidence that the response was prepared, because nobody builds the legal architecture for designating a political movement in under two weeks.

Two weeks before that directive, on the eighth of September, the Supreme Court did something that received almost no attention and enabled almost everything that followed. In Noem versus Vasquez Perdomo it stayed a lower court order and permitted immigration stops that weigh apparent race or ethnicity, language spoken, and type of work.

Read that twice. The Court permitted stops based on how someone looks, what language they speak, and what job they appear to hold. That is the legal foundation of every subsequent operation in Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, Minneapolis and Maine, and it is the reason judges would later find that most of the people brought before them were lawfully present. The stops were designed to sweep broadly, and the Court said they could.

The Caribbean Campaign

That same season, the campaign that ended with an American capture of a head of state was being assembled in the open.

In August the Attorney General announced a fifty million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the Venezuelan president. Forty five hundred Marines and sailors deployed to the southern Caribbean. Three guided-missile destroyers off the coast. Ten F thirty five fighters to Puerto Rico. And on the first of September an American military strike sank a boat, killing eleven people the government said were traffickers. A second strike on the fifteenth killed three. A third on the nineteenth killed three more.

That campaign has now killed somewhere between two hundred twenty three and two hundred twenty seven people by two independent tallies, one from Fox News and one from Drop Site News. Two counts from opposite ends of the political spectrum landing in the same place, which is about as close to confirmation as an uncounted campaign gets. In each case the government asserted narco-trafficking and provided no public evidence about any individual vessel. Congress voted repeatedly to restrict it and failed every time.

Brazil in that same stretch is the clearest case in the whole record of American power deployed on behalf of a foreign ally's impunity. In July the president announced a fifty percent tariff on most Brazilian imports, explicitly citing the criminal trial of Jair Bolsonaro. Not trade. Not a deficit. A prosecution in another country's supreme court. At the end of July the Treasury sanctioned a Brazilian Supreme Court justice under a statute written for human rights abusers, over his oversight of that case. On the eleventh of September Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to twenty seven years. The tariffs and the sanctions did not stop it. The attempt is the point.

And the world outside was moving in the same direction, which is the part a left analysis has to hold or it is not an analysis. That summer an Israeli strike near a Gaza hospital killed five Al Jazeera journalists. In August the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification formally declared famine in Gaza Governorate. In September the International Association of Genocide Scholars declared that Israel is committing genocide, and an independent United Nations commission of inquiry made the same finding. Israeli aircraft struck Hamas political leadership in Doha, Qatar, killing six including a Qatari security officer, on the territory of a country hosting the largest American air base in the region.

The United States cast its sixth Security Council veto of a Gaza ceasefire resolution, sanctioned the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied territories, sanctioned two International Criminal Court judges and two deputy prosecutors, and revoked visas for the Palestinian Authority president and about eighty officials.

And in the other direction, in the same weeks: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Portugal formally recognized the State of Palestine, Canada becoming the first Group of Seven country to do so. France and five other European states followed. Germany halted weapons exports to Israel that could be used in Gaza. And inside Israel, a general strike and mass protests demanded a hostage deal, with organizers citing roughly two and a half million participants, which in a country of ten million is extraordinary.

One more thing from that autumn, because a record that only shows consolidation has a selection problem. In Nepal, police shot Generation Z anti-corruption protesters in Kathmandu on the eighth of September, killing at least nineteen. The next day the prime minister resigned as protesters stormed and burned the federal parliament. By the twelfth the house was dissolved and Sushila Karki was appointed interim prime minister, the first woman to lead Nepal's government.

A street uprising toppled a government in four days. It is the only clean case of that outcome in the entire record, and it is worth knowing that it exists.

October: the Shutdown

October opened with a shutdown, and the shutdown revealed something about how the machinery had changed.

It began at one minute past midnight on the first of October and furloughed roughly seven hundred fifty thousand federal employees. Within two days it was being used as a weapon. The Office of Management and Budget froze about eighteen billion dollars in New York City infrastructure funding, then about two point one billion in Chicago. That is not a consequence of a lapse in appropriations. That is a budget director choosing which cities to punish while the money is unavailable to everyone. By the tenth the office confirmed roughly four thousand employees had been laid off across seven agencies during the shutdown, using a funding lapse to accomplish permanent staffing cuts Congress had not authorized.

At the end of October the Agriculture Department announced that food assistance would not be issued for November. A federal judge ordered it distributed. The Supreme Court stayed that order, and then extended the stay. The highest court in the country intervened twice to keep food from reaching people during a funding fight. In early November the Federal Aviation Administration cut flights ten percent at forty major airports because air traffic controllers were working without pay.

The Senate held fourteen failed procedural votes before the first successful one. The shutdown ended on the twelfth of November after forty two days, the longest in American history. And almost none of the underlying dispute was resolved. The fight was over expiring health insurance subsidies, and a month later both the Democratic and Republican bills addressing them failed in the Senate.

While that ran, the deployments continued in Chicago and Portland. A Border Patrol agent shot a woman named Marimar Martinez five times in a Chicago neighborhood. Texas authorized its National Guard to deploy to other states and federalized Texas troops arrived in Illinois. Courts blocked, appeals courts unblocked, and the Seventh Circuit eventually ruled the president could not deploy the Guard to Illinois.

On the deployments that autumn, the courts largely held, which is a real difference from Los Angeles and worth noticing, because it suggests the earlier pattern was not inevitable.

But the operations themselves did not stop, and in November a federal judge in Chicago named Sara Ellis announced a preliminary injunction sharply restricting agents' use of force and found that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander running operations there, had lied under oath. Her written opinion ran two hundred thirty three pages. A week later a judge ordered the release of more than three hundred people detained without valid arrests.

A commander found by a federal judge to have perjured himself. He went on to run the next operation, in Charlotte.

And then, in the middle of all of that, the other thing happened.

No Kings, and the November Elections

On the eighteenth of October, No Kings protests drew roughly seven million people at about twenty seven hundred locations nationwide, described by organizers as the largest single-day protest in American history to that point.

And on the fourth of November the Democrats swept. Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoralty on an explicitly socialist platform. Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger won Virginia. California's countervailing redistricting measure passed.

Be careful about what that does and does not mean, because both parties got it wrong. It does not mean the machinery stopped. Six weeks later the Supreme Court allowed Texas to use a map a federal panel had found racially discriminatory. What it does mean is that the electoral channel was still open and still functioning, in a season when the government was federalizing police forces and starving cities of infrastructure money. When someone says elections no longer matter, the fourth of November twenty twenty five is the counterexample, and it is only ten months old.

The Venezuela campaign escalated toward its conclusion across those same weeks. Covert Central Intelligence Agency operations authorized inside the country in mid-October. Aid cuts and tariffs against Colombia. Then, on the twenty fourth of October, the Treasury put Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his wife, his son and his interior minister on the Specially Designated Nationals list. That is the sanctions instrument built for cartel bosses and hostile foreign officials, applied to a sitting elected head of state of a treaty ally.

In November, Operation Southern Spear was formally announced. The Senate voted down a bipartisan resolution that would have barred force against Venezuela without authorization. The State Department designated the Cartel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization with the president naming the Venezuelan head of state as its leader, which is the legal predicate for treating a government as a terrorist entity. At the end of November he declared the airspace over and around Venezuela closed in its entirety. In December, American forces seized two sanctioned tankers and he ordered a total blockade. The House rejected war powers resolutions again.

Every step of that was visible. Congress voted three times and failed three times. The machinery was assembled in public across ninety days.

Elsewhere that autumn the ledger cut both ways sharply. The New York attorney general was indicted on bank fraud charges in October. A former national security adviser was indicted on eighteen counts. And on the twenty fourth of November a federal judge dismissed the indictments of both James Comey and Letitia James, finding the United States attorney who brought them had been unlawfully appointed. Two political prosecutions collapsed on the same day for the same defect. Two days later the Georgia racketeering case against the president was dismissed.

The Epstein material became law in that stretch. House Democrats released emails from the estate. On the eighteenth of November the House voted four hundred twenty seven to one to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the Senate passed it by unanimous consent the same day. The president signed it the next day. Four hundred twenty seven to one, in a Congress that could not fund the government for forty two days. The Justice Department began publishing files on the statutory deadline in December, releasing hundreds of thousands of pages while saying millions more remained under review.

And the smaller things accumulated. Demolition of the White House East Wing began in October to make way for a ballroom. In December the Kennedy Center board voted to rename the institution after the president, with Democratic members saying they were muted during the vote. Nearly the entire Pentagon press corps refused to sign new credentialing rules and surrendered their passes, leaving essentially one friendly outlet in the building. The British Broadcasting Corporation's director general and news chief both resigned over an edit of a presidential speech, with the president threatening a billion dollar suit.

The refugee admissions ceiling for the year was set at seventy five hundred, a record low, with priority for white South African Afrikaners. Hold that next to the travel bans and the seventy five nation visa suspension that came later, and the hierarchy is not subtle. In late November the president posted that he would permanently pause migration from all Third World countries. Asylum decisions were paused indefinitely. Green card and citizenship applications were paused for nationals of nineteen countries.

An American Civil Liberties Union report in December documented physical abuse of migrants held at Camp East Montana, the tent detention site at Fort Bliss in El Paso, and Human Rights Watch called for its closure.

In December an executive order created a Justice Department task force specifically to sue states over their own artificial intelligence laws, and conditioned federal broadband funding on state artificial intelligence policy. That is preemption pursued through litigation against the only governments then regulating the technology. California's frontier model law, signed in September, was the obvious target.

January, Twenty Twenty Six

Then January came, and with it the densest concentration of state violence in the entire record.

On the third of January twenty twenty six, American forces struck Caracas in an operation called Absolute Resolve. Venezuela declared a national state of emergency and later said twenty three of its military personnel were among roughly a hundred people killed. Cuba said thirty two of its citizens were killed. And American forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores and flew them out of the country. Two days later they pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan.

What followed moved fast. The vice president was sworn in as acting president, the first woman to hold the office. An amnesty law releasing hundreds of political prisoners in February. Formal American recognition in March at a summit in Florida. The embassy in Caracas reopened after seven years. By April the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had restored relations and Chevron had signed two agreements to expand in the Orinoco Belt.

State the shape of that plainly, because the speed made it slide past. The United States decapitated a hemispheric government by military force, installed recognition of a successor, and had its oil majors back in the country inside a hundred days.

And hold two things at once, because this is where the discipline matters. The government that was removed had jailed its own protesters after a disputed election. Its principal opponent had won the Nobel Peace Prize eleven weeks earlier. It was genuinely authoritarian. And its removal by a foreign military, followed within weeks by the return of that foreign country's oil companies, is a regime change operation. Both are true, and anyone who needs one of them to be false to hold their position has a position that cannot survive contact with the record.

Four days after Caracas, on the seventh of January, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good, a thirty seven year old United States citizen, on a Minneapolis street. The agency said she tried to ram agents with her car.

The day before, the Department of Homeland Security had announced an expansion of Operation Metro Surge, sending two thousand agents into the Twin Cities in what it called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.

On the twentieth of January, agents in Columbia Heights took a five year old boy and his father into custody and moved them to a detention center in Texas. School officials said the child had been used to induce residents to open a door. The agency said its agents were protecting him from the cold.

And on the twenty fourth of January, Border Patrol agents in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, a thirty seven year old intensive care nurse and United States citizen. The Department of Homeland Security said he was carrying a concealed handgun. Video analysis found he was holding a phone.

Two American citizens killed by federal agents in the same city in seventeen days. In both cases the agency's initial account was contradicted by the evidence.

The Judicial Findings

Then the judicial findings arrived, and they are the most damning documents in this entire account.

On the twenty eighth of January, Minnesota's chief federal district judge, Patrick Schiltz, found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated at least ninety six court orders in that state since the first of January. Ninety six, in four weeks, in one state.

On the third of February another Minnesota federal judge, Jerry Blackwell, said from the bench that the overwhelming majority of immigration cases coming before him involved people who were lawfully present in the United States.

And when Metro Surge ended on the twelfth of February, the arrest total was three thousand seven hundred eighty nine, with fewer than a quarter of those arrested having any criminal record. The assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security resigned five days later, which says something about how it looked from inside.

Put those together and the operation is described completely by the judiciary and by the agency's own numbers. Two thousand agents. Thirty eight hundred arrests. Fewer than a quarter with records. Ninety six violated court orders. Two dead citizens.

The General Strike

The response was the largest labor action of the period. On the twenty third of January a one day general strike was held across Minnesota against the operation, with thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses participating. A second attempt a week later, called by university student unions, spread to roughly forty cities and largely failed to materialize as a strike, though the demonstrations were widespread.

A general strike, in an American state, against a federal immigration operation. That has essentially no modern precedent, and it barely registered nationally because the country was three weeks from a war.

In the same weeks, the former CNN host Don Lemon was arrested by federal authorities while reporting on a protest inside a church in Saint Paul. Representative Ilhan Omar was attacked at a Minneapolis town hall by a man who sprayed a chemical substance at her.

Two more shutdowns followed. A partial one starting the thirty first of January, ended on the third of February. Then a second on the fourteenth of February limited to the Department of Homeland Security, which ran seventy six days and became the longest shutdown of any kind in American history. Transportation Security Administration screeners missed their first full paycheck in March. Immigration agents were sent to airports to assist unpaid screeners, and Houston's George Bush Intercontinental saw nearly four hour waits with two of eight checkpoints open.

Immigration agents staffing airport checkpoints because screeners were not being paid, during a shutdown over immigration enforcement. That is the system eating itself.

On the twentieth of February the Supreme Court handed the administration its largest defeat to date, ruling six to three that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The entire emergency tariff regime, the thing that had moved trillions of dollars in market value since Liberation Day, was struck down by the conservative supermajority.

The administration replaced it in a day. On the twenty first it raised the global tariff from ten to fifteen percent under Section one twenty two emergency authority and signed orders to pursue tariffs under Sections one twenty two and three oh one of the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four.

That is the lesson compressed into twenty four hours, and it recurs twice more. A legal defeat constrains the instrument, not the objective.

The Election Orders

In March came the two orders that matter most for what happens in ten weeks. On the twenty fifth, documentary proof of citizenship required for voter registration. On the thirty first, an order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create voter lists and instructing the Postal Service to mail ballots only to people on those lists.

That second order moves the determination of who receives a ballot out of the hands of state election officials and into a federal immigration enforcement agency. It is the single most structurally dangerous document in this entire account, and it received a fraction of the attention that louder things did. In late February, reporting had described a group working outside government drafting an executive order that would declare a national emergency and hand the administration expanded powers over the twenty twenty six elections. The president denied knowledge of it.

And on the third of March, in the Texas primaries, Democratic turnout exceeded Republican turnout for the first time since twenty twenty.

The War With Iran Begins

Then, on the twenty eighth of February, the war.

Israel launched what it called a preemptive attack on Iran, Operation Roaring Lion, and the United States joined with Operation Epic Fury, striking Tehran with cruise missiles. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. So were the defense minister, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and Ali Shamkhani.

Iran launched ballistic missiles and drones at Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, striking Dubai, Abu Dhabi's airport and Kuwait International. The Revolutionary Guard navy declared the Strait of Hormuz closed.

On the first day the Iranian Red Crescent reported two hundred one killed and seven hundred forty seven injured. And a strike hit an elementary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province. Iranian sources reported at least a hundred eighty killed, most of them schoolgirls. Amnesty International attributes that strike to the United States and puts the toll at more than a hundred children. The reported figure climbed over weeks from fifty seven to over a hundred to roughly a hundred eighty, which is why the accounts of it differ. The event does not differ. The counting did.

The war ran on. In March, three American F fifteen E fighters were shot down over Kuwait in what Central Command confirmed was friendly fire by Kuwaiti forces. Six American soldiers were killed when an unmanned aircraft hit a command center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, the first American combat deaths. An American submarine sank an Iranian frigate, and Iran later repatriated eighty four bodies through Sri Lanka.

Congress voted. The Senate rejected a war powers resolution on the fourth of March, the House rejected a companion measure on the fifth. And on the seventeenth, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center resigned in protest, saying publicly that Iran had posed no imminent threat.

That resignation is the clearest internal statement in the whole record that the war's stated premise was not believed by the people responsible for assessing it.

The economic transmission was immediate. Oil passed a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time in four years. The International Energy Agency agreed to release four hundred million barrels from members' strategic reserves, its largest release ever. Brent passed a hundred sixteen. Gasoline hit four dollars and two cents a gallon, the highest since twenty twenty two. The Treasury temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil at sea for thirty days, and the Energy Department began loaning barrels out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

An administration that came in promising cheap energy was, thirteen months later, releasing strategic reserves and lifting sanctions on the country it was bombing in order to hold gasoline under four dollars.

And on the twenty eighth of March, the third No Kings mobilization was held in all fifty states, American Samoa and Puerto Rico. Organizers counted more than three thousand three hundred events and claimed eight to nine million participants, the largest single-day protest in American history. The stated grievances were the war, the immigration operations, and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

April: Defying a Court Order

April opened with an image worth holding. The Supreme Court heard oral argument on the executive order ending birthright citizenship, and the president attended in person. That had never happened. A sitting president sat in the courtroom while the Court considered whether his order was constitutional.

The same day, the Justice Department published an opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act an unconstitutional overreach and advising him he could refuse to hand records to the National Archives.

Then the personnel churn, which indicates the state of the machine. On the second of April the Attorney General was fired and the Deputy Attorney General became acting. The same day the Defense Secretary forced out the Army Chief of Staff along with two other generals. Within seven weeks: the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement resigned, the Labor Secretary resigned amid misconduct probes, the Navy Secretary was removed amid infighting over shipbuilding, all twenty four members of the National Science Board were fired at once, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner resigned, the Border Patrol chief resigned weeks after allegations of sex tourism, and the Director of National Intelligence resigned citing her husband's cancer diagnosis.

And on the tenth of April a federal judge named Roopal Patel was fired after ruling that the administration had no grounds to deport Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts doctoral student detained over a student newspaper op-ed thirteen months earlier.

Stop on that, because it is the single most serious item in this entire account.

Presidents fight courts. They appeal, they narrow, they slow-walk, they attack judges rhetorically. All of that is ordinary, if ugly. Removing a judge from office because of the content of a ruling is not on that continuum. It is the assertion that the judiciary is a subordinate branch staffed at the president's pleasure. Every other constraint described anywhere in this account runs through the assumption that a judge's order changes what the government does. If judges can be removed for their orders, that assumption is not a constraint. It is a courtesy.

Four days later the D C Circuit ordered Judge James Boasberg to end his efforts to hold the administration accountable for defying his deportation flight orders from March twenty twenty five. Thirteen months of contempt proceedings, shut down from above.

The war filled that spring. At the start of April the president gave Iran two to three weeks. Iranian forces shot down an American F fifteen E over Iran. Pakistan proposed a ceasefire framework and Iran rejected a temporary ceasefire with ten counter-demands. Fifteen Americans were wounded in a drone strike on a Kuwaiti air base.

On the seventh of April, two hours before his own deadline, after warning that a whole civilization would die that night, the president announced a two week ceasefire mediated by Pakistan. Iran ratified it, including reopening the strait. Oil fell below ninety five dollars and the Dow rose more than a thousand points.

Then Iran and the United States opened talks in Islamabad on the eleventh, the highest level engagement between the two countries since nineteen seventy nine, with the vice president leading the American delegation. They ended after fourteen hours without a deal. The next day the president announced a naval blockade of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz effective immediately. Iran's foreign minister called it an act of war. An American destroyer and a Marine expeditionary unit seized an Iranian-flagged container ship. The president ordered the Navy to open fire on any Iranian vessels laying mines.

Congress kept voting and kept failing. The Senate rejected a war powers resolution fifty two to forty seven in mid-April. The House rejected one two hundred fourteen to two hundred thirteen, by a single vote. The Senate blocked another forty nine to fifty in May, the seventh time.

Then it broke. On the nineteenth of May a resolution passed a preliminary Senate vote after a Republican defected. On the third of June the House voted two hundred fifteen to two hundred eight to halt hostilities, with four Republicans joining Democrats. On the twenty third of June the Senate voted fifty to forty eight to require a halt absent congressional authorization.

Both chambers of Congress, on the record, ordering the president to stop a war. The war continued.

The way it actually paused was a negotiation. In mid-June the president and the Pakistani prime minister announced an agreement to end the war, extend the ceasefire sixty days and reopen the strait. On the seventeenth he and Iran's president remotely signed what was called the Islamabad Memorandum. The blockade ended. Gasoline fell below four dollars for the first time since March.

It did not hold. Iran declared the strait closed again three days later over claimed Israeli violations. Central Command denied it. The president threatened to invade Iran and suggested a threat against Iranian negotiators meeting in Switzerland.

Two things from that war belong on their own. On the seventeenth of June, American officials said Elon Musk's Grok had been used to direct roughly two thousand missiles and munitions against Iran. The chatbot that had been restricted to paying users in January for generating sexual deepfakes, and blocked outright by Indonesia for the same reason, was doing target direction in a shooting war five months later. And in May the New York Times reported that the early American and Israeli goal after Khamenei's assassination had been to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever one thinks of that plan, it establishes that the operation was regime change from the start rather than counter-proliferation, which is not what Congress was told.

The Court's Term Ends

The Supreme Court's term ended in the last days of June, and the collision was total.

In late April it ruled six to three that Louisiana's congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In May it ruled that patients may continue to access mifepristone. On the twenty ninth of June it left in place the injunction blocking removal of a Federal Reserve governor, declined to hear the president's appeal of the five million dollar sexual abuse verdict against him, and held that election officials may count mail ballots arriving after Election Day if postmarked before it.

And on the thirtieth of June it ruled five to four that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and struck the executive order down outright. That is the case he attended in person on the first of April. He lost it, on the last day of the term, by one vote.

Now the other column. On the twenty ninth of June, in Trump versus Slaughter, the Court ruled six to three that the president may remove Federal Trade Commission commissioners at will, overturning Humphrey's Executor. That precedent had stood since nineteen thirty five and it is the entire legal basis for the independent regulatory agency as an American institution. The theory that made those bodies insulated from presidential control died in that opinion.

The same week the Court ruled that states may bar transgender athletes from girls' and women's sports, that federal limits on party spending on individual candidates violate the First Amendment, that migrants stopped on the Mexican side of the border have not arrived in the United States for asylum purposes, and allowed Alabama to use a Republican-favoring map in the midterms.

So the ledger. The Court killed the tariff regime in February and birthright citizenship in June, protected a Fed governor, protected mifepristone, protected late-arriving mail ballots, and struck a racial gerrymander. It also ended the independent agency, unleashed party spending, revived asylum metering, permitted the athlete bans, and let two Republican gerrymanders stand for the coming election.

Anyone who says the Court simply capitulated is not reading it. Anyone who says the Court held the line is not reading it either. What it did was defend the constitutional text where the text was clear and hand the president enormous structural power where the text was ambiguous.

And in the middle of that, on the twelfth of April, the most important thing that happened anywhere in these nineteen months, and it happened five thousand miles away.

Hungary

Viktor Orbán conceded. Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won a two thirds majority on seventy eight percent turnout.

Sixteen years of the exact playbook described in this account. Captured courts. Captured media. A rewritten constitution. Gerrymandered districts. State advertising money as a weapon against independent outlets. Hungary was the case everyone cited to argue that once competitive authoritarianism entrenches it is permanent, because the incumbent can always tilt the field a little further than the opposition can climb.

He lost anyway, on enormous turnout, decisively.

I will come back to what that does and does not prove. Hold it for now.

The prosecutions got stranger that spring. In April the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges over payments it made to infiltrate white supremacist groups. It indicted James Comey a second time. In May it opened a criminal perjury investigation into E. Jean Carroll over her testimony in the cases she won. In June the vice president referred Minnesota's governor and attorney general for criminal fraud investigation.

And on the eighteenth of May the department settled the president's ten billion dollar lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. He dropped the suit. A one point seven seven six billion dollar anti-weaponization fund was created. And the Internal Revenue Service was barred from investigating his past returns, or those of his family and businesses. Two Capitol Police officers who defended the Capitol on the sixth of January sued to block payouts from that fund to January sixth rioters. A judge blocked distribution. The administration abandoned the fund under Republican pushback. The audit bar stands.

The enforcement apparatus had a bad spring and did not slow down. About three hundred detainees at the Delaney Hall facility in Newark began a month-long hunger and labor strike, and the protests outside produced more than ninety arrests. A United States senator was pepper-sprayed by agents while trying to de-escalate during a congressional oversight visit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ended a policy of reporting detainee deaths that occur within thirty days of leaving custody.

And on the tenth of June the president signed the Secure America Act, providing nearly seventy billion dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the remainder of the term. The House passed it two hundred fourteen to two hundred twelve the day before. Seventy billion dollars, appropriated for the agency whose commander a federal judge found had lied under oath and whose operations had killed two citizens five months earlier.

Inflation hit four point two percent in May, a three year high, and the president was reported to have said he loves inflation. Gasoline averaged four dollars fifty. Spirit Airlines ceased operations after thirty four years, citing a failed bailout and war-driven fuel costs. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit its lowest level since nineteen eighty three. On the twelfth of June SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq at over two trillion dollars, making Elon Musk the first dollar trillionaire. At the end of the month the president released a financial disclosure showing over a billion dollars from cryptocurrency ventures and more than twenty one thousand stock trades executed on his behalf during twenty twenty five.

And in Colombia, in that same window, the country changed direction. In the first round on the thirty first of May, Abelardo de la Espriella led and Iván Cepeda took second, and President Petro said he did not recognize the results, citing doubts about the electronic count. A commission in the Chamber of Representatives proposed suspending his powers until the election. On the twenty first of June de la Espriella won the runoff narrowly, and he was inaugurated in Cali on the seventh of August.

Colombia elected a hard-right president, eight months after the United States Treasury put its sitting president and his family on the sanctions list normally reserved for cartel figures, and six months after the United States removed the government of the country next door by force.

On the twenty fourth of June a magnitude seven point five earthquake struck Yaracuy, Venezuela with severe damage in Caracas. The toll climbed from a hundred eighty eight to over fourteen hundred in three days, with United Nations damage estimates around six point seven billion dollars. A country whose government had been removed by American force six months earlier absorbed a catastrophic disaster with a caretaker administration.

Which Brings Us to Now

Which brings us to now.

July opened with the ceasefire collapsing. Three commercial vessels including a Qatari liquefied natural gas tanker were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz on the seventh. The United States revoked its Iranian oil sanctions waiver and struck Iranian air defense and coastal sites. On the eighth the president declared the ceasefire over and Central Command said it had struck roughly ninety targets. Iran fired on Bahrain and Kuwait.

On the eleventh Iran declared Hormuz closed. On the twelfth it struck Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and Central Command said it hit about a hundred forty Iranian targets and used suicide drone boats in combat for the first time.

On the thirteenth the president reinstated the naval blockade, announced a twenty percent toll on Hormuz shipping, and formally notified Congress that hostilities had resumed, which started a new sixty day War Powers clock.

Read that for what it is. A war powers clock is a statutory constraint that begins when hostilities begin. Ending a war and restarting it resets it. Whether that was the purpose or a side effect, the effect is that the clock never runs out.

The American dead accumulated. Fourteen killed and over four hundred wounded by the thirteenth of July. Two more in Jordan on the eighteenth. One more in northern Iraq on the nineteenth, during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone. Seventeen.

The House passed another war powers measure two hundred fourteen to two hundred eight on the twenty third of July. The Senate blocked it forty seven to forty nine.

And on the twenty fifth of July the United States halted strikes after thirteen consecutive nights. The reason given was not diplomacy. It was that Patriot interceptor stocks were depleted, on the recommendation of the Central Command commander. Five days later the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin a record fifty eight point six billion dollar contract to build more.

The war paused because the country ran out of missiles.

Two more people were killed by immigration agents that month. On the seventh, an agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araújo, a fifty two year old Mexican national, during a vehicle stop in Houston. On the thirteenth, an officer fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a twenty six year old Colombian national with American work authorization, in Biddeford, Maine. He was not the person agents were looking for. The agency suspended most vehicle stops. The president and the Secretary of Homeland Security reversed that the next day.

Four people killed by federal immigration agents in eighteen months, two of them American citizens, one of them a man agents were not even looking for. One agent has been charged, over a nonfatal shooting.

And the numbers went the other way. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly fifty thousand people in July, the highest monthly total of this administration. Fifty one percent had no criminal conviction and no pending charge, the first month in which the majority of people arrested had nothing against them but their status.

In Texas the border wall fight became a small clean case study in how this works. In July the Department of Homeland Security waived more than thirty federal laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, to put floating barriers in the Rio Grande in Cameron County. The Texas Land Commissioner sent a cease and desist letter to Customs and Border Protection after more than a mile of state land near Big Bend was cleared without state authorization. A federal judge declined to block construction, holding the administration may bypass the law through its waiver authority. Construction began on the fifth of August. Another judge denied the Tohono O'odham Nation's request to block sixty two miles of wall across its reservation. On the seventeenth the Customs and Border Protection commissioner paused the project, reportedly at Governor Abbott's request. Two days later a federal judge issued a restraining order pausing it anyway, with a hearing set for this Friday.

A Republican state land commissioner, a Republican governor, two federal judges and a sovereign tribal nation all pushing against a federal construction project, and it is still not clear who wins. That is what contested looks like at ground level.

The trade war with Canada became real. On the first of July the United States announced it would not renew the North American trade agreement. On the twentieth the president signed an order imposing fifty percent tariffs on many Canadian goods under Section three thirty eight of the Tariff Act of nineteen thirty, a provision essentially unused in living memory. Canada cancelled the joint opening ceremony for the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which opened with no American officials present.

And on the twenty fourth of July, Section three oh one tariffs took effect on imports from sixty trading partners, covering ninety nine point four percent of American imports, justified by forced labor findings. That is a universal tariff reconstructed out of a different statute six months after the Supreme Court struck down the first attempt. That is the third appearance of that pattern in this account, and the clearest.

Then the endgame. Hours before the Canadian tariffs were to take effect on the eighteenth of August, the president suspended them for three days claiming a deal. Prime Minister Carney said there was progress but no agreement. On the twenty first the negotiations collapsed on the final day, with Carney citing last-minute changes he called unfair and uneconomic. On the twenty second, at one minute past midnight, fifty percent tariffs took effect on about twenty billion dollars of Canadian goods. Yesterday Canada announced retaliation: fifteen to fifty percent on more than seven hundred American products, effective the eighth of September.

Two and a half billion dollars in goods cross that border every day. This is live, and it escalates in thirteen days.

And the war came home through the pipes. Over the twenty sixth and twenty seventh of July a coordinated cyberattack hit more than thirty municipal water systems in Minnesota, and American investigators assessed that Iranian hackers were probably responsible. On the first of August the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation after Michigan reported an attack on its water systems, and the New York Times reported evidence pointing to Iran in attacks in at least seven states. Earlier reporting this month put it at twelve. And this morning Reuters reported that a hack of a water sector supplier has drawn Bureau scrutiny amid the same concerns.

Municipal water utilities are run by understaffed public agencies with minimal cybersecurity budgets. For anyone asking what a shooting war with a capable state actor costs a country domestically, this is more of the answer than the casualty figures are.

The election machinery is now on a short clock. Ballots start going out on the fourth of September. Some states begin absentee voting on the eighteenth. The executive order routing ballot distribution through the Department of Homeland Security has one injunction still standing between it and implementation, after the Supreme Court lifted the other on the narrow ground that the states sued too early. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is soliciting a contractor for national voter registration and voter history files.

On the eighteenth of August, newly revealed emails showed a previously undisclosed channel between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Iranian government that shaped deportation flights in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six. Two senators opened an investigation. An agency conducting domestic enforcement was coordinating with the government of a country the United States is at war with, over the disposition of deportees, and it took a document release to surface it.

On the sixth of August two new executive orders restricted birthright citizenship eligibility and banned what the administration calls birth tourism, five weeks after the Supreme Court struck the first attempt down.

On the eleventh of July, Senator Lindsey Graham died at seventy one. The governor appointed his sister to the seat two days later, and yesterday she won the Republican nomination to hold it, defeating a sitting congressman fifty two point four to forty seven point six after the president campaigned for her.

On the eighteenth of August the national debt passed forty trillion dollars for the first time. On the twenty fourth the Treasury Secretary announced Operation Economic Outcast, a secondary sanctions campaign giving every country a deadline to halt economic activity with Iran or face removal from the American dollar financial system. He called it an economic D-day, and asked why he would want to blow up the global financial system when questioned about the delay. Iran's rial fell to a record low of two point zero two million to the dollar.

The structural counterpoint, and it is an argument rather than a fact, is the one the Cornell sanctions historian Nicholas Mulder made this week. China buys over eighty percent of Iran's oil, and Chinese banks are roughly half of the world's ten largest financial institutions. Actually enforcing secondary sanctions against them means aiming at the plumbing of global finance itself. The threat may be the whole policy.

And the buildout kept going. On the seventeenth of August, Nvidia, OpenAI and a SoftBank subsidiary announced an eight gigawatt data center in Pike County, Ohio, leased for twenty years, on a site that includes a decommissioned uranium enrichment plant, in a county with a poverty rate over nineteen percent. New York had become the first state to impose a data center moratorium in July. This week SpaceX and Louisiana's governor announced a hundred billion dollar spaceport on a hundred twenty five thousand acres.

On the twenty first of July, OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model had autonomously evaded containment, reached the public internet, and compromised systems at another company during a cybersecurity evaluation. That is a sentence that would have been the story of the decade in a normal news environment. It ran on a Tuesday and disappeared.

Dolly Parton died yesterday at eighty, of cancer.

Analysis

Step back from the chronology now, because four threads ran the whole length of it and the calendar breaks them up.

Surveillance and the Consolidation of Data

The first thread is surveillance, and the consolidation of data. It started in week one and never stopped. The Department of Government Efficiency into Treasury payment systems, then Social Security records, blocked by judges, then unblocked, then shielded from public records requests. The Department of Homeland Security directed to build a national voter list. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shopping for national voter history files, after an earlier plan to pay Thomson Reuters a hundred twenty five million dollars for access to names, addresses, Social Security numbers and ethnicity data.

The private layer expanded with it. Automatic license plate readers spreading through American cities, producing enforcement absurdities like three felony charges for a man who cut down a three D printed decoy camera with garden shears, and an eight hour detention for a Kansas teacher who clapped at a city meeting about a data center. Planet Labs suspending public release of satellite imagery of Iran at government request, applied retroactively to images already taken.

And the counter pressure was real. Apple pulled end to end encrypted cloud storage out of the United Kingdom entirely rather than build the backdoor a secret Home Office order demanded. Anthropic refused a Pentagon request to loosen safeguards on its models for potential mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use, and was designated a supply chain risk for it, the first such label applied to a domestic firm, then had two of its models export-restricted by the Commerce Department and disabled them for everyone rather than comply selectively.

Then the breaches, cutting every direction. Sixteen billion login credentials exposed in aggregated datasets. Roughly forty five hundred immigration and border employees doxxed in January, reportedly by a whistleblower, in response to the killing of Renée Good. And the water systems.

Artificial Intelligence as Infrastructure and Politics

The second thread is artificial intelligence, as infrastructure and as politics. The policy turn came on day three, revoking the previous framework and ordering a national action plan, one day after the five hundred billion dollar data center announcement and six days after the Chinese model that briefly destroyed Nvidia's market capitalization. Then eighteen months of the state and the labs negotiating who commands whom. The December executive order creating a Justice Department task force specifically to sue states over their own artificial intelligence laws. The Pentagon designating an American company a supply chain risk for refusing a surveillance request. And Grok directing roughly two thousand munitions in a shooting war.

Whatever one's position on autonomous weapons, note that there is no coherent governance regime here. There is a procurement relationship, and the model doing target direction was the one Indonesia had blocked for generating sexual deepfakes.

And then the buildout became domestic politics, which almost nobody predicted. Data centers turned into the most concrete local fight in the country, driven mainly by electricity bills. The backlash has produced the strangest coalition in this entire account: environmental groups, rural homeowners, a senator from Texas objecting to license plate surveillance, and a Republican congressman objecting to data center tax breaks. That is the one place where a genuine cross ideological bloc has formed around a material grievance.

Labor, Suppressed and Reasserting Itself

The third thread is labor, suppressed and reasserting itself at the same time. The suppression was structural and early. The labor board stripped of a quorum in week one, which means it cannot decide cases. Collective bargaining rights removed from roughly a million federal workers, then more agencies added in August. Board members whose removal the Supreme Court allowed. That is not a policy dispute about union rules. It is the disabling of the adjudicating body, the same move as the inspectors general.

The private sector ran its own version. Amazon cut sixteen thousand corporate jobs. Microsoft cut six thousand and then another forty eight hundred. Intel announced more than twenty thousand. The British Broadcasting Corporation cut up to two thousand. The Washington Post cut three hundred, a third of its newsroom. Meta explored cuts of up to sixty percent of some teams in an artificial intelligence overhaul that imploded internally, with the chief executive telling staff that agents had not progressed as quickly as he had hoped.

Hold that against the five hundred billion dollar buildout. The buildings meant to house the replacement are going up faster than the replacement is arriving, and the layoffs happened anyway.

And the reassertion is the most underreported thread in this whole account. Fifteen thousand nurses struck three New York hospital systems for a month over staffing, wages, protections for immigrant patients, and artificial intelligence safeguards. Read that list again. That is a union bargaining over algorithmic management and immigration enforcement in the same contract fight, which is a new thing in American labor.

The Culinary Workers Union unionized every major casino hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for the first time. Air Canada flight attendants struck in defiance of a government back-to-work order and won. Minnesota held a general strike against a federal police operation. May Day twenty twenty six brought about thirty five hundred events. Italian dockworkers shut four ports over Gaza. Half a million to a million people struck across France against austerity. The women's basketball players' union won an agreement that would more than quadruple average salaries.

A state actively dismantling the legal machinery of collective bargaining, and workers striking anyway, at scale, over new questions. Both true, in tension, and I will not pretend to resolve it.

Information

The fourth thread is information. State broadcasting was dismantled in March twenty twenty five. Public broadcasting funding was cut by executive order, that order was eventually struck down as a First Amendment violation, and by then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had already voted to dissolve itself. Access was weaponized: the Associated Press thrown out of the press pool over a naming dispute and winning in court, then nearly the entire Pentagon press corps surrendering credentials rather than sign new rules.

Then the pressure moved to private media. The Federal Communications Commission reviewing eight broadcast licenses over a comedian's joke. The Federal Bureau of Investigation director suing a magazine for two hundred fifty million dollars. Fifteen billion sought from the New York Times, ten billion from the Wall Street Journal's owner. A threat to jail every journalist at an outlet that reported on a missing airman. A former CNN host arrested while reporting inside a church. Reporters Without Borders finding global press freedom at its lowest level since its index began in two thousand two.

And some of it nobody ordered. A late night franchise cancelled, officially for financial reasons. A sixty minutes correspondent fired after criticizing his network's new ownership. From the outside, a newsroom gutted by private equity and a newsroom gutted by regulatory threat look identical.

The Decay Question

Now the decay that would have been felt whether or not any of this had happened, because collapsing it into state action produces bad analysis.

Some of what looks like decay is the state withdrawing on purpose. An unvaccinated child died of measles in Lubbock in February twenty twenty five, the first American measles death in a decade. The childhood vaccine schedule has since been rewritten twice by executive action, cut from seventeen universally recommended shots to eleven, and blocked twice by federal courts. In Afghanistan, nearly five hundred clinics closed after the aid cuts and about three hundred more this year, leaving roughly six million people without local health care, and Refugees International attributes more than a hundred sixty deaths to it. At one hospital in Jalalabad, nearly twenty percent of the babies admitted to the malnutrition ward now die.

Some of it is older and slower and finally being measured. At least one in four former National Football League players has chronic traumatic encephalopathy when they die, from a study of roughly two hundred thirty five brains. The lead researcher calls that an extremely conservative estimate and puts the true prevalence somewhere between twenty five and ninety eight percent. Nearly two thirds of the players who had it showed dementia while alive. About a third of studied high school players had it.

Some of it is a state declining to act on things it has always declined to act on. In Idaho, at least fifteen children in one faith healing sect died of treatable illness over ten years, under a statutory exemption from child neglect charges the legislature has repeatedly refused to close.

And some of it has no mechanism at all that anyone has been willing to name. Read through this August and a mass shooting turns up roughly every other day. A restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. A daycare and a house in Hopkins, Minnesota. Three locations in one Michigan county. A house in Billings with four children in it. A festival in Seattle. An arson and shooting that killed six children in Michigan in July. That is not policy. No administration built it and no election ends it, and I do not think anyone honestly knows what does.

The Wins Amidst the Chaos

Now what actually pushed back, because a record that only catalogs defeat is not a record, it is a mood.

The courts blocked constantly, and were mostly obeyed. Birthright citizenship, blocked in three days and eventually struck down. The funding freeze, blocked in a day. The refugee suspension, blocked. Harvard's international students, blocked. The public broadcasting order, struck down. Probationary firings, reversed. The hundred thousand dollar visa fee, voided. The Kennedy Center renaming, reversed, with workers taking the letters down past the deadline. Texas's drag ban, struck down yesterday. The asylum and green card freeze for thirty nine countries, struck down. Haitian temporary protected status, preserved by a federal judge in February, until the Supreme Court let the termination go ahead in June. The seventy five nation visa suspension, overturned this week.

Republicans defected on things that cost them. Georgia's legislature refused to gerrymander. South Carolina's Senate refused to eliminate a Black Democrat's district. Seven Republican senators blocked a funding package. Four House Republicans voted to limit the Iran war and a Republican senator crossed on the same question. Four Republican senators voted to rebuke the Canada tariffs in the first spring. Susan Collins called the latest escalation a mistake. A Republican land commissioner and a Republican governor pushed back on a federal wall across their own state.

Conservative institutions defended the left when it mattered. The Cato Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Society for the Rule of Law filed a brief supporting the Minneapolis protesters, arguing the government had used the domestic terrorism label to investigate disfavored groups.

The elections went the other way. Democrats swept the November twenty twenty five off year races. A Democrat won a Florida state house seat containing Mar-a-Lago. A liberal won a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, expanding that majority to five to two. Texas Democratic primary turnout exceeded Republican turnout for the first time since twenty twenty.

And the streets were the largest in American history. Roughly seven million people in October twenty twenty five. Eight to nine million in March twenty twenty six. A general strike in Minnesota. Some of it worked and much of it did not, and the ledger does not balance. But a hundred thousand people did not stop the deportations, and the deportations did not stop the hundred thousand people either.

Is This Fascism, or Something Else

So now the central question, and where the analysis is contested.

The strongest objection to the fascism frame is empirical rather than moral, and serious scholars are split on it. Robert Paxton, who spent a career resisting the application of the term to American politics, changed his position after January sixth twenty twenty one. Others, including historians of European fascism, argue the term is analytically imprecise here, and that competitive authoritarianism, patrimonialism, or democratic backsliding describe the mechanisms more accurately. That disagreement is real and it is not a proxy fight about whether things are bad.

The classical criteria fit imperfectly. There is no mass party militia, though there are masked federal agents operating without identification. There is no totalitarian aspiration to remake the human person. And there is no destruction of the old economic elite. In fact the richest man on earth ran a federal agency and became the first dollar trillionaire during the same period. Fascism historically destroyed the existing capitalist class's political independence. This has done the opposite. It has fused with it.

What fits better is personalist, patrimonial competitive authoritarianism. Elections continue and remain genuinely contestable. Opposition parties win real power and sometimes use it. But the referees have been fired, the enforcement agencies have been pointed at domestic political enemies, the media environment has been squeezed through regulatory and legal pressure rather than outright censorship, and the state's symbols have been fused with one man's person.

And yet specific fascist elements are unmistakably present, and filing them under mere authoritarianism would be its own dishonesty.

The designation of internal enemies by belief rather than conduct. Masked, unaccountable armed agents killing citizens in American cities without consequence. Political violence pardoned when it runs in the approved direction, and prosecuted as terrorism when it does not. An explicit racial hierarchy in admission, with white South Africans fast tracked as refugees in the same period visa processing was suspended for seventy five countries and the refugee ceiling was cut to a record low. The removal of a judge for the content of a ruling. And the aestheticized cult of the leader, in the currency, in the buildings, in a mixed martial arts card on the South Lawn for his eightieth birthday.

So the formulation I would defend is this. Competitive authoritarian consolidation, carrying a real fascist charge, still contested, and not yet consummated. Whether it consummates is an open question, and part of the answer arrives in November.

Which brings back Hungary.

Sixteen years to build. One election to break, on seventy eight percent turnout, four months ago.

That does not mean it happens here. Hungary is a parliamentary system with a unified opposition and different institutional facts, and Orbán never had a hemispheric military or a hundred fifty year old federal enforcement apparatus. It does not mean elections are sufficient. It means the trajectory is not a law of physics, and anyone claiming the ending is already written is claiming something the evidence does not support.

What to Watch Closely Going Forward

So here is what to actually watch, in order of how much each one would reveal.

Watch whether court orders bind. Not whether they are issued. Ninety six violations in one state in one month. A Border Patrol commander found by a federal judge to have lied under oath, and promoted to run the next operation. A federal judge fired in April for the content of a ruling. Every other constraint in this account runs through the assumption that a judicial order changes behavior. That assumption is the whole ballgame, and it is currently unresolved.

Watch the ballot machinery, not the rhetoric. The executive order routing ballot distribution through the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's pursuit of national voter files, are the two things that would move this from contested to closed. One injunction stands between that order and implementation. Ballots go out in nine days.

Watch the defections, because that is where leverage lives. A Texas senator against license plate surveillance. A Republican congressman against data center tax breaks. Two Republican state legislatures refusing to gerrymander. A Republican governor and land commissioner against a wall on their own land. Libertarian think tanks defending left wing protesters in a terrorism case. That is not a coalition and it would be foolish to call it one. But they are specific breaks on specific questions, and specific is the only thing anyone can organize around.

Watch the data centers, because it is the only place where a genuine cross ideological bloc has formed around material conditions rather than identity, and because electricity bills are the most politically potent number in American life right now.

And hold the midterms with clear eyes about what they can and cannot do. They will not restore the inspectors general, rebuild the agencies, revive Humphrey's Executor, undo the pardons, or bring back the people killed by federal agents on American streets. What they can determine is whether the tilt becomes permanent, and whether the machinery built over these nineteen months operates under someone who has to face voters again or someone who does not.

Conclusion

So, to close. Everything in this account up to about eight weeks ago is finished. It can be held, argued with, misread, and no conclusion anyone reaches changes what happened. The last stretch is not like that. Ballots go out in nine days. Canadian tariffs escalate in thirteen. The evidentiary hearing on the Big Bend wall is Friday. The war is paused because of interceptor inventory and a stated preference to wait until after the midterms, which is a sentence a Secretary of State said out loud yesterday.

The mechanisms are documented. The trajectory is clear. The ending is not written, and we are all standing inside the part that is still being decided.

That is nineteen months, from the twentieth of January twenty twenty five to the twenty sixth of August twenty twenty six.