The following article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you can subscribe to the print edition of Catalyst for just $20.
The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term began — as did so many events that defined his first four years in office — with a nationwide search for categories. How best to describe the mass firings of civil servants, the impoundment of billions in congressionally appropriated funds, the disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and the refusals to abide by court injunctions on these maneuvers? A coup or a constitutional crisis? A pushing of the office’s boundaries or a rupture of the separation of powers? Questions like these haunted the pages of the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs and interviews on public radio, to say nothing of the listservs of legal scholars. These were, by this point, quite familiar lines of inquiry. They would not have been out of place in the voluminous pop social science and history titles that materialized on the shelves of airport bookstores to process Trump’s first term, books with stark monochromatic covers and titles like How Democracies Die.
If the questions were echoes of the past, the reality they aimed to classify was not. The first few months of 2017 were characterized by chaotic but ultimately halting attempts of an administration not quite ready to step into the void of power. The weeks that followed Trump’s second inauguration revealed an administration with a semblance of a playbook for seizing the state — articulated by presidential transition teams like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint. The plans…
Auteur: Philip Rocco
