Politics Doesn't Explain It

MAGA violence is directed at Republicans too.

We are 163 days into Trump 47 and the consequences to our nation are nearly incomprehensible. I went to bed on Inauguration Day deeply troubled by what the Trump administration did that day and signaled they were going to do in the coming days, weeks, months and next four years.

That Democratic leaders weren’t ready is an epic understatement. I think most of us were caught flat footed, because we didn’t anticipate that the MAGA team would move so quickly and be willing to ignore all norms and many laws.

Even before the election, the MAGA team was making sure that Republicans would be all in. The culmination of bending Republicans fully into MAGA loyalists was on display yesterday when the Senate Republicans passed Trump’s legislative agenda.

Since January 20th, the Trump administration has been torpedoing labor law as it applies to federal workers. They continue to insult our allies. Cozy up to our enemies. Ignore court orders. Lie to the public. Attack the press. Threaten business leaders, governors, university presidents, mayors, judges, and anyone who dares to attempt to hold them accountable.

As I mentioned in my post on June 19, “The Trump administration has now put in handcuffs or arrested a US Senator, a member of the US House of Representatives, a Wisconsin Judge, and the second highest elected official in America’s largest city.”

In addition to Senator Alex Padilla, Representative LaMonica McIver, Judge Hannah Dugan, and Comptroller Brad Lander, the executive branch has detained Democrats including Mayor Ras Baraka, and a congressional staffer for Representative Jerry Nadler.

After pardoning nearly 1500 of the January 6 insurrectionists, the Trump administration has unleashed thousands of federal agents and contractors to grab people off the streets suspected of being undocumented. In some cases, like that of lawful permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil taken into custody from his residence and without a warrant, abduction is openly motivated for political reasons.

These agents are often masked, without identification, and traveling in unmarked vehicles. They are agents of terror. To assume there could be no relationship between the act of pardoning, the encouragement of federal ICE agents to disregard the law, and the recruitment of masked contractors working with ICE is dangerously naive.

Increasingly, Trump’s deportation team appears to have the backing of the Roberts Supreme Court. The three justices appointed by Democratic presidents issued a fiery dissent to the court’s approval of rapid deportations to third countries last week.

Sotomayor, in a lengthy opinion, said she cannot join “so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” arguing that the court is “rewarding lawlessness.”--TIME June 24, 2025.

If anyone was still wondering if the Roberts Court was independent or in the bag for MAGA, last week should have made that crystal clear.

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Yesterday, we saw Senate Republicans rush through one of the most massive legislative efforts in our nation’s history at a speed we seldom see. The House passed their reconciliation package in May. The Senate bypassed their committee process taking up the House bill directly. The talk is that next week the House may pass the Senate bill and President Trump could sign it by the end of the week.

While we all need to keep protesting, this is likely going to pass.

What explains that Republicans have fallen in line for the Trump team so quickly and completely in just 163 days? The coercion is working. Considering the threats made by Trump with few consequences and the actions taken against immigrants including those with legal status, is it paranoid to consider that governmental leaders including Senators and Supreme Court justices are being threatened by violence?

I cannot think of a means of coercion that the Trump administration has not employed or at least threatened, including execution.

Ok, I’m exaggerating now. I’m off the deep end. Or am I? If you can think of a means of coercion that Trump and his team haven’t threatened, please put it in the comments to prove me wrong.

I think those trying to interpret this situation as Republicans being afraid of primaries are the naive ones. That seems more delusional than connecting the dots between what Trump says in public, what his paramilitary force does on the streets in clear daylight, and what is likely going on behind closed doors in DC.

Imagine someone walks into Senator so and so’s office, closes the door, and says, “It would be tragic if your daughter had a car accident on her way home from work. We expect you will stay on the team and your daughter will make it home safely.”

I have heard third hand about a federal worker being threatened in such a way. I’ve heard third hand about a senator being threatened in such a way. I heard first hand about the pizza doxxing threat where a judge gets a pizza delivered that they didn’t order as a means of intimidation. On February 10th, Robert Leonard and I wrote about watching Anne Applebaum speak about the fear among leaders in our nation’s capital.

Anne Applebaum with the Atlantic, while speaking Friday on Washington Week on PBS highlights their fear:

So, we're now at a really weird moment in history where powerful U.S. senators who are elected for six years, who have huge staffs and money and great futures ahead of them if they leave the Senate at the Harvard Kennedy School or, you know, on television, are more cowardly than unnamed USAID bureaucrats, several of whom have done very brave things in the last few days, who've tried to stop orders, even knowing they would lose their jobs.

And the only conclusion I can come to is that they are all terrified, and they're afraid of Twitter, they're afraid of Musk, they're afraid of their constituents, they're afraid of threats of violence that they get against their families. This is a very, very strange moment in U.S. politics where we have, you know, members of Congress elected politicians who are afraid to speak their minds and afraid to do their jobs.

That was three weeks into Trump 47. What we’ve witnessed since makes us more numb to the violence. But it all indicates that the coercion is likely more violent now than three weeks into the new administration.

And now we’re seeing policy being passed into law that is widely unpopular and incredibly radical.

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MAGA isn't about policy. It's about movement building. It would be difficult to argue that MAGA has failed at movement building. So if policy is what builds a movement, MAGA should be on its heels and scrambling to self-correct. It's not. And Republicans are falling in line rather than standing up against it.

Democrats, this moment in our history isn't about policy. It's about movement building. If we aren't building a movement grounded in the VALUES that explain why Americans dislike the policies in Trump’s radical redistribution of wealth and power, we're not only going to get those policies, we're going to keep losing our nation to the most radical leaders in the MAGA movement.

We aren’t just fighting against harmful policies, we’re fighting for the very foundation of our nation. While the identity politics around MAGA aren’t about policies, those leading the MAGA movement are certainly using the levers of power to change the laws to further consolidate their power.

The Senate bill includes $45 billion for detention and

“$29.85 billion for, among other measures, hiring ICE staff; ICE performance, retention, and signing bonuses; and transportation and related costs for removing illegal aliens,” according to and celebrated by Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

All told, FAIR is celebrating $155.4 billion in the Senate reconciliation package focused on Trump’s attack on immigrants, which with the blessing of the Roberts Supreme Court will be able to grab people off the streets and send them out of the country without due process.

For now, that’s limited to certain immigrants, except when it isn’t and “mistakes” are made. But shortly, that system of legalized terror will be used on others to threaten and punish dissent. The threats are already being made.

I’m not without hope. I’m inspired every day with amazing stories of resistance. I’m seeing people become engaged in our democracy that have never really been engaged.

Republicans know that this bill will doom them electorally. I have to believe that many of them are hoping that Democrats get our act together and punch back to save them from the violence.

But don’t expect Republicans to step up themselves. Between last week’s Supreme Court capitulation to Trump and now the House and Senate doing the same, it’s clear they’re handing our nation over to MAGA.

It’s now up to all of us ordinary Americans to save our country. It’s time for movement building. It’s time for Democrats to go all in. And while we’re being brutally honest with ourselves, we might just have to drag some of those Democrats kicking and screaming into our movement.

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