Beware the Hurricane!

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” — Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, per the character of Sir Thomas More.

As the most consequential election since our Civil War approaches, Donald Trump is placing his bets on migration. Polls show consistently that it’s the issue on which he enjoys the most lopsided advantage over Biden.

Trump calls undocumented migration an “invasion.” But is it really?

What Vladimir Putin’s Russia is doing to Ukraine is an “invasion.” It involves tanks, troops and millions of artillery shells. Every single day, Ukrainians get killed or injured, as their dwellings and infrastructure get reduced to rubble by exploding shells, missiles, bombs and drones. Ukrainians often hide or sleep underground, in subway tunnels. They school their children there, just to give them a feeling of safety and normalcy.

That’s an “invasion!” Other examples of “invasions” are what Hamas did in Israel on October 7, and what Israel is doing in Gaza now.

Does our unprecedented wave of desperate refugees look or feel anything like that? Not hardly. The vast majority of them are helpless people, driven here by misery, poverty, violence, and corruption in the homelands they are fleeing. All they have is what they can carry on foot.

Unlike past waves of migrants, this one consists significantly—if not predominantly—of families, unaccompanied children, and women. All are seeking decent work and peaceful, better lives. Most of them do jobs that native-born Americans won’t do, under pay and conditions that native-born Americans would never accept. And the bosses welcome them for their docility and willingness to accept low pay and poor conditions without complaining. At the same time, the bosses foment fear and hate against them for political purposes.

On the left, the big issue appears to be women’s reproductive rights. Yes, it’s a terrible thing when women who, for half a century, had the rights to make their own decisions in matters of sex, childbirth, and family have had those rights snatched away by a bunch of so-called “conservative” judges drunk with activist political power. But is this anything like what’s happening in Ukraine or Gaza, or happened in Israel on October 7?

And so we come to the title of this essay and the hurricane analogy. As Hurricane Katrina became a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico and gathered strength, the citizens of New Orleans were going about their business as usual. They were discussing and arguing about local politics. They were debating the divisions between the posh Garden District, with its great mansions, and the low-lying Ninth Ward where the poor and mostly Black people live. They were talking about the oil, gas, and plastics industries downriver, and how to keep their pollution away from the city.

What they should have been talking about was the levees. They were built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and Katrina was a Category 4. The sad and wet denouement is now history. Devastation and pervasive mold still scar New Orleans to this day, nearly nineteen years later. Katrina changed New Orleans’ destiny for a generation and counting, just because the levees didn’t hold.

As the head quote from the (fictional) mouth of Sir Thomas More suggests, you can make a good analogy to levees in politics and government. The rule of law is the levee that protects us from the winds of human hate, greed, violence, and lust for power.

One of many big ideas in the Western Enlightenment was that law, by replacing the whim of individual monarchs and tyrants, could serve as levees against these all-too-common human failings. Law could, and often did, make our lives more stable and predictable, and all of us safer and happier.

Like the denizens of New Orleans as Katrina approached, many of us are missing the point of the upcoming election. A hurricane is approaching, so we should all look to our levees. If we don’t, a storm surge of authoritarianism could wash our levees away and leave us back where humanity was before the Enlightenment: subject to the whims of tyrants, a self-focused aristocracy, and an overweening Church that told everyone what to believe. Then everything would relentlessly get worse.

What are the signs of the coming hurricane? There’s Trump’s pledge to pardon those convicted for the January 6 insurrection, as well as people like (former) General Michael Flynn, who was convicted for lying about official activities. There’s the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”—a complete plan to revolutionize the federal Executive, upon Trump’s inauguration, to maximize presidential power in service of Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda, whatever that may be. This project is essentially a concerted attempt (dare I write “conspiracy”?) to consolidate Executive power in a so-called “unitary Executive”—once a fringe legal theory but now a concrete plan—to effect a Republican agenda regardless of the will of Congress or any popular consensus.

But to consider all these threats to democracy and the rule of law together is to risk the same loss of focus that drowned New Orleans, and that may make Trump president again. We have to focus on a single clear threat to our democracy. So I’m going to focus on a single, specific, concrete plan that Trump outlined in a recent interview.

Beginning shortly after his second inauguration, Trump pledges to use presidential power to round up and deport the vast majority of undocumented immigrants in the US. And he says he will feel authorized to use the US military to do this job, perhaps with coerced recruitment of the National Guard and local police as well.

A old law called the “Posse Comitatus Act” stands athwart this plan. It forbids the use of America’s federal military forces against civilians, as distinguished from foreign military forces or domestic rebels or terrorists. But Trump has claimed, in the interview, that undocumented migrants are not “civilians.”

The point here is not Trump’s interpretation of the law. He’s no lawyer or judge and cannot make a legal ruling, even if elected president again. The point is simple, practical cause and effect. What is likely to happen if, having made the decision to use our armed forces against helpless undocumented immigrants, Trump can clear all eleven million of them before Congress or the courts can act?

At the end of the day, neither our courts nor Congress controls our armed forces. (That’s something our first rogue President, Andrew Jackson, pointed out.) So the success of Trump’s plan, in practice, will depend on the the willingness of our military officers to follow what appear to be illegal orders.

By constitutional fiat, our President is Commander in Chief of our armed forces. But our military brass pledge loyalty to our Constitution, not to any individual or officer. Their oaths allow them to disobey orders that they find illegal or immoral. Thus much depends on how our top military officers will respond to presidential orders to round up and deport eleven million mostly peaceful and productive but undocumented immigrants.

Yet even that is only legal theory. In practice, the president has the ultimate trump card (pardon the pun!): the power, as Commander in Chief, to fire any recalcitrant military officer.

There is strong precedent for using this power. Lincoln removed several commanding generals during the Civil War, before settling on Ulysses S. Grant to lead Union forces. Harry Truman fired General Douglas McArthur for advocating the use of nuclear weapons against China after it intervened in North Korea’s side in the Korean War.

So think it through for a moment. Does Trump really believe that deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants and using our Army, Navy and Air Force to do it will make us a better nation and secure his place in history? Unlikely. Possibly his plan is a sop to his ordinary supporters, who would like to see him come through on at least one important campaign promise, besides lowering taxes for the rich and corporations.

Much more likely, in my view, this plan is a pretext for Trump to fire our top officers and appoint his own loyalists to take over our military. During his first term, he tried to co-opt the military beginning with (former) General Michael Flynn, who later got snared in a perjury charge. He tried again with General Mark Milley, who later apologized for his role in the anti-democratic disaster of using troops to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square.

If there’s any consistent line in Trump’s erratic behavior, it’s seeking ways to consolidate, enhance and exercise his personal power, free from any restraint. So I deem it likely that he would use an effort to clear the nation of all eleven million undocumented immigrants not as and end in itself, but as a means to clear the military of all opposition to his unopposed rule.

He would seek absolute power backed by the world’s mightiest military force controlled by his loyalists. And he could be confident that at least a large minority of Americans, whipped to an anti-immigrant frenzy by Fox and his own lies, would support him enthusiastically, despite the catastrophic effects on our communities, our economy (with eleven million workers gone!), and our democracy.

After that, we would be retracing Nazi Germany’s path in the 1930s. Or, if various highly-placed military officers in various regions resisted, we could find outselves in a second civil war.

This is the hurricane that threatens us, and this is why we must look to our levees. All other issues—inflation, unrestrained immigration, women’s reproductive autonomy, and our fading influence over Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza—pale in comparison.

The consequences—and likely the aim—of Trump’s Executive takeover of our military would be to nullify the people’s power to affect decisions in any of these fields. Our nation, in effect if not in word, would be governed by martial law, thus validating, for our own country, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

This outcome is just one of several plans our right wing has to consolidate power in the Executive, take effective control of the nation, and press the Republican agenda regardless of Congress, the courts, or popular sentiment. This is how democracies die.

As Adolf Hitler should have taught us all, when a man—let alone several groups of influential citizens—publishes plans to weaken and destroy democracy and take over, citizens/subjects had better believe him and them. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Fox, and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Progress, among many others, have made their aims clear.

So when time comes to vote in November, keep your eyes on the hurricane and the levees. No other issue rises to the same level of importance. Without a democracy and the rule of law, neither women nor anyone else will have peace, let alone reliably enforceable rights.

No protest will have any meaning, as protestors could be jailed or shot. With the federal bureaucracy and the Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force on his side and controlled by his lackeys, Trump will have no effective counterbalance: not an inevitably divided Congress, and certainly not the courts, which are already dominated by a Supreme Court suborned by the Federalist Society.

Either all important decisions will come from the White House, or there will be a second civil war. If no war comes, everything will be up to a “unitary executive” headed by Donald Trump, managed by a bureaucratic phalanx (dare I say “Deep State”?) of his loyalists, not experts, and inspired and perhaps led by cabals of men (nearly all men!) far more wealthy, intelligent, socially entrenched, single-minded and devious than he.

This gathering hurricane is by far the key issue in the election now only half a year away. The only sure way any individual voter can help avoid it is by voting for Joe Biden and getting others to do so, too. The survival of our democracy and the long-term fate of the Western Enlightenment in North America depend on voters, especially young ones, appreciating this dismal but simple truth.


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