“It’s not your imagination folks,” the pilot announced. “We have turned around and are now flying in the opposite direction. There’s bad weather ahead.”
I looked out the window. The weather was so beautiful here, somewhere near Rochester, New York, where we would spend the next 90 minutes flying in a circle. The clouds looked like pillows and, in the distance, there was a rainbow.
“Flying in circles for 90 minutes near Rochester,” I said to myself. “Damn, that sounds like the lyrics of a country or blues song.”
I had just wanted to take a trip for the Fourth of July weekend. But here I was, stuck in the air and giving money to a budget airline that profits from cruelty.
In May, the company began contracting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transport “illegal aliens,” and presumably other “undesirables,” out of the country as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. (The airline announced this week that it would be ending its West Coast flights due to disappointing profits.) Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he signed and celebrated at the White House on the Fourth, devoted $160 billion to immigration enforcement spending, much of which will go to ICE, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government — and larger than that of most countries’ militaries. (As Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor pointed out, it nearly doubles Germany’s total defense spending in 2024.)
The agency’s border guards have been turned inward. This is a defining feature of democracies that are collapsing into authoritarianism.
Trump and ICE now have their “Alligator Alcatraz,” a de facto concentration camp in Florida, and they are building a much larger system of gulags all over the country. According to the Guardian, acting ICE director Todd Lyons wants to study how Amazon delivers and ships so many packages each day so he can apply the same techniques to human cargo. These are all signals that the administration’s deportation plan has escalated. Next, the citizenship of naturalized citizens who are deemed to be the enemy, the Other, will likely be taken away.
Did some poor soul who was being kicked out of the U.S. and deposited in a foreign country they escaped from as a child –– and which is now alien to them –– sit in this same spot?
On the plane, I shifted in my seat. Did some poor soul who was being kicked out of the U.S. and deposited in a foreign country they escaped from as a child –– and which is now alien to them –– sit in this same spot? Are they the source of the sour smell, the particular stink of fear and anxiety that has been bothering me this entire flight?
I have studied accounts from people who lived through authoritarian and fascist regimes in places like Chile, Argentina and Germany. One of the common threads is how citizens compromised their ethics and, in the end, were stained in ways both large and small. For some, this took the form of actively working with the regime against their family, friends and neighbors. They raised high the banner of Patriotism! Law and order! The Dear Leader is always right! Other denizens chose denial and willful ignorance, turning inward to a fantasyland where, somehow, everything was normal, even when it was not.
Those “Good Germans.” How could they ever do such things? We “Good Americans” will, in all probability, not be much different.
I muttered my song again: “Flying in circles for 90 minutes somewhere near Rochester.”
The American people and our democracy are not just flying in metaphorical circles. We are being intentionally spun out of control by Trump and the larger right-wing anti-democracy movement.
These last few weeks have seen Trump’s reign as a wannabe king and aspiring dictator made even more secure by a series of decisions by the right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, who have neutered the ability of the federal courts to slow down the administration’s assaults on the rule of law and democracy. In violation of decades — and centuries — of norms and precedents, Trump has expanded the use of the military and federalized National Guard as part of his mass deportation campaign. He is also claiming the right to nullify and generally ignore any law he does not agree with. According to a recent whistleblower report, Justice Department official Emil Bove, who Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, suggested telling courts that ruled against the administration “f**k you” and then “ignor[ing] their orders.”
This is part of a much larger pattern where Trump, his staffers and other mouthpieces have argued he does not have to obey the Constitution and its protections for civil and human rights. The president and his agents are becoming even louder with their threats to arrest and imprison members of the Democratic Party for “crimes.”
The administration’s attempts to end multiracial pluralistic democracy are accelerating with little effective resistance from civil society or the mass public. If anything, after last month’s “No Kings” protests, the so-called resistance appears weaker.
In a recent essay, Thom Hartmann summarizes the dire peril of our present moment, arguing that “America stands today at an extraordinarily dangerous crossroads,” including the possibility of economic calamity, fascism and a third world war. He points to Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” — more accurately called the “big ugly bill” because of the harm it will do to the American people — and how it has masqueraded as tax reform. In fact, “it was looting,” he says. But its potential ramifications are far more ominous.
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“This isn’t just bad economics,” Hartmann writes. “[I]t’s dangerous geopolitics.”
History shows that when working people lose access to opportunity and stability, populism and extremism rise. They demand scapegoats and embrace demagogues. In early 20th-century Europe, economic collapse and inequality paved the way for authoritarian regimes. The result was two world wars.
We’re now staring into the jaws of what political scientists call the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power (China) threatens a dominant one (the U.S.), and conflict becomes almost inevitable. Combine that with economic unrest, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Authoritarianism is often the result of a deep national and personal crisis of meaning in which shared norms, values and reality are in grave jeopardy. Americans are experiencing a type of spiritual, political and societal vertigo, where our fundamental beliefs and expectations about what is healthy and normal are being challenged, if not shattered altogether. For many, I believe this has created emotional turbulence, which can take the form of depression, anxiety, malaise, drug and alcohol addiction, and other negative coping mechanisms.
To ignore these dimensions of our current national emergency is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the existential danger we are facing. To wit: Public opinion polls, focus groups and other data consistently show that the vertigo we are experiencing during this Age of Trump is getting worse. A series of recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans feel the country is heading in the wrong direction. The findings from Gallup are particularly stark: Almost 70 percent of Americans are not satisfied with “the way things are going” in the country. Pride in being an American has also continued to steadily decline. Those figures are now at an historic low, with only 58 percent of respondents reporting being “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American.
According to a study released last year by the American Psychological Association, a deep concern about the country’s politics and future is dominating our collective emotional life. Both personal accounts and systematic evidence indicate that “election anxiety” and the effects of Trump’s “shock and awe” attacks on American democracy, government and society have caused an increase in anxiety, disrupted sleep and other physical, emotional and mental health maladies.
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As a whole, the mainstream media and the larger establishment political class, especially centrists and institutionalists, are uncomfortable discussing America’s democracy crisis through such frameworks as emotions, psychology, culture and health. Instead, “normal politics” and horserace coverage of each news cycles’ winners and losers continue to dominate, even as those frames have diminishing descriptive, explanatory and predictive power as America increasingly falls into a state of authoritarianism.
Elite, agenda-setting publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets routinely feature numerous stories about public policy, political personalities and how a given event or trend will impact the midterms and the electoral fortunes of Democrats, Republicans and Trump himself. By comparison, there is a paucity of reporting about how those policies impact the day-to-day emotional lives and health of actual Americans and their lived experiences.
Ultimately, Americans are quickly running out of time to stop our democracy and society from spinning out of control.
On the plane, a man seated across the aisle from me gestured for the flight attendant. He demanded a new seat because he was having a panic attack. But the plane was full.
“No reason to worry,” the pilot said in his announcement. “We have more than enough fuel.”
I kept humming my song.
However the Age of Trump may end, I fear it will show that too many Americans, along with “responsible” mainstream leaders and other elites, did not pay close enough attention when the flight crew told us about the escape doors and flotation devices. Now we are in the middle of a very dangerous storm and are wondering what to do. Because the plane is about to crash.
