Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight

As the saying goes, everything the Nazis did was legal, under German law.

Hitler began by being lawfully elected, then invited to form government and become Chancellor under the constitution, following which he suspended everyone’s civil rights, suborned parliament and made increasingly repressive laws.

Since government consists of three arms, you need to capture or neutralise all three if you want to be a proper fascist. Having taken possession of the executive arm and co-opted the legislature, the Nazis set about bringing the judiciary to heel as well. There wasn’t much resistance.

The Trumpeted States of America is following the playbook, with two key differences: the Nazis were never remotely funny, while Trump and his clown car cabinet are extremely entertaining; and Trump isn’t bothering with the pretence of following the law.

The executive government is being assiduously gutted by Trump’s vandals, and there’s less chance of Congress offering an effective check to his megalomania than there is of him choking on a cheeseburger.

The judiciary is now the focal point. Although America’s courts have been famously far more politicised than those of other Western nations, especially since Trump himself stacked the Supreme Court, they have managed to maintain a strong tradition of independence from government.

Something happens to lawyers when they’re put in black robes; call it allegiance to a higher duty, or an ego trip, but they often surprise the politicians who appointed them by interpreting the law according to principle rather than ideology (or corruption). They also often don’t, but the point is the unpredictability.

Trump is experiencing this insistent independence in real time, and he’s not loving it. His thing is governing by diktat; executive orders have been flying off his desk like vampire bats from day one, most of them unconstitutional or illegal, declaring everything from the abolition of the entire Department of Education and abandonment of Ukraine to the mandatory acquisition of plastic instead of paper straws by government agencies.

It’s very dictator-y, so much less hassle and more fun than asking Congress to pass laws (boring!). But the courts keep issuing injunctions to stop his orders being enforced, and declaring their obvious illegality to be, well, obvious.

Things are coming to a head right now, after a federal judge ordered the administration to not send several planeloads of allegedly illegal immigrants (rapists! murderers!) to El Salvador because something something civil rights habeas corpus the constitution you can’t do that, you know, the law.

And yet, the planes went, in direct and flagrant defiance of the court’s order. Trump’s already-destroyed Department of Justice has come up with various bullshit defences which even ChatGPT would be too embarrassed to pull out of its arse, and the judge is standing his ground. The government is, unquestionably, in contempt.

That judge is far from alone; many, including Republican appointees, have been standing up to the imperial will and ordering halts to the insanity. One such example is a judge who has just barred DOGE from accessing Social Security data, saying:

“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

Trump’s response has been to call for the judges getting in his and Musk’s way to be impeached – that is, removed from office. He makes the perfectly correct point that they didn’t get as many votes as he did, from which he draws the conclusion that it must be illegal for them to obstruct his manifestly mandated duty to do whatever the fuck he wants. As for Musk, look, Himmler was never elected either.

Which brings us to the rule of law. It says the law protects us all equally, and we are all equally subject to its authority. That authority is only as strong as our collective willingness to subject ourselves for the greater good. It should be no surprise that Trump has no idea why anyone would do that.

The Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, largely a pathetic enabler for the Republicans and Trump, has taken the surprising step of coming out and saying that this talk of impeaching judges is out of order and must stop. Clearly, he’s getting the vibe that the temple of justice is about to collapse around him, but it’s way too little, too late.

Things are at a fascinating pass. We’re minutes away from MAGA incels starting to literally murder judges, but the present stand-off – where Trump is making big fat noises but hasn’t stormed the courthouse yet – illustrates the one slim hope America still has of avoiding the full tyrannical experience.

Unlike his idols, Putin and Xi, or their many minor copies in less important places, Trump has not to this point followed the true path of authoritarianism to its normal end point: rule by fear, underlined by that fear’s realisation. By which I mean, killing or disappearing his opponents.

I have no idea whether he will go there. If he doesn’t, I’d back the judges to win the staring contest, in which case his mad reign won’t last long.