This is an adapted excerpt from the March 19 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The movement to resist Donald Trump’s unconstitutional power grab faces two fundamental questions: How bad are things right now? And when is it time to use every possible democratic means to slow his assault?
This is how democracies end. When independent voices of authority are purged and a pluralistic civil society is fractured.
On Tuesday, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer joined “All In.” The interview was clarifying in many ways, but one of my main takeaways is that there is a fundamental difference between how some people view this moment.
Some people think we are in a constitutional crisis — that there is a plan in place to impose a dictatorship in the United States. On Tuesday’s show, Schumer told me he was not quite ready to declare a constitutional crisis yet. Now, I truly hope Schumer is right, but it makes it very hard to imagine a leader “meeting the moment” if they don’t believe the moment is even here.
For me, Trump’s intentions are so clear. He is in the process of attempting to undo the constitutional republic. His executive branch is in the process of overtaking the legislative and judicial branches of government, Congress and the courts, so that he gets to act unilaterally.
Even within his executive purview, this president is purging anything and anyone who falls short of pledging unshakable loyalty to him and his political project. From the FBI to the Justice Department to the Federal Trade Commission, these institutions are being cleared of career officials who may favor the rule of law over Trump’s whims, and they are being replaced with loyalists.
As The New York Times reported, Trump is using the vast powers of the presidency to hobble his political opponents, including bogus investigations into Democratic fundraising platforms and threats to shut down nonprofit organizations he sees as oppositional.
But it’s not just the government or partisan entities. Trump wants to dismantle all forms of public opposition to his power grab, starting with all sources of independent authority. Any institution with credibility must either be bent to Trump’s will or destroyed.
He has repeatedly threatened independent media outlets, including this one, for coverage he deems to be insufficiently fawning. He is conducting an unprecedented attack on American higher education, including freezing $175 million in federal funding for his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. And he is seemingly openly defying the Constitution as he tries to deport a legal resident over his protected political speech.
This is how democracies end — when independent voices of authority are purged and a pluralistic civil society is fractured. It is clear as day to so many of us, including scholars of authoritarian regimes and especially folks who have lived through those regimes.
I think part of the issue, which is a legitimate concern, is how we got to this point. There is a sense among Democrats — one that is not totally wrong — that democracy is not a particularly salient political issue. Democrats spent the entire 2024 election cycle hammering their messaging about the threats to democracy and civil society, but voters were more concerned with pocketbook issues, like the cost of living. Therefore, some Democrats think democracy is a losing issue politically and that we should talk about Medicaid cuts or the effect of Trump’s trade war on the economy.
I understand the instinct to stick to these kitchen-table issues. I don’t think it is necessarily the wrong lesson to have learned from the election. But the terrain has shifted too much since November. Democrats should not be fighting the last war. While that type of resistance worked eight years ago, now is not the time for politics as usual. This is a break-glass moment.
‘This moment requires us to break norms; this moment requires us to take risks,’ Sen. Chris Murphy told Jon Stewart on Monday.
First of all, Trump is already underwater on questions about the economy. The state of the stock market is doing a pretty good job messaging pocketbook issues all on its own. But more importantly: Democrats don’t have to choose. It’s all one thing. The threat to democracy has become so much more tangible than it was when folks went to the ballot four months ago, in part because Trump’s entire mad king act is wreaking havoc in every direction.
With that in mind, a lot of Schumer’s Democratic colleagues believe it’s time to fight back harder, as Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been out there saying.
“This moment requires us to break norms; this moment requires us to take risks,” Murphy told Jon Stewart on Monday. “And I get it. A lot of my colleagues said shutting down the government, being in a government shutdown, that’s a risk; that hands power to Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But how on Earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us, right, when there’s a five-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets — not with hundreds, not with thousands or tens of thousands of people, but with hundreds of thousands of people — if we’re not willing to take risks ourselves?”
Now is the time to take political risks — before it is too late. Not to oversimplify, but the whole point of America is that you cannot have one guy in charge of everything, without checks or balances. That is literally the foundational insight upon which the country was built. No kings. Not ever. There is quite possibly nothing that is more fundamentally American.
Allison Detzel contributed.
