What can history teach us? Where were the off-ramps that our great-grandparents should have taken – and that we still could?
This is like the burning of the Reichstag, I remember seeing people ominously declare on Twitter, back when it was Twitter, back on January 6, 2021, as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn an election.
But those rioters didn’t burn down the building, unlike the German government’s Reichstag, which was nearly destroyed by arson shortly after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, an event that he exploited to lock in Nazi rule.
So instead of January 6 ushering in the American equivalent of the Malicious Practices Act and the Enabling Act, it ushered in Joe Biden. The presidential election was certified, and the republic held.
Besides, as I told myself then in an act of hopeful self-reassurance, would a truly history-altering incident of domestic terrorism look so … tacky?
Geniuses these fellas were not: the attempted insurrection was carried out by, for example, a “QAnon shaman” who wore a pseudo-Viking helmet and face paint, as if he’d got lost on his way to a Big Ten game, and a dude cheerfully nodding to the camera as he stole House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.
But then four years passed, President Donald Trump came back, and so we had to restart the timeline.
The convicted Capitol stormers have been rebranded as heroes, and on Monday night the President ordered 2000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to California.
Their ostensible job was to control protests related to ICE raids – protests that the Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom, had said were under control.
These troops were added to the 2000 that Trump had already deployed just a few days before. None of these service members, according to Newsom, had been requested by the state.
It was the first time since the 1960s that a President had federalised the National Guard without a governor’s consent.
We might point out that when it happened back then, it was to protect Americans’ right to protest, rather than to quash it.
I hope that the troops sent to safeguard Martin Luther King jnr’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, felt immensely proud of the service they’d pledged to their country.
I wonder if the ones sent to California last weekend, allegedly “wildly underprepared”, without food, water or accommodations, and forced to sleep in what appeared in one photo to be a loading dock – arriving to police their fellow countrymen for protesting the raids ripping apart families – ever wished they’d just volunteered for a local food pantry.
Was this the Reichstag moment, then? The sitting President makes a false flag out of California’s real strife and uses it as an excuse to put boots on the ground and effectively eliminate the ability to protest?
“We’ll have to see what happens next,” I told a chatty stranger at the neighbourhood coffee shop, trying to explain what I was writing about. “Is this just about making an example of California? Or is the National Guard going to be deployed for every protest now?”
Then the coffee shop buddy asked me what year the Reichstag burning took place, and I said 1933, and then she said, so does this mean we’re in 1933? And I said … no?
No, I don’t think we’re there. Maybe it’s in three years? Maybe we already passed it? Maybe it’s never?
The trouble with trying to compare anything to the timeline of World War II is that you really don’t ever want to compare anything to the timeline of World War II.
The tragedies then were both unfathomable and specific, unique to a time and place.
Trying to line them up with where we are now only gets you labelled as either suffering from Trump derangement syndrome or as being dismissive of human atrocities the scale of which the US has not, in the 20th or 21st centuries, come close to approaching. Thankfully.
And the other reason I didn’t know how to answer this is that Dr Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, had embedded with ICE.
As reported by CNN, America’s most famous television psychologist was at LA’s ICE headquarters on Friday local time and had “exclusive” sit-down interview time scheduled with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan.
I haven’t seen that interview yet, but I’m sure that when I do it will melt part of my brain.
This wasn’t the first time McGraw has embedded with ICE (he participated on a ride-along in January), but for millions of viewers, he’s still the guy who tells you how to reignite the spark in your marriage. He started his career on Oprah.
The timeline we find ourselves in now is also unfathomable and specific, unique to our time and place, and I think a lot about how to categorise it.
Everything that happens is horrifying, and everything that happens is also a little silly.
We have sinister footage of ICE officers pulling up their masks before accosting unsuspecting immigrants who were dutifully showing up for their court dates, and we have rumours that the Department of Homeland Security was considering a reality show in which immigrants would compete for fast-tracked citizenship.
We have Trump throwing a military parade on his birthday this weekend – an armoured tank-filled extravaganza that, against the backdrop of Los Angeles, comes across as threatening more than festive.
But don’t worry: There will also be, news reports tell us, “two mules and a dog”. What would the dog be doing? I immediately wondered. Performing tricks? Jumping out of an airplane with the Navy Seals?
The mind immediately conjures up a not-implausible scenario in which a shepherd solemnly approaches the presidential box, sinks to its … knees? elbows? … and presents Melania Trump with an American flag.
We have the Secretary of Health and Human Services on Monday unceremoniously removing all 17 members of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee, ie the panel of thoroughly vetted experts who recommend which immunisations should be available to Americans.
“An unmitigated public health disaster,” the chair of the infectious-disease committee for the American Academy of Paediatrics told the New York Times.
But because everything that happens now must not only be worrying but also bizarre: The anti-vaccine secretary in question is Robert F. Kennedy jnr, the black sheep of America’s most famous political dynasty, and his influencer evangelists make social media posts about how chickpeas might kill you.
There’s a surrealness to living in this timeline, which feels particularly American.
Our racist past, our manifest destiny, our huddled masses yearning to be free, Norman Rockwell – all of it has been placed in a blender with YouTube podcasts, AI slop, the manosphere, The Real Housewives, ancient Rome and ancient reruns of Cops, and this is the aesthetic through which we are projecting and processing how to make America great.
It’s ICE raids + Dr. Phil, it’s vaccine scepticism + fresh-squeezed MAHA influencers, it’s insurrection + Bass Pro tourists cavorting through the hallowed halls of Congress threatening to hang then-Vice-President Mike Pence.
It’s a joke, but it’s not, but it could be, but just when you think it is, ICE might barge into the restaurant and deport your uncle.
Shortly after I started this essay, Derek Guy, a smart, sartorial critic known as the Menswear Guy on X, revealed online that he is undocumented.
His family emigrated from Vietnam when he was an infant. His post was emotional and honest. His immigration status, which he’d had no control over, “has made every interaction with the law much scarier”, he wrote.
“It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud.”
Another X user took the opportunity to tag JD Vance, joking that Vance could “do the funniest thing ever”, which presumably meant, deport him.
And Vance, who is the sitting Vice-President of the United States, responded to that user by posting a meme of Jack Nicholson smiling and nodding.
And then the official account of the Department of Homeland Security responded by posting a GIF from the movie Spy Kids, in which the boy spy kid uses a techy device to zoom in on his target.
Meaning, I guess, that they will hunt down Guy? Or that they want him to know they could? Ha ha who knows?
On Tuesday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said he anticipated military personnel would remain in LA – where they had not been requested, where they were not wanted – for 60 days.
Newsom is launching lawsuits to get them out of there. There’s always the possibility that they leave California only to pop up in New York, Georgia, Virginia, Illinois. There’s always the possibility that they never leave at all.
It’s not 1933. I don’t know when we are. It’s all so stupid. I think we might die.
