Is the slide into autocracy supposed to feel so humdrum?

With National Guard soldiers from several states and the District of Columbia now occupying the nation’s capital on the flimsy pretense of ridding Washington of crime, former Acting Vice Chief of the National Guard, Major Gen. Randy E. Manner observed in an interview with NPR last week, “The sad thing is this is a political prop. Our young soldiers and airmen are political props."

America’s reserves and guardsmen are capable warfighters — two decades of combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have seen to that — but there is nothing the part-time military prepares our citizen soldiers for better than the forbearance of drudgery.

In the pictures of Guardsmen stationed around national monuments, I recognize the same listless expression I wore on so many drill weekends as a Navy reservist, enduring the hurry-up-and-wait of it all. I empathize with these service members who have put their lives on hold, stepping away from their careers, rearranging schedules, and securing childcare — all for a photo op with no real coherent mission.

Maybe it’s this banality, the soldiers in the capital looking like the physical manifestation of an exasperated sigh, or maybe it’s the relentless drumbeat of overwrought rhetoric and unprecedented actions from the White House, but when I look around on the train during my commute and see people engaged in their everyday concerns, scrolling gossip news and sports gambling apps, I think, is this really how it happens? Is the slide into autocracy supposed to feel so humdrum, so bereft of cataclysm?

One can hardly blame the general public for their muted reaction. Democrats, after all, are behaving like this power grab is nothing more than a misdirection, as though unilateral martial occupation of the capital city of a purportedly liberal democracy is a distraction rather than the whole ballgame. The most powerful institutions in this country are setting an even worse example, too busy as they are cutting cynical deals with the administration to protect their own parochial interests to speak out against it. Our corporate and academic elite clearly find it more expedient to engage with the kleptocracy on its own terms than oppose it.

We should be clear-eyed about what is happening in our nation’s capital: the Trump administration is exerting its will via the power ministries of the federal government and red states. It is a dress rehearsal for things to come. The president is consolidating his power over those arms of the government with the authority to unleash violence. Indeed, in the six months since Trump took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become a fully-politicized, secret police force, that, thanks to the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is slated to become the federal government’s largest law enforcement agency with a budget larger than that of the entire Israeli military.

Such a brazen power grab would be one thing if the administration were more popular, but this government is not comporting itself as though it fears the consequences of future elections. Almost half of American adults think the aforementioned “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will hurt them and their family — it is a public relations disaster. The president’s tariff regime is even less popular. Even on the issue of immigration, once a bulwark of the president’s favorables, Trump is now polling underwater.

Beyond these specific issues, the whole ethos of the post-2024 election MAGA movement seems designed to turn off a plurality of Americans, exalting as it does in the trappings of failed states such as net-negative migration and the construction of Orwellian detention facilities.

I refuse to believe that a majority of my fellow citizens approve of this on either tone or substance, but should the administration have its way, the opposition of the American people to its policies will be immaterial.

President Trump has already successfully pressured Texas into undergoing an unprecedented, mid-decade, redistricting process to pick up five more House seats for Republicans. While California’s plan to redo its maps in a way that could give Democrats five more seats will go to voters this November, other Republican states are already making moves to follow Texas’ lead, artificially insulating GOP members of Congress from the will of the people.

Perhaps more ominously, spurred apparently by that paragon of democratic ideals, Vladimir Putin, Trump has renewed his assault on voting by mail, laying, if not a constitutionally sound, at least rhetorical groundwork to baselessly challenge the results of the midterm election (as he is wont to do).

But it is in our nation’s capital that we now see the gravest threat to the sanctity of our elections. As the midterms approach and the American people become inured to the presence of the military in our city streets, what’s to stop the president from sending troops to seize ballots he claims are somehow compromised, or to station armed security forces outside polling places in Democratic precincts to depress turnout? In may sound alarmist, even ridiculous, but, as the never-Trump Republican Tim Miller of The Bulwark has noted, in the Trump era, the ridiculous has a tendency to become the inevitable.

In October of 2016, James Parker of The Atlantic wrote of then-candidate Trump, “He makes that face, that superfrown, the glower of the autocrat. He looks like a bust that will one day be toppled in a city square.” It’s an observation that strikes me today as both prescient and perhaps overly optimistic. Stopping a determined, would-be dictator takes work. When I see the distracted, tired faces that surround me on my commute, I wonder whether we have it in us to turn the tide in the face of this exhausting, numbing, drumbeat of authoritarianism. Our republic is ailing. I only hope we awaken to the severity of the malady before it becomes terminal.

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