In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies. Today, they are in a position to take Katrina national.
What makes this constellation of disaster capitalists all the more worrying is the fact that, though Trump has been able to do a great deal of damage in his first few months in office, he has been repeatedly stymied by the courts and by Congress. And many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be attempted at all. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, for instance, has devoted her life to pushing for a privatized education system like the one in New Orleans after Katrina. Many of the figures who surround Trump are passionate about dismantling Social Security. Several are equally fervent in their distaste for a free press, unions, and political protests. Trump himself has mused publicly about bringing in “the feds” to deal with crime in cities like Chicago, and on the campaign trail he pledged to block all Muslims from entering the US, not just the ones from the countries on his various lists. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been highly critical of police department “consent decrees,” an important measure that allows the Justice Department and federal courts to intervene in local and state police forces if they identify a pattern of abuse—for example, repeated shootings of unarmed Black people. Sessions claims these accountability mechanisms “can reduce morale for the police officers,” impairing their ability to fight crime (a claim unsupported by the data).
The wealthiest funders of Trump’s campaign and of the Far Right more broadly—the multibillionaire Koch Brothers and the Mercer family—have their sights set on eliminating the remaining restrictions on money in politics, while doing away with those laws that require transparency in how such private money is spent. Under the guise of battling a manufactured “voting fraud” crisis, they are also backing groups that have been pushing measures to make it even harder for low-income people and minorities to vote, such as rules requiring photo ID to cast a ballot (some form of these initiatives had already been enacted in at least thirty-two states by the time Trump was elected). If these twin goals are fully realized, progressive challengers will be so outspent by their Republican rivals, and will have so much trouble getting their supporters into voting booths, that the corporate coup Trump represents could well become permanent.
Realizing the full breadth of this antidemocratic vision is not achievable in the current circumstances. Without a crisis, the courts would keep getting in the way, as would several state governments controlled by Democrats, and on some of Trump’s more sadistic dreams—like bringing back torture—even Congress might stand up to him.
But the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. Which is why author and journalist Peter Maass, writing in the Intercept, described the Trump White House as “a pistol cocked to go off at the first touch”—or rather, the first crisis. As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly antidemocratic ideas.
So the questions we need to focus on are these: What disaster, or series of disasters, could play the enabling role? And what tasks on the toxic to-do list are most likely to rear their heads at these first opportunities?
It’s high time for some disaster preparedness.
States of Emergency, States of Exception
During the campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. In Trump’s first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. And the response was immediate. In major cities across the United States, thousands upon thousands of people left their homes and flooded to the airports, demanding that the ban be revoked and that the travelers being detained be released. Taxi drivers in New York refused to take fares to or from JFK airport, local politicians and lawyers showed up in droves to help the people under detention, and a federal court judge finally intervened to block the ban. When Trump slightly modified his executive order and reissued it, another judge got in his way.
The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. But we can’t forget that a terrorist attack in the United States would provide the administration with a pretext to try to override much of this kind of pushback. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports a threat to “national security,” and then using that cover to go after protest organizers—with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment. Many of us well remember the “with us or with the terrorists” atmosphere that descended after September 11—but we don’t need to go back that far to see how these dynamics work.
In the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be “completely unacceptable.” And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms “to ask them to work with us” on providing backdoor access to these platforms.