The Miller presidency’s goal is to make fair elections in 2026 and 2028 impossible

Here’s a gift link to Thomas Edsall’s latest piece, which as usual is a collection of comments from various academic observers of current political events, interspersed with his commentary. Rather than quote from it — there are too many insights to quote and you should just read it — I’ll summarize what Edsall and his correspondents see as the state of play:

(1) The Trump administration is desperately eager to provoke some sort of serious violent confrontation in a large American city, preferably in a blue state of course.

(2) Sending troops to occupy cities under false pretenses of urban (if you know what I mean) disorder is a strategy designed to create violence rather than prevent it.

(3) The murder of Charlie Kirk has accelerated plans that were clearly already in place to produce such violent confrontations, which would then be used as pretexts for mass authoritarian repression.

(4) A key element of all this is to use military and paramilitary force to intimidate anti-MAGA voters from going to the polls, and/or to declare some sort of state of emergency that suspends normal politics.

(5) The administration’s claims for deploying state violence against American cities are so obviously pretextual that there’s some hope that courts may continue to interfere with the unfolding of this plan in a meaningful way. That is why the administration is looking to invoking the insurrection act so as to bypass the courts altogether.

A couple of Edsall’s correspondents note that the speed and coordination of the administration’s response after Kirk’s murder indicate the extent to which this was all very much in place well before that extremely convenient event.

We are dangling from a precipice at the moment, on the brink of tumbling into an authoritarian void, although the public as a whole remains almost completely oblivious to any of this.