I was going to write one more liberal column expressing outrage about what Donald Trump has done to the White House this week, but then I thought: Why? What would be the point? The people who would agree with me would agree with me, and the people who wouldn’t wouldn’t, and the world would go on its merry way.

Of course the president’s destruction of the East Wing is beyond outrageous. It’s completely illegal and un-American—not just un-American, but anti-American: the unilateral, I-don’t-give-a-fuck desecration of a civic shrine that belonged to all the people. Democracies have appointed bodies that oversee such things. Dictators, actual and aspiring, ignore all that. Call it overreaction if you must, but I’m sure I’m hardly the only American to google “Albert Speer Germania” this week.

And yet, it’s probably only the third-most-outrageous thing Trump has done since Monday. To place, in horse-racing parlance, I’d put the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, who “invested” in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency start-up and who pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing his Binance crypto exchange to be used—get this now, and imagine a Democrat issuing a pardon to such a person—by, among other unsavories, Hamas’s military wing (not just plain old Hamas—its military wing!).

And taking the gold medal this week would be the $230 million extortion that the sitting president of the United States demanded from the Department of Justice. (I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.) A Pahlavi-level tacky ballroom can always be torn down; these other corrupt precedents cannot be undone.

No—one more outraged liberal column won’t add much this week. The more interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is not the leader who perpetrates these acts but the people who allow them and cheer them. Because this is the truly maddening question, from a small-d democratic perspective. Authoritarian-fascist demagogues come along sometimes; that’s the world. But democratic societies stop them. Why hasn’t ours stopped Trump?

We are cursed with four categories of fascism enablers. The interesting question about each group is not merely what they are doing, but why: What motivates them? Let’s go through them.

First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: “I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.

Group two consists of the cowards in the corporate and business worlds who surely know on some level that Trump is dangerous. But they stay silent, for, I think, one of two reasons, or some combination thereof. One, they fear Trumpian retribution. Two, they want their taxes cut. Have a gander at this list of donors to Trump’s razing of the East Wing for his ballroom. Talk about a basket of deplorables. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone. The Fanjul brothers, the megarich sugar magnates and welfare queens. Meta (Mark Zuckerberg). Amazon (Jeff Bezos). Palantir (Peter Thiel). Others are less blatantly offensive but obviously covering their corporate behinds. These are not by and large stupid people. On some level, they see what Trump is doing to this country. They just care more about other things.

Third come the right-wing “media” outlets that serve as Trump’s propaganda arms. Among this group again I think we see dual motivations. The first is the kind of cynicism exposed in those publicly released Fox News depositions relating to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit: Trump is good for business, so they lie for him to make money. The second motivation is more genuine: They truly despise liberals and liberalism and think we must be stopped at all costs, even when it involves lying to their audiences for a higher purpose. This mixture of the insincere and the sincere may seem incongruous, but actually the two motivations mesh together perfectly: The insincerity ensures that they defend and minimize every single thing Trump does, while the sincerity drives their coverage of Democrats and liberals, although it too is salted with plenty of cynicism, as when they try to persuade their viewers that some kooky neo-Marxist tenured postmodernist professor stands in for American liberalism.

And finally—the MAGA faithful. Here let’s distinguish between the soft Trump supporters and the true red-hots. Of the 40 or 42 percent of Americans who still say they approve of Trump’s job performance, I’m guessing that a third or so are soft supporters. Some are swing voters. Some are evangelicals for whom a Democratic vote is basically out of the question. Some remember the first Trump economy fondly. There are lots of different motivations there, but what they have in common is that they don’t necessarily consider him America’s savior.

But that other two-thirds … I hesitate to say these are bad human beings. But their rage at certain developments in the United States over these last 30-odd years is so overpowering that their civic and small-d democratic instincts have been buried by the antagonisms Trump has brought to the surface of American politics. They once knew, or they know, or a part of them knows, that no actual leader should be calling human beings “vermin.” But that empathic impulse isn’t much match for rage, which can be quite exhilarating and liberating (we all must admit that we know this feeling from personal experience).

How deep does that rage run? We don’t yet know. We have yet to see its bottom. Tearing down part of the White House may lose him a portion of the softs, as polls suggest. But it won’t bother the red-hots, who’ll leap to point out, as I saw some nincompoop do on Newsmax Thursday night, that what Trump did was really no different from Barack Obama ordering the building of his basketball court. The pardon of Zhao is in fact the liberation of the crypto industry from the shackles imposed by Sleepy Joe. The DOJ bribe is money due to Trump fair and square. And so on and so on.

I sometimes wonder what it will take for some of these folks to peel away. What if ICE agents just start shooting people? They already are; but I mean en masse. I doubt even that will change anything. Things will change when the rage stops being exhilarating, and I doubt that happens anytime soon.

It takes all four of these groups to sustain Trumpism. If Republicans in Congress were doing their constitutional job, Trump would still be Trump but the legislative branch would have established the reality of limits. The corporate class could have said to him: We too know that we thrive best under democratic norms, and we cannot tolerate you breaking those. The right-wing media could still be basically pro-Trump while adhering more closely to the principles of conservatism than to genuflection before one man. And finally, his base too could at least from time to time acknowledge error on his part and demand that he adjust course.

But none of these things are happening. And it’s hard to see them happening anytime soon. Bad as this week was, it’s not close to the bottom we’re going to hit.

If you’ve heard any Republicans talk about Saturday’s No Kings marches across the country, you know what they’re calling them. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday referred to the marches collectively as a “hate America rally.” He continued: “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists in full display.” Many others on the right have echoed these sentiments over and over, and Fox News and the other state propaganda outlets have followed suit, thus washing the brains of their viewers into accepting, once again, the exact opposite of reality.

You will probably find the occasional Marxist or antifa type or even the odd Hamas enthusiast marching somewhere tomorrow, because this is still a free country, and people aren’t asked a series of litmus-test questions before they’re allowed to join the fray. But overwhelmingly, these are marches of mainstream Americans. These are marches of teachers, lawyers, laborers, service workers, accountants, nurses, Pilates instructors, bank tellers—everyone. These are marches of people who love their country and are horrified at what President Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing to it. These are marches of patriots. The real, actual, thoughtful, quiet, modest, non-flag-hugging patriots (because history teaches us over and over that the people who need to make a show of hugging the flag are often the people who hate a country’s true ideals but need to fool folks into thinking the opposite so they can trample on those ideals and have it called patriotism).

Have a gander at this map of march locations for tomorrow. There are 16 in Wyoming—a state notoriously pulsing with Hamasniks. There are 18 in Oklahoma, that veritable hornet’s nest of antifa hooliganism. There are another 18 in my home state of West Virginia (go, Morgantown contingent!), where Marxism has obviously taken deep root among an unsuspecting populace.

Once again, these are not mere lies from Johnson et alia. I make this distinction from time to time, and it’s worth making again here. A lie is a mere denial of truth—“I never said that” or “No, Mom, that isn’t my pot, I was just holding it for Mark.” What Republicans are doing here, as they do with such regularity, is more than lie. They invert the truth. They say its exact opposite. They do so with two express intentions: to make people believe that their political foes are doing that which they themselves are trying to get away with, and to make it easier to get away with defiling the Constitution.

But don’t ask me. Let’s ask James Madison. Imagine that the chief author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could watch tomorrow’s events and observe the post-event spin. What would he think? Whose side would he be on? It’s obvious. He’d be with the marchers. And it’s not even close.

How do we know this? For a lot of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is Federalist 47, penned by Madison, which discussed the importance of separation of powers.

One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0—and indeed, from a constitutional point of view, perhaps the hallmark—is the way that, as Trump has made so many moves to concentrate power in his own hands, the other branches of government have supinely gone along with absolutely everything. Congress under Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is a joke, and as for the Supreme Court, well, it’s too tragic to be a joke.

We’ve seen many examples of both branches bending over for Trump at every turn, but arguably, the most egregious one just happened: Trump diverting other monies to pay troops during the shutdown. As TNR’s Matt Ford shows here, it’s blatantly illegal. The Constitution says clearly that Congress appropriates such funds. Trump claimed the power to do so as commander in chief, but he has no such power.

The Republican Congress has lain down and said fine. And the really pathetic thing here is that Congress could move a bill directing the payment of troops during the shutdown. It would pass easily. But that can’t happen because Johnson won’t call the House into session, because there’s a new Democrat waiting to be sworn in whose seating has potential ramifications for Trump with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Again, it all revolves around the wishes and perceived needs of Dear Leader.

As for the Supreme Court, it has given Trump practically everything he’s asked for. It has defied him on a couple of minor occasions, but even on the most notable of those, its holding was vague and pusillanimous: It ruled in early April that the administration must “facilitate” the return to the country of Kilmar Abrego García, but it also held that a district court judge had gone too far in ruling that the administration had to “effectuate” his return (he was finally returned to the United States in June). But on almost all other matters, the court has given Trump exactly what he’s wanted. And this week, during the Voting Rights Act hearings, we saw a court majority working nakedly to advance the partisan goals of one political party and its president.

Now—back to Madison.

Federalist 47 was Madison’s brief to the citizenry in favor of the concept of separation of powers—and his argument to them that powers were sufficiently separated in this new Constitution so as to guard against tyranny. Because tyranny was his great concern. In fact, he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective [emphasis mine], may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

This accumulation has not, I admit, happened in a legal sense. But in practice, this is precisely where we are today. So had Madison been among us these last nine months to observe what Trump and the Republicans and the court’s majority have done, there is no question that he would say: “Yes. This is tyranny.”

I asked Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School, author of the amazing book The Framers’ Coup about the Constitutional Convention, for his thoughts on the relevance of all this. He emailed back:

Madison and other Framers believed that “ambition would counteract ambition,” by which they meant largely that Congress would check an autocratically inclined executive. Madison and the other Framers were not anticipating the development of a party system, which actually happened quite soon after the founding. Today, all that matters to Republican members of Congress is that they support Trump, whether he is hiding something in the Epstein files, nominating incompetent people to run agencies, destroying congressionally created agencies, murdering people off the coast of Venezuela, or sending troops into American cities to oppress the people. Cowardly, toadying members of Congress are providing no check whatsoever on a tyrannical executive. It is an abandonment of their oaths, really no different from their predecessors who resigned their positions to join the Confederacy in 1860–61.

And the courts? Klarman wrote, “Lower court judges are doing a great job in trying to check that executive. But the Supreme Court—out of some combination of fear, calculated effort not to be defied, and underlying agreement with much of Trump’s agenda—has mostly been complicit in Trump’s authoritarian project.”

This is tyranny. We’re not lurching toward tyranny. It doesn’t loom on some hypothetical horizon. It’s here. Right now.

Madison was right about tyranny. But obviously he was wrong that the Constitution was strong enough to guard against executive accumulation of power. He assumed, as Klarman put it, that the other branches would do their jobs. But Patrick Henry, the noted anti-federalist, turns out to have had the more sober view. In his speech against ratification, he anticipated people such as Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Roberts:

Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?

The Americans who are marching Saturday are the Americans who embrace Madison’s principle but have sadly come to acknowledge Henry’s insight. And they—not Trump, not Johnson, not Roberts—are the people who truly love this country.

Johnson also said Wednesday that Saturday’s marchers are “the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic, and that’s what we’re here doing every single day.” As ever with these frauds, he was talking about himself. He may be dense enough not even to know it. But Saturday’s marchers know it all too well.

David Axelrod is far better known these days for occasionally wagging his finger at his fellow Democrats than for breathing partisan fire, so it caught my eye when he posted this on X Wednesday: “So far, the ICE gang has shot & killed an unarmed man & lied about the circumstances; shot a woman 5 times for obstructing their vehicle; roughed up elderly women and zip-tied small children; shot a clergyman in the face with a pepper ball; marched through downtown Chicago, masked and armed. And they’re not going after the ‘worst of the worse,’ [sic] as promised. Most of the people they’re snagging have clean records. Some are citizens. To be clear: This is NOT making Chicago safer. It’s state-sponsored mayhem; dangerous political theater calculated to provoke.”

Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I’m here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.

That’s fascism. It may be—for now—a........

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