Patrick Lawrence: Trump’s ‘End of History’ Moment

Recent executive orders and presidential memorandums go beyond even the Patriot Act in facilitating  nebulous and overreaching state surveillance. 

By Patrick Lawrence 
ScheerPost 
CN at 30

The Trumpster is not yet finished his first year back in the White House, and I cannot imagine how the crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants with whom he has surrounded himself. 

And it occurs to me lately that neither I nor anyone else is supposed to imagine any kind of future — good, bad, in the middle — beyond Jan. 20, 2029, when President Trump will no longer be president. The future will not be the point by then. By then we are supposed to be living in an imaginary past that we won’t have to imagine because the imaginary past will be the actual present. 

It is not quite three months since Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa,” the more or less fictitious “organization” of antifascists, a “domestic terrorist organization.” In the Trump White House’s rendering, antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.”

To this end, it organizes and executes vast campaigns of violence. It coordinates all this across the country. It recruits and radicalizes young people, “then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”

I didn’t take the executive order containing this kind of language the least bit seriously when it was issued Sept. 22. Antifa, so far as I understand it, does not actually exist. It is a state of mind, or it signifies a shared set of political sentiments vaguely in the direction of traditional anarchism — a hyper-individualistic, ultra-libertarianism when translated into the American context. 

Trump’s executive order describing antifa as an organized terrorist organization reminded me of nothing so much as those flatfooted fogies back in the Cold War years who, nostalgic for a simpler time but understanding nothing, went on about “outside agitators” as the root of America’s ills. 

I was wrong in one respect, maybe more, about Trump and his adjutants and what they have in mind. These people are not flatfooted. They know exactly what they are doing and they are moving swiftly to get it done.

It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.   

Three days after the antifa executive order, the White House made public a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM–7, as this document is known, is formally addressed to Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary. 

This thing picks up where the one-page executive order leaves off. It cites various assassinations and attempted assassinations — Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive, the two attempts on Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign — and fair enough, although casting political violence as terrorist violence is a sleight-of-hand too far. It is when NSPM–7 invokes recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” that you sense the trouble to come. 

From the first of the document’s five sections:

“This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. 

A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.”

What is required, it turns out, is an institutionalized surveillance operation that goes considerably beyond the Patriot Act.

“This guidance,” Section 2 reads, “shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.” 

And then NSPM–7 gets down to what the Trump regime is truly after:

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

I am not letting the liberal wing of the ruling Late–Imperial War Party, commonly known as the Democrats, off the hook in this domestic terrorism business. Joe Biden banged on about this whenever it was politically expedient the whole of his discombobulated term, and we now witness the consequences of all his loose, opportunistic talk. In effect, Biden prefaced what the Trump regime is step-by-step codifying into law.

One of the more pernicious of the many objectionable features of NSPM–7 merits immediate note. This is the vagueness of its language. Whenever I see official documents of this kind my mind goes back to imperial China, whose mandarins were highly legalistic but kept written law purposely ambiguous so as to maximize the prerogatives of imperial power. A surfeit of laws, all of them to be interpreted in whatever way suited the throne.

As of last weekend we know how Pam Bondi, Trump’s patently fascistic AG, intends to interpret NSPM–7. This is by way of a Justice Department memorandum Ken Klippenstein, the exemplary investigative journalist, reported on (but did not actually publish in full) on Saturday, Dec. 6. This is Klippenstein’s exclusive. Here is the top of the piece he published in his Substack newsletter under the headline, “FBI Making List of American ‘Extremists,’ Leaked Memo Reveals:” 

“Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to ‘compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism’… The target is those expressing ‘opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,’ as well as ‘anti–Americanism,’ ‘anti-capitalism,’ and ‘anti–Christianity.’ ”

By way of defining all these domestic terrorism threats, Klippenstein reports, the DoJ memorandum cites “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” As to enforcement, the memorandum authorizes the F.B.I. to open a hotline by means of which ordinary Americans can report on other ordinary Americans, along with “a cash reward system” to go along with it.

The bureau is also to develop a legion of informants (“cooperators”); state and local governments are to be funded to develop their own programs in conformity with the DoJ’s directives. What the memorandum calls Joint Terrorism Task Forces are to “map the full network of culpable actors.”

This is more than what we now call an all-of-government surveillance and enforcement program that open-and-shut outlaws a variety of Constitutional rights. It is an all-of-society operation that prompts comparisons with regimes in history I never would have imagined summoning to mind in anything like this context.

“Extremist viewpoints” are to be criminalized? I am an outlaw if I am critical of orthodox Christianity, if I am “hostile” to the nuclear family, to traditional morality and so on? Just how close to thought control does the Trump regime plan to sail?  

As I was reading Klippenstein’s excellent work, another report came across that bears mentioning here. On Tuesday, Dec. 9, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a case brought by Republican political advocacy groups who want the court to remove some of the last remaining limits on campaign finance.

In an excellent report on the opening day’s arguments, CBS News quoted Sonia Sotomayor, who is among the court’s liberal minority, thusly: “Once we take off this coordinated expenditure limit, then what’s left? What’s left is nothing, no control whatsoever.”

No control whatsoever — unbound by the rule of law, the Constitution, legislative oversight. Eleven months into Trump’s second term, this emerges as the agenda among those residing at Trump’s distant end of the garden.

At the Supreme Court — this case is likely to be decided next spring — the topic is the further sequestration of power by way of the more or less complete monetization and corporatization of the political process. At a time the political elites are ever less accountable to electorates, the court is weighing not to correct this but, as Sotomayor put it during the opening arguments, “to make matters worse.” 

Read NSPM–7 and the Klippenstein reportage again and consider what is on the minds of those in the Trump White House and Bondi’s Justice Department. “Anti–Americanism,” “open borders,” “anti-capitalism,” “radical gender ideology” and so on. These people have set themselves to returning America to a rigidly ideological, white, Christian, pre-feminist state that never existed in history but lives in their imaginations. 

As my colleague Cara Marianna reflected while I wrote this commentary, “The liberals had their ‘end-of-history’ thesis at the Cold War’s end. This is the Republicans’ ‘end-of-history’ moment. They intend to destroy any vision of the future that departs from theirs. There can be no version of reality that departs from the Trump version.”

I am habitually shy of terms such as “totalitarian” and “fascistic,” hyperbole never serving the cause of understanding. But I have described Pam Bondi with the latter term, as readers will have noticed. We are drifting swiftly in this direction, these latest documents from the Trump regime prompt me to say — lawlessness in the name of the law.   

Stephen Holmes, a professor at New York University and an energetic commentator on current affairs, published an interesting piece in Project Syndicate on Dec. 1 under the headline, “MAGA’s Death Wish.” Holmes makes his point with admirable clarity:

“Because the future MAGA wants cannot be attained, the movement has no constructive program. It cannot build anything, because nothing it builds would satisfy it. All it can do is destroy…. The rage that animates MAGA is the rage of impossibility — the fury that comes from wanting something that cannot be had…. This is what happens when a political movement promises to restore an irrecoverable past. Unable to deliver, it can only demolish.”

I have never understood where all this end-of-history fantasizing comes from. Francis Fukuyama, the sophomoric charlatan who made the thought popular a year into the awful triumphalism of the first post–Cold War decade, was a middling bureaucrat at the State Department when he wrote The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992). Maybe this explains it: America as the final word, the best of all possible worlds, is an ideological subset of the exceptionalist consciousness. 

However this may be, it is going to wear very ridiculously, not to say dangerously, as Trump and his lumpen lieutenants try it on. History will thankfully go on once we see the end of them and the work of repairing the mess they are making begins. 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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This article is from ScheerPost.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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