AMENDMENT 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I’m not a lawyer, but I would be willing to argue in front of the world that those four bolded words inserted in the fourth clause of Amendment I to the Constitution of the United States represent a contract. A self-executing, written agreement between We the People and the press that states that in exchange for the freedom to investigate, report and publish their findings, We expect the free press to act in good faith, to report the truth, and to provide us with all of the information that we need as citizens of a free country to elect our leaders and to hold them accountable for their actions.
I’m here to tell you that one of the two parties has breached the contract and it ain’t us. And because of that, we are in deep, deep trouble.
How do I know this?
Behold…
I ask you to consider the following questions: in what universe in which the American news media have consistently been doing the job that we need them to do, the job that they have a civic and moral responsibility to do, would this poll exist?
In what universe in which the American news media have properly and thoroughly informed the citizens of this country of the many things that the current presidential administration has accomplished and reported on the stark contrast between that record of achievement and improvement in the civic and economic life of the nation it has resulted in and the incompetence, criminal negligence and corruption of the previous administration, would this poll exist?
In what universe in which the American news media have merely done their job instead of act as stenographers for the hatred and utter nonsense that has spewed from the Republican challenger since leaving office in disgrace a little more three years ago, would this poll exist?
See what I mean?
They have spent years normalizing insanity and providing the public with what amount to gossip columns about the goings on within the walls of the White House and Congress, speculating about what it all means for the poll numbers and the next election, instead of telling us all what the fuck was actually going on, who was responsible, and how it would affect us.
I am accusing the American news media not just of breach of contract, but of malfeasance and malpractice.
Now, given the circumstances I have just described, I’m going to ask you to come with me on a journey of the mind.
It is November 6, 2024. Although millions of votes remain to be counted, the outcome is almost certain. AP, followed by every mainstream media outlet in the country, has declared that Donald Trump has once again been elected President of the United States. George Stephanopoulos, on the anchor desk for ABC news, falls into stunned silence after announcing his network’s decision desk call and then walks off the set. In the streets of much of the south and mid-west of the country, cheers and chants of “four more years” and “USA” can be heard alongside occasional gunfire into the sky.
It is January 6, 2025. Vice President Kamala Harris, despite widespread protests and unrest throughout large sections of the country—including violent clashes with police and national guardsmen in the streets of Washington, D.C.—and multiple objections, demonstrations and sometimes heated and profane protestations lodged by Democratic members of Congress—who, thanks to the election results, are now in the minority in both chambers—on the House floor and in the well of the Senate, certifies the Electoral College vote for President and Vice President of the United States, without incident or serious disruption to the proceedings. The Washington Post editorial hails the peaceful transfer of power.
It is January 20, 2025. Donald J. Trump and his Vice President are sworn in. The National Mall is transformed into an outdoor arena hosting a Trump rally. In his two-hour long, rambling, and barely coherent inaugural address to the nation, Trump airs the entire pileup of real and imagined insults, injuries, and usurpations he claims to have suffered in the name of the people, his people, and calls for the immediate arrest of a long list of enemies, whom he accuses by name. CNN reports that it is unclear whether the arrests that Trump called for will or can be carried out.
It is January 21, 2025. Having managed to successfully delay all four of his criminal trials during the previous eighteen months, President Trump orders the Department of Justice to drop all charges and any continuing investigations into his actions surrounding the unauthorized removal of classified documents at the end of his first term as president and his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The DOJ carries out the order without fanfare or public comment.
The next day, Trump signs a series of presidential pardons for himself, his children, the members of his previous administration and anyone else suspected, accused or convicted of illegal participation in the classified documents case and in connection with the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and the attack on the capitol on January 6, 2021. The pardons were all drafted by Heritage Foundation lawyers working on Project 2025 during the transition.
It is February 27, 2025. President Trump petitions the Supreme Court of the United States for and is granted forbearance in the two state criminal prosecutions that he still faces and remain pending, one in New York and the other in Georgia. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito cites the disruption to the work of the office of the President and the executive branch of the federal government as the primary reason for granting the stay. Only the Court’s three liberal justices dissent.
It is March 15, 2025. President Trump, as the final act in his effort to reverse nearly every executive order signed by his predecessor, signs Executive Orders EO 14214 and EO 14215, federalizing the national guards of every state that he carried in the previous election and ordering their deployment within the next six months to the southern border of the United States and, if necessary, to so called “sanctuary states.” This is over the objections of the governors of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, who all promise to challenge Trump’s executive orders in court.
It is July 22, 2025. In a 6 to 3 decision, along ideological lines, the Supreme Court issues an expedited ruling in favor of the Trump administration in the matter of Newsom, et. al. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The so-called “Newsom Decision” allows the continuation of Trump’s plan to deploy red state national guardsmen to repel the “invasion” of immigrants seeking to enter the United States through its southern border and to carry out the detention and mass deportation of undocumented persons and other “undesirables,” wherever they are found.
It is September 11, 2025. On the 24th anniversary of 9-11, Trump proudly presides over the opening of the first U.S. Federal Migrant Detention Camp (MDC) located in Valverde County, Texas, between Del Rio and Laughlin Air Force Base. The hastily constructed, sprawling facility, surrounded by 20-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire and dotted with guard towers, was designed to house a maximum of twenty-thousand internees. But the head of the Customs and Border Patrol union is quoted in local papers as saying that they’ll be able to “squeeze a bunch more in there” if they “do it right.” At the ceremony, Trump unveils the plans for eleven more camps to be erected along the border and is captured by TV news cameras waving to the first ten busloads of detainees as they come through the gates and are driven to the camp’s Intake Processing Center pending deportation to their countries of origin.
While President Trump is busy dismantling “the Deep State,” the new Republican Senate Majority Leader, under pressure from far right, Trump-allied, Republican members, agrees to a vote on eliminating the filibuster. The measure passes along party lines. The only suspense coming in the final moments of the roll call when Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is wheeled by an aid to the front of the chamber to give a “thumbs up,” echoing the gesture made by the late Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona when his “thumbs down” vote effectively ended the GOP’s effort to repeal Obamacare in 2017.
Without the 60-vote threshold to stand in their way, Senate Republicans and their even more conservative counterparts in the House of Representatives enact the top three priorities of the far right’s legislative agenda: a national 15-week abortion ban, without any exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother, the establishment of fetal personhood beginning at conception, and a national ban on gender-affirming medical care at any age.
Almost immediately, the obvious contradiction in the first two statutes results in widespread confusion that no one in either the congressional leadership, the federal bureaucracy empowered to enforce the laws, or even the courts is able to clearly resolve and the situation quickly results in the end of all legal abortion services within the United States. The ban on gender-affirming healthcare, in the meantime, is later identified as a directly causal factor in massive increases in both medical-related foreign travel and teen and young adult suicide rates.
Due to intraparty squabbling and the lack of engagement or interest from the Trump administration, very little else is accomplished by the 119th Congress during the remainder of its session.
It is November 3, 2026. In a massive wave of national revulsion and rejection of what Trump and Congress have done in the past 22 months, Democrats win veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress. Up until the morning of Election Day, most polls and ABC News’ 538 election model have Republicans holding on to narrow majorities. Nobody remembers that the next day and it is never mentioned again by anybody in the news media.
It is January 4, 2027. On day one, the new House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader hold a joint press conference to announce a lengthy agenda of legislation to reverse the actions of the previous Congress, including making reproductive choice the law of the land, and to thwart the worst intentions and actions of President Trump.
The 120th Congress goes immediately to work and over the weeks to come, without wanting or waiting for “bipartisan cooperation,” the new committee chairpersons begin drafting and sending to their respective chambers bill after bill. Each one is passed and lands on Trump’s desk where, in front of a room full of photographers and network cameras, he affixes the veto stamp to them and with his black Sharpie he scrawls his name and then waves it around for all to see and capture with their cameras. The vetoed bills are promptly sent back to Congress where one after another of his vetoes are easily and cheerfully overridden and the bills become law.
Predictably, the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN.com begin to feature variations on the headline, “Are the Democrats Going Too Far Too Fast?”
It is April 11, 2027. Trump, frustrated and angry about being made to look completely powerless and a fool, decides to take his frustration and anger on the road. He schedules a series of MAGA rallies, his preferred forum, and in speech after lengthy, rambling speech he complains bitterly about his plight—always with the self-pity—and rails against the “evil and crooked Democrats” and “Leftist crazies and communists” in Congress and how they’re destroying America and will soon be coming after them, to take away their property, their guns, their children, and their rights. He also goes as far as to, in explicit terms, call for violence by his supporters to help him retake control of the government. The New York Times sanitizes this part of his speeches as “troubling rhetoric.”
It is July 3, 2027. During a weekend recess for the Independence Day holiday, a Democratic senator’s home is firebombed, injuring the senator and killing her husband. Elsewhere, a freshman Democratic congressman is shot to death along with members of his staff during a visit to his district office. Because Trump fired and replaced FBI Director Christopher Wray when he took office and the new director disbanded the bureau’s domestic antiterrorism unit, the investigations are carried out by the FBI’s respective local field offices, without the assistance or cooperation of the Capitol police and at the exclusion of local and state law enforcement.
During that same Summer, throughout the country, local and state Democratic officials are threatened, harassed, and assaulted by Trump’s MAGA followers. Multiple “lone wolf” attacks are attempted and perpetrated against Democratic members of Congress. The Speaker of the House introduces a bill authorizing a massive expansion of the United States Secret Service protection services for members of Congress and their families.
The DOJ and DHS, under the direction of Trump’s MAGA-friendly Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security, slow play the federal investigations into the attacks on congressional Democrats and refuse to commit resources to the investigation of local political violence, calling them state and local “matters.”
It is August 31, 2027. Trump promises to pardon anyone convicted of a federal crime in the attacks and the Attorney General indefinitely suspends the FBI and DOJ investigations since any prosecutions would be futile.
It is October 18, 2027. In response to the escalating violence and the inaction of the federal government, blue state governors throughout the country vastly expand and mobilize state and local law enforcement and National Guard forces. They order close surveillance of suspected violent MAGA groups and individuals and begin to set up command posts and checkpoints along their borders with red states. The most visible and vocal of these governors is Gavin Newsom of California.
Infuriated by this act of “rebellion,” Trump directs some of his federalized red state guard units to establish a presence along California’s and other blue state’s borders. Trump attempts to direct the U.S. Army and other U.S. armed forces to do the same, but is thwarted by the intervention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who remain loyal to the U.S. Constitution and who tell the President that neither they nor their troops will violate their oaths or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement except when expressly authorized by law—which means an act of Congress. A stalemate ensues between red state guard units and police forces loyal to Trump and their blue state counterparts under the command of their governors.
It is November 6, 2027. On the third anniversary of Donald Trump’s second election to be President of the United Stated, shots are fired across the divide separating the two sides along the Colorado border. No one will ever know which side fired first. The dissolution of the United States of America has begun.
Farfetched? Insane? Or plausible and perhaps even predictable? You tell me.