Holding Our Collective Breath

Time to level up, exhale, and remain clear-eyed, clear-headed and determined

Image courtesy of Foreign Policy

In a year marked by chaos, violence and uncertainty, the past weeks have been particularly unnerving.

It’s easy to feel confused, perhaps even powerless, when barraged by the news of late. At times like these, when the zone truly is flooded, it’s always helpful to seek higher ground and a higher vantage.

Let’s start by acknowledging that people are understandably anxious about what they’re seeing and hearing. There’s the chaos coming from the Trump regime itself, from threats of troops in Portland to displays of federal force in Chicago, from prosecution of his political enemies to an unprecedented, in-person meeting of all the nation’s generals called for Tuesday—with no announced agenda. What’s that all about?

Political and targeted violence has dominated the news, from Charlie Kirk’s assassination to shootings at an ICE detention facility in Texas, at a dock in North Carolina, and at a Latter-day Saints church in Michigan. The latter three all happened within the last week.

To top things off, the entire federal government may shut down at midnight tomorrow without a continuing resolution to fund it. Congressional leaders are meeting today at the White House but still remain dug in and far apart. Federal workers are understandably feeling stressed about when they will get paid and whether they will still have jobs.

Deep breath moments, for sure. But if we climb up from the flood zone, there are some commonalities to what’s happening. And that can help us put things into perspective and not allow the Trump White House to paralyze us into fear and inaction.

A chaos agent’s M.O.

While most normal people try to avoid chaos and uncertainty, a narcissistic chaos agent like Trump thrives on it. When everyone else is thrown off their game, then Trump can be exactly where he wants to be: at the center of the storm, grabbing all the attention.

The tariffs are a great example of this principle in action. Trump made it seem like he holds all the cards and can control the world economy by throwing wrenches into its machinery whenever and however he feels like. This worked for a time—until our trading partners got so used to his threats and pronouncements that they stopped giving them so much weight. Then our big trading rivals like China called his bluff, causing him to back down, which he then did repeatedly.

The markets even priced this uncertainty in by presuming the TACO effect: Trump Always Chickens Out.

It’s helpful to keep this in mind for Trump’s non-economic pronouncements and threats, too. Whenever Trump says something crazy (“We’re going to war in Chicago! I’m ordering Pam Bondi to prosecute my enemies! I’m sending troops into Portland!”), we should first hit pause. Begin from the presumption that Trump is saying something to grab attention, and that he relishes how everyone jumps and scrambles to deal with whatever consequences will flow from his words.

Whether he will follow through—and if he does whether it will be effective—are different questions entirely. In the case of invading Chicago or Portland with the “full force” of the military, he backed down over Chicago and last night apparently backed down over Portland after Gov. Tina Kotek actually spoke with him and explained that what Fox News was showing him wasn’t the reality on the ground.

What we get instead are displays of force meant to demonstrate power without actually seizing it. We saw this in the MacArthur Park display in Los Angeles, on the streets of downtown Chicago yesterday, and around D.C. with the National Guard. The White House knows it has to be careful not to cross the line, however, or it could face adverse judicial rulings as in California. Indeed, even while Gov. Kotek was defusing the situation, she and the mayor of Portland filed a lawsuit on Sunday to challenge the troop deployment.

The fact is, as Pete Buttigieg noted on social media, in a post seen by over five million users, Trump is not as popular as he wants us to believe, and we are far more powerful than he wants us to think. This is particularly true in the blue states, where his ability to deploy troops is constrained by our federal system and the Posse Comitatus Act.

When Trump threatens a city within a blue state, it gives another governor and another mayor a crack at reasserting the limits of his power. Each time he does it and backs down—in Los Angeles, California; in Chicago, Illinois and now in Portland, Oregon—another pair of blue angels earns their wings. That means the important thing isn’t that Trump has threatened another city, as he will continue to do just to grab attention and freak people out. The important thing is to look at and appreciate how effectively the leadership and the citizens of that city stood up to him and helped shore up our system.

Are they gathering the generals together to declare martial law?

I want to briefly address the all-hands meeting of generals called for Tuesday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which Trump has now said he will crash. Some readers emailed with concerns about “martial law,” and I want to dispel this fear with some basic facts.

First, the President doesn’t actually have this power. At most, he can declare under the Insurrection Act that there is an active rebellion or insurrection that justifies using the military to conduct police action. That isn’t happening anywhere in the country, so any such declaration would face immediate judicial pushback.

But even under the Insurrection Act, we would endure more of a “police state” than “martial law.” For the U.S. to come under true martial law, the military would need to assume all of the activities of the civil government, including all judicial functions. It isn’t equipped to handle this on a national scale. Indeed, it is overextended already.

Also, as Gen. Mark Milley reminded the nation in a speech for the ages, our military leaders swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the President. If Trump tries to issue orders that violate the Constitution or demand fealty to him, he risks a mass military revolt. He is already facing internal opposition within the Justice Department and our intelligence services, and the last thing he wants or needs is a military that tells Trump to get lost.

The most likely thing Trump wants out of Tuesday’s gathering is a chance to be the center of attention again, forcing career officers to endure yet another campaign-style, rambling address. And for his part, Pete Hegseth likely knows that his hold on the Pentagon is slipping due to his own incompetence and inexperience. Forcing the generals to gather at huge expense and inconvenience, all to deliver a pep rally that could have been an email, will only confirm his weak leadership.

Casting about for who to blame

Americans have endured the horrors of political and targeted violence in recent days, all from disturbed white men with easy access to firearms. The Trump White House has sought not to unify the country but to capitalize on the violence by sowing division and assigning blame, often long before any real motive is known.

The left has grown suspicious in response. With FBI Director Kash Patel tweeting out unsubstantiated news about suspects and evidence, including alleged bullet casings with on-the-nose text written on them, and Donald Trump leaping to blame the “radical left” and to claim that “Christianity” is under attack, the political agenda of the White House has become painfully obvious. It’s hard to know what is true and what is propaganda in such moments.

The left has responded by trying to prove that a given shooter was one of “theirs” rather than one of “ours.” I have felt the same immediate pressure, with my first thought often being “I hope it wasn’t a Muslim/minority/trans” shooter.

I’ve been reminded rather quickly, however, that the truth doesn’t really even matter to the White House, and therefore to the far-right. They will believe whatever the propagandists tell them. And even if we prove definitively that a shooter actually was a crazed right-wing Trumper, they’ll shift to blaming something else, from the mental health of a “lone wolf” to too many video games. Then they’ll simply wait till the next mass shooting, which statistically is just around the corner, to push again with the whole “radical left” narrative.

In any case, all it ever takes is a single example for them to make their case and have their next cause. We saw this with Laken Riley’s murder at the hands of a Venezuelan migrant, which they leveraged into a wholesale immigration crackdown. We saw it with the horrific fatal railway stabbing of a Ukrainian girl, Iryna Zarutska, by a crazed Black passenger, which the right is now using to scare their base into thinking crime is out of control everywhere. The burning of a handful of Waymo cars in Los Angeles was on loop at Fox, leading people in rural red states to conclude the entire city was a burning hellscape.

The MAGA mind is more susceptible to this kind of broad brush, where the actions of one can be used to paint an entire community as criminals and culprits. On the left, we don’t do this as naturally. Indeed, we are often skeptical of efforts to draw connections or blame whole groups. If we were less so, we would want to racially profile every young white male gamer or veteran to make sure they aren’t tomorrow’s mass shooters.

That makes it hard for us to compete in the blame game. In fact, I would advise that we not spend much time and effort trying to change MAGA minds on this. No amount of counter examples will ever overcome the power of a single one on repeat.

For the sake of our own mental health, it’s better to predict and understand the likely outcome of any background investigation of a killer: If he’s white and conservative, it will be forgotten among the thousands of examples we have of such shooters; if he’s Muslim/minority/trans, we won’t hear the end of it for a long time, if ever. This will happen no matter what we assert or even prove in any single case, so it’s better just to accept this than to argue over whether any given killer was “theirs” or “ours.”

We shouldn’t fear the find out part

Most Democrats were already at the point, back in March when a government shutdown first loomed, where we would have understood and supported our leaders if they’d stood up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk and refused to be complicit in the dismantling of our federal government.

Instead, what we got was a capitulation by Senate Democrats with nothing to show for it.

That, I hope, was the low point for the Democrats. The sense at the time and for a long time to come was that we simply didn’t have leaders willing to fight and make the kinds of calls needed to exercise what little power they still had.

Six months later, we’re up against another government shutdown. But this time the Democrats appear to have learned at least one lesson: Never give in for nothing in return. In exchange for the eight or nine Democratic votes in the Senate that the GOP will need to keep the government open, Democrats now have a list of demands, some realistic and some less so.

At the top of that list are Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year. Should that happen, millions will see huge spikes in their monthly insurance costs. A lot of people will be forced to go without insurance at all. And the GOP will own that damage and face the fury of voters around it.

This possibility has swing state and swing district Republicans nervous. And that in turn means that extension of the ACA subsidies is a rare area of possible agreement. Given the appetite on both sides for an extension, Democrats shouldn’t keep the government open without at least getting this concession out of it.

Another demand that seems objectively reasonable is that the White House should have to undo its illegal rescissions of expenditures, including for things like funding for public broadcasting. After all, if the White House and the GOP can simply come back and undo things as they want later, what is the point of even negotiating the budget in good faith now?

The rescission power isn’t something Republicans would want a Democratic White House to have, were the roles reversed. And there is a highly principled and self-preservative reason for Democrats to stand firm on undoing the rescissions today as part of any deal to keep the government open.

As for the remaining asks, we also need to be realistic. There is no universe, for example, where the Republicans, who passed their budget through reconciliation, would undo a cornerstone of that: the deep cuts to Medicaid. Less still is the chance they do so in exchange for just a seven-week extension to pass the remaining appropriation bills. It’s simply too big an ask for too little in return.

We should understand that this Democratic wishlist item is based on principle, one that shows Democrats are not done fighting to get Medicaid cuts restored. But if they don’t get that in these negotiations (and they won’t), we shouldn’t act like they failed. In the end, it is pretty plainly a term they can offer up as a concession during negotiations. We should go into this knowing we’ve already lost the Medicaid funding fight and aren’t going to suddenly win it over the next two days.

This raises a larger question, however. At some point, MAGA voters need to understand that there are real economic consequences for supporting the GOP. Democrats have put themselves in the unenviable position of coming to the rescue of white working class and rural families time and again, all to try to blunt the pain of terrible GOP policies. At some point though, hard as it may be to witness, we may need to let MAGA voters face the “find out” part.

Indeed, we often say “elections have consequences,” then spend the next two years trying to limit those consequences for the very voters who chose them. Yet, sadly, many of these same voters only seem to awaken to the danger of the GOP’s policies when their own livelihoods are on the line, as the Medicaid cuts with their expected closures of rural hospitals will likely prove.

The GOP has rather cynically sought to put off the pain of Medicaid cuts until after next year’s midterms. But the reality of the cutbacks will hit long before then as hospitals adjust to and plan for the loss in funding.

For our own sanity, and to win elections going forward, we need to begin to let the chips fall where they may with the Trump economy and GOP budget. If that means a government shutdown and even mass firings of federal workers (which is happening anyway even without a shutdown), then we need to make peace with that. Even if it means acceleration of Project 2025, it’s time for the Christian Nationalists to show their true agenda more plainly for the electorate to see and experience. If we are going to face it all anyway, we might as well force their hand now before even more of our remaining guardrails are gone.

When we screw our courage to the sticking point, and we hold fast to the truth that the only way out is through, we will also discover what we have sorely lacked till now: a true fighting spirit. We need deep clarity of purpose in our resistance to the fascist takeover. We cannot blink, we cannot falter, we cannot capitulate.

So that breath you’ve been holding under this barrage of scary headlines? Push it all out, and inhale a deep new one. Then it’s steady as we forge ahead, through the swirl and the storm.