What's in a Norm?

The Trump administration doesn't care about strongly worded letters. Are Democrats ever going to figure it out?

Political norms are over. The sooner we all get on the same page about that, the better, but the people who most urgently need to realize this are currently sending you requests for $20 so they can keep ‘fighting’ Donald Trump after the midterms.

I do not mean ‘political norms’ like civility during the State of the Union. I mean political norms like ‘we at least pretend to follow the law here.’ We’re not doing that anymore here in these United States. Realize it and match the energy, because it’s only going to get harder.¹

One might center norms like civility when considering the state of our politics because so many of our elected ‘opposition’ leaders remain in Strongly Worded Letter territory. It’s impossible to say with certainty why people who spent their whole lives fighting to gain access to power now refuse to wield it to do anything beyond having aides overuse the thesaurus tool in Microsoft Word as they write press releases.² I suspect they’re scared, mostly, and you have to be brave to even allow yourself to see what’s happening, let alone address it.

These kinds of structural, this-is-how-we-do-things norms feel safe to argue about because they allow people to cling to a notion of business as usual. As ICE conducts murderous operations throughout the country, plenty of people wish to condemn the officers’ lack of training, as if there is an acceptable way for the Gestapo to hunt down Latine people in the streets. The debate about abducting Nicolas Maduro becomes about whether Trump had authority to do so (obviously he didn’t), and not about whether the United States should regress from neocolonial foreign policy to outright colonial foreign policy. When we still pretend the laws apply, there is a Step Zero that has to be argued before getting to the real argument: leaders focus on the question of whether the fascist act was legal before bothering to focus the question of how we should respond to fascistic acts. Donald Trump is well aware that as he floods the zone, the Democrats are unable to make it past Step Zero.

I wanted to make the center a little Sisyphus pushing a rock that was the Democrats’ logo up a hill but this has already taken way too long.

Not only is it a fully Sisyphean task to argue the legality of Trump’s actions one-by-one, the strategy fails to convince anyone of the opposition’s competence or of the moment’s urgency. Our legal system is intentionally complex, constructed in large part to justify the pay scales at law firms and make it impossible for the working class to access any semblance of justice through the courts. Americans have little insight into or faith in the legal system as an institutional check on power. They are now watching in real time as that lack of faith is proven correct; it is ultimately counter-productive to institutional trust to put forth, over and over, arguments that the Trump administration is operating outside the bounds of the law and then have exactly zero pathways to hold him accountable for doing so.

Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit, first published in 2020, describes one of the great failures of the Democratic Party’s determination to miss the forest for the trees and call it expertise (emphasis mine):

What passes for political argument these days consists either of narrow, managerial, technocratic talk, which inspires no one; or else shouting matches, in which partisans talk past one another, without really listening. Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view—by administrative agencies (often captured by the industries they regulate), by central banks and bond markets, by corporate lobbyists whose campaign contributions buy influence with public officials.

These backroom policy decisions, inaccessible to the public for a very long time, now seem to generally be made by three white nationalists in a trench coat, at least one of whom works at Chevron. Democrats are debating the legality of the decisions made by our trench coat friends as opposed to taking high-stakes, necessary action to confront the morality of these actions at least in part because they, too, kept voters out of any real discourse, and also they have some friends that work at Chevron—don’t worry, though, their Chevron friends aren’t white nationalists!³ Even as they debate the legality, they do so toothlessly, but before we address that, we need to talk a bit more about complicity.

It’s tempting to claim that this tendency to make the conversation about doing things ‘the right way’ regardless of whether they are the right things is new, because it’s tempting to view all of Trump 2.0 as uncharted territory. It isn’t. It is a natural progression, because fascism does not come overnight. Anyone who understands what’s happening⁴ knows political norms have been over for quite some time. As alluded to above, there’s a foundational element of representative democracy that no one in power seems to care about at all anymore: aligning policy with popular opinion. Our government does not care what you want. Only one-third of the American public approves of military action in Venezuela? Who gives a shit! What are you gonna do about it? Lest we fall into liberal tendencies to decry this as a new phenomenon, let’s jump back two years to 2024, when 75% of Democratic voters disapproved of Israeli military policy in Gaza and consistently told to shove it, or two months, to Kathy Hochul meeting cries of “tax the rich” with “I’m the type of person — the more you push me, the more I’m not going to do what you want.” Exactly the attitude one should expect from elected officials in a representative democracy.

Although many Democrats and Republicans alike have stopped pretending to care about the electorate and their bothersome values and opinions, the Trump administration is far more likely to abandon the structural, Step Zero norms of how one ‘must’ do things, which is why they’re actually getting things done. Donald Trump has realized that the Overton window⁵ is bullshit, and he can just walk through the door. All you have to do is ignore procedure.

A recent NYTimes news alert reads: Days after toppling the leader of Venezuela, President Trump’s comments about Greenland, Colombia and Cuba offer hints about what could be next. As this came to my phone, I experienced what I must assume was a form of synesthesia, where my entire mind, body, and soul briefly became nothing more than a physical representation of the sentence what the fuck are we even talking about. Our elected officials and legacy media are committed to getting bogged down in procedural arguments over and over. They do this to ignore a scary truth: if we want to avoid a large war in the Americas and additional mass disappearances of people based on race (and surely soon gender identity and sexuality and speech and any other panoply of disfavored characteristics),⁶ we must shut the country down, and soon. But simultaneously, they tacitly acknowledge the reality that Trump does not give a shit about any of these arguments, because if he did, there would be no hints about what’s coming for Colombia, because he wouldn’t be able to do these things, because he isn’t fucking allowed.

Any model or concept of political acceptability only constrains political action to the extent there are political consequences for supposedly unacceptable behavior. Accepting the premise that the United States will have real elections in the coming years and that the American electorate will reject Trumpism, the President and his white nationalists in a trench coat remain in office for three years with a stacked Supreme Court and an opposition party whose leadership is currently Googling ‘synonym for unprecedented’ to make sure their statements about a civil law enforcement agency gunning people down in the streets stay punchy. Even to the extent we care about these horrific things being done-the-right-way, if you point out over and over again that they are not being done-the-right-way and the people doing them respond with deepfake videos of you in a sombrero, when do you escalate?

Every Democratic politician in the fucking country should have been demanding entry to Delaney Hall following LaMonica McIver’s arrest. They should have been at vigils for Silverio Villegas Gonzales and they should be en route to Minneapolis right now. They should be calling for mass economic boycotts of companies working with ICE or the Department of War. They should be camped outside of ICE facilities and tearing down the fucking fences if they aren’t let inside. Frankly, we all should be, but it’s important to remember these people spent their whole lives working to become the decision-makers, the leaders. For fucking what?

It is not a consequence to receive a strongly worded email or a threat about an election that you and your pals are going to do your utmost to rig or even to have tens of thousands of people march around with signs about how you have tiny hands. Maybe once upon a time it was, maybe things have been rotten for far longer than white Americans would care to admit, probably at least a little bit of both. But these things are not consequences anymore.

Structural norms and unpopularity and press releases and impact litigation will not stop the Trump administration from implementing its agenda. The only thing that can is action that is equally willing to ignore these norms. Right now, this could still look like true, major economic boycotts of companies collaborating with ICE and the Trump administration. It could look like a blue-state politician actually refusing to cooperate with ICE, ordering police departments to stand down, promising protestors will not be arrested or charged at the state level for stepping up to defend their neighbors. But as the Trump administration gets ever more brazen and violent, what is an ‘equally’ disruptive action will need to keep pace, or the actions will continue to fail to matter. It’s imperative that we act now.

This essay was originally conceived as an argument that U.S. aggression in Venezuela is less similar to the Iraq War⁷ than it is to Hitler’s early stage land grabs in Europe, a frame that ultimately felt insufficient.⁸ But I must share one particularly on-the-nose quote from the Fuhrer, speaking about his record:

My foreign policy had identical aims. My program was to abolish the treaty of Versailles. It is futile nonsense for the rest of the world to pretend today that I did not reveal this program until 1933 or 1935 or 1937. Instead of listening to the foolish chatter of emigres, these gentlemen would have been wiser to read what I have written thousands of times.

The talking heads who fear and deplore violence—by which they mean violence that might reach talking heads, as if violence is not already here, has not already been here—would be well served to realize that the only way to avoid it is to stop talking about legality and start normalizing the idea that everyday Americans could, and must, shut this shit down. For many people, it’s already too late. Everyone else is running out of time, too.

Act like it.

1. Back in February 2025, I felt very silly writing a Substack about how I thought the government was preparing to round up vulnerable groups and I must say I’m feeling much less silly about it now and continue to fucking hate being right! I wish I had put in that Substack that I thought people should also look into how to buy firearms in their states but I wimped out. Not doing so again!

2. Yes, this specific clause is about Hakeem Jeffries. Don’t want you to spend time wondering so I’m addressing it forthwith.

3. In fact, the Democrats feel really mad about the fact that there are white nationalists there at all, but it would be super rude to talk about it at work. Also, the Democrats at Chevron write really big checks (nevermind that they mostly write them to Republicans, there are GOOD billionaires) and we need big checks for 2026 and 2028, when we’re sure to have free and fair elections. That’s why Donald Trump is selling a Trump 2028 hat and just pulled the United States out of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, and the UN Democracy Fund.

4. This group very obviously excluding pretty much anyone with power within the Democratic Party’s leadership. YES I AM MAD AT THE DEMOCRATS. THAT IS THE PARTY I WORK WITH AND VOTE FOR AND EXPECT THINGS FROM.

5. For those unfamiliar with the Overton Window, I assume you have lived a peaceful life, free from interactions with nineteen-year-old political science majors (this is about me in 2013). It’s a model that posits certain ‘fringe’ or ‘radical’ policy ideas fall outside the realm of political acceptability and are thus unthinkable, impossible to accomplish.

6. In no way do I mean to imply there are not already mass disappearances based on race in this country, where Black Americans are sent to prisons at overwhelming rates and both parties have built out our deportation machine.

7. The Iraq War was also obviously about oil, and murderous, but there are really key differences: first, the structural norms, at least American structural norms, were followed. Congress authorized the President’s use of force in Iraq, and at least pretended to care about the UN, too. Second, lifting from Sim, the Iraq War was popular at the time. And third, lifting from HITO, there were goals articulated and shared with the American public, as opposed to being naked imperialistic/manifest destiny ambition.

8. OK, I’ll be honest, I abandoned it after asking a Gen Z friend if it was too lib-pilled and being told it sounded like ‘something Hank Green would write,’ but also I agree with the general critique that when white Americans use Third Reich comparisons all the time we ignore the deeply engrained and deeply American structures that got us here.