Dems, Don't Fund the Destruction of US Democracy

It seemed kind of crazy when the hit movie Civil War came out in spring 2024 and the main storyline hinged on a war against the rest of the United States waged by the combined forces of Texas and California, our two most unalike big states in real life. But it must have ignited one of the dim bulbs in the Donald Trump White House.

On Sunday, the 47th president and his raging id, Stephen Miller—blocked by federal judges and political reality from some of their schemes for flooding cities run by their Democratic enemies with armed soldiers—had a new brainstorm for igniting a constitutional crisis.

First, Trump announced on his favorite platform of Truth Social that—rebuffed by Oregon’s governor and a judge that he’d appointed in his first term—he had a new plan for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of Portland. (This is the city Trump thinks is “on fire” after watching b-roll footage of 2020 unrest on Fox News.)

The administration eventually said it would federalize and call up 200 soldiers from the California National Guard—against the will of that state’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, just as the Trump regime had done earlier this year on the streets of Los Angeles. And it didn’t stop there.

How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?

By Sunday night, the very pro-Trump governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sought to cement the bizarre alliance between California and the Lone Star State by announcing that, under a presidential order, he was calling up 400 National Guard troops who could also be sent to Portland, or to Chicago, or anywhere else that the White House seeks to invade.

For all the nattering nabobs in the media who still think this is about “fighting crime,” Trump flew to Norfolk, Virginia, and— before a cheering throng of sailors celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary—all but declared war on half of the country he was elected to serve. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he declared.

OK, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon more times than an ancient Roman ferry, but this really feels like The Big One in terms of a constitutional crisis. The idea of soldiers from a cornerstone of the old Confederacy rolling up I-55 in BearCat armored personnel carriers to occupy the streets of a northern city really did feel like another Civil War, and this time I’m not talking about the movie.

The president—defying both laws and democratic norms meant to prevent the deployment of American troops on US soil—is sending armed troops to occupy key intersections in the cities that voted heavily for the opposing party, and that’s just the half of it.

As the calendar flipped from summer to fall, the Trump regime has amped up the authoritarianism on every front—a flash-bang dead-of-night warrantless raid on an entire Chicago apartment building, obliterating boats and their passengers off the coast of Venezuela in a campaign that the normally staid New York Bar Association just called “murder,” and pressing prosecutors to indict Trump’s political enemies.

Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, in the crosshairs with masked federal agents already swarming his state’s largest city, has risen to the occasion—at least verbally.

“There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation,” Pritzker wrote on Bluesky Sunday night, adding: “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”

While Democrats have more often been finding the right words about America’s rising fascism, action has proved more complicated. Pritzker himself came in for criticism over the role of Illinois State Police at the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago, where protesters believed the troopers were curbing their protest rights. Time and time again, a repressive US policing culture seems to trump the ability of even progressive Democrats to rein it in.

American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined.

Even worse, the Democrats have powerful leverage that they’re not using. Some 1,000 miles east of the democracy crisis in Chicago, the 47 Democratic senators—thanks to the filibuster—have been using their power to keep much of the federal government shut down, after missing last week’s deadline for legislation to keep paying the bills.

Led by a duo of milquetoast New Yorkers, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats and their omnipresent pollsters have said they won’t vote to reopen the government unless Trump and the GOP agree to undo devastating cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

The Dems are right to fight this battle—millions of working-class people face devastating premium hikes, or will lose coverage altogether if nothing is done—and yet it also fails to reflect the gravity of the current threat to the American way of life. How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?

We heard last week from one prominent Democrat who gets it. “Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy,“ Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told the New Republic last week. ”I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down—to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us."

A steadily rising number of everyday voters also see the rise of authoritarianism as intolerable. One of the more telling developments of 2025 has been watching regular citizens increasingly defy the government—members of grand juries or trial juries rejecting the Justice Department’s extreme prosecutions, for example—while pampered elites curry favor with the regime. The budget shutdown crisis in Washington is an opportunity for top Democrats to flip the script.

It’s time for the opposition party to take a bold, principled risk. Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities. They need to declare: No troops, now or in the future, or no deal.

American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined. Democratic leaders need to rally their own “troops”—millions of angry and anxious citizens—to take to the streets in support of the fight to save democracy and to accept the sacrifices that come with making a moral stand against autocracy. They also need to gamble that courage will enhance their political careers, even if that risks losing reelection to a job that their past cowardice has made nearly worthless anyway.

The choice is clear. We can resist Trump’s tyranny at some unknown future date—when his tin soldiers are stationed across the country, when the media has been totally neutered and other institutions like our universities have been humiliated and crushed, and when the odds for success will be extremely difficult. Or we can stage that battle now, mustering all the liberty we have left. Democrats simply cannot pass a budget that pays for the destruction of the American Experiment.