The Warning America Can’t Afford to Ignore

Last week, Trump and his inner circle hosted bloody, Roman Empire–styled cage fights on the White House lawn. It was a crass, coarse, and uncultured demonstration of Trumpian America.

Trump’s vision of the country, it seems, is as a place of human cockfights—a place where eye-gougers and bare-knuckle brawlers grapple in front of crowds that would torment people placed into the pillory. It is a vision of a society where a spectacle-addicted populace would be ready to laugh, gawk, and picnic as lynch mobs do their foul deeds. It is, in short, a United States where all of the very worst, most violent instincts and practices bubble up to the surface.

The UFC makeover of the White House, backed up by plentiful displays of military hardware and personnel, as part of the America-at-250 celebrations, was an embrace of brute force as a guiding principle of Americanness. “We have the muscle. We have the brawn,” Trump’s spectacle suggested. “So don’t fuck with us.”

As the blood-and-gore festivities got underway, former House majority leader and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt and former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth were writing a warning statement. The Wirth-Gephardt memo laid out their fears that the United States is facing a “rolling coup” over the coming months—and that too many Americans, distracted as they are by all of the vulgarities and tackiness of the Trump oligarchy, are sleepwalking toward a disaster.

Their memo explains how the Trump administration is corroding basic democratic protections, eviscerating the rule of law, and expanding presidential power through use of a National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memo is published in full today in The Nation. It should serve as a call to all Americans who are worried at the extreme, authoritarian direction in which Trump is taking the country.

The Wirth-Gephardt document is a sobering exploration of just how much damage can be inflicted—is already being inflicted—on the polity by a president who is willing to deploy the Justice Department, the military, ICE, and other powerful tools of the state against domestic political opponents. The retired politicians argue that a politically damaged Trump facing the possibility of a GOP electoral wipeout in the midterms is capable of declaring a national emergency and attempting to activate expansive emergency presidential powers—detailed in top secret President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADs)—that would render largely meaningless the Constitution’s guarantees of basic rights and liberties.

PEAD powers have accumulated from the Eisenhower presidency to the present day. So secret are they that even members of Congress don’t know the full scope of what a PEAD-based power grab would look like, but from what is publicly available, we do know that they arrogate to the president huge powers to curtail free speech, derail the functioning of the electoral process, and seize control over the means of communication. In other words, PEADs, which were designed in the early years of the Cold War to ensure continuity of government in the event that the country had experienced a nuclear attack, could be used against a purported network of domestic enemies not to ensure continuity of government but to ensure continuity of Donald Trump’s political power and of his financial grift operations.

We are already seeing glimpses of this strategy: Last week, more than 100 FBI investigators were deployed to Ohio to comb through the materials of and interview people affiliated with a two-decade-old voter registration group called the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. Ostensibly, the FBI was on the hunt for voter fraud; more likely, it is a fishing expedition intended to intimidate groups that register low-income voters and push back against GOP gerrymandering efforts.

Also last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the country’s most consistent and high-profile foils to Trump, announced that he and his wife were being investigated by the DoJ for unspecified crimes. This comes on the heels of numerous other politically motivated investigations of Trump’s opponents and of people such as Federal Reserve board of governors member Lisa Cook who stand in the way of Trump’s corrupt agenda.

What is so striking about the Wirth-Gephardt warning is that neither of these men built careers for themselves as alarmists. They are serious and cautious individuals—longtime DC insiders who spent years comfortably walking the halls of power. And yet in 2026, they are shouting from the rooftops that the country is facing a political crisis the likes of which it has never before confronted.

When I spoke to the former senator this past Wednesday, he was adamant that they were not overstating their case. “It’s pretty clear he [Trump] has increasingly got his back to the wall. In Iran, he’s definitely in a corner, and he’s not getting out. That is really damaging to him and his presidency. And he’s deeply unpopular even in Republican areas. This is a double whammy on him. He never wants to be known as a ‘loser’ and will do everything possible to avoid that moniker. And he also knows that if he loses it will be the jailhouse; the country will demand that with a vengeance.”

Wirth told me he believes that the trajectory is clear. After all, ICE has been turned into something of a private army for Trump; the system of prisons being built ostensibly to house immigrant detainees is now so large that it’s naïve to believe there aren’t plans afoot to also incarcerate large numbers of political detainees inside these facilities should an emergency be declared; the oversight systems designed to ensure that the military doesn’t violate the law by, for example, deploying domestically against groups Trump labels as terrorists have been deliberately taken down; and the FBI has already set a ballot-seizing precedent by going into Fulton County, Georgia, and taking hundreds of boxes of materials relating to the 2020 election. Meanwhile, NPSM-7 has shifted government resources into investigations of putative domestic enemies, many of them singled out by Trump for their opposition to his power grabs.

All of this, Wirth told me, is likely a prelude to the declaration of some sort of national emergency in the run-up to, or days following, the midterm elections. “Our rule of law and democracy is under deep threat because of Trump’s fear of losing elections,” Wirth concluded. Yet, despite these warning signs, he said, too few people in either political party are willing to connect the dots and publicly argue just how far along the road to autocracy we are now traveling.

“We’ve got to stop fiddling,” the ex-senator warned.

In four and a half months, the country will go to the polls. Trump has ensured that election-deniers now populate the key federal election integrity offices. He is continuing to pile pressure on Congress to pass the voter suppression SAVE Act. And he has given the green light to the DOJ to ramp up investigations into alleged voter fraud in California and elsewhere.

Wirth and Gephardt close out their memo with a call to action. “We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not,” they write. “But time is short and the challenge is urgent.”