Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed.
Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed.
President Donald Trump attends the FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on December 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Hector Vivas / FIFA via Getty Images)
We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election.
The current executive is slowly dismantling institutional checks on the president’s power. Their efforts to corrode and then destroy democracy as we know it are more discernible each month and year.
We call this a “rolling coup” and in the following paragraphs describe many of the actions that may each appear legal or at least arguably so but that taken together are well along the path of destroying our democracy. At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he answered. We take that admonition seriously today.
Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these events and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture. Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration, but few have taken a step back and connected the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision, or a single day.
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Consider what happened in plain sight over the past nine months. On September 25, 2025, the president signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”). Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway.
On September 30, 2025, the president stood before nearly 800 senior military commanders at Marine Base Quantico, an assembly without modern precedent, and told them that the United States was “under invasion from within.” He said, “the enemy is not in Beijing or Moscow. The enemy is domestic,” adding that US cities should serve as “training grounds” for troops to target domestic “enemies.”
NPSM-7, the sweeping federal directive issued by the White House, orders federal agencies to aggressively investigate and disrupt groups or financial networks associated with political violence and domestic terrorism. It tasked the FBI, the IRS, and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.
Soon thereafter the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from 10 federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified to a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of US citizens and nongovernmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.
Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and the president himself amplified this by posting on Truth Social, “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all……… But first, Barack Obama.”
0n May 6, 2026, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States. Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five-year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named.
The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion budget to do the targeting. Trump v. The United States provides absolute immunity for official acts; and the president’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel has preauthorized the use of domestic force. Meanwhile, the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Tom Homan, the president’s “border czar,” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of US citizens without an act of Congress.
In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific US forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly 60 strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial, or judicial review. The commander of US Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil. The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against US citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while the president has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations. And he is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports, and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter rolls and ballots.
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Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADS). These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” that is currently underway. Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.
Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens
Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.
The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.
So what is to be done? Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on US soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo. Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, nonprofits, and election workers from NPSM-7. Newsrooms must report the rolling-coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is. And each of us—in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work, and around kitchen tables—must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.
What makes this a “rolling” coup rather than a sudden one is that each part of the mechanism was built individually; each in isolation appeared to serve a defensible purpose, and no single step was dramatic enough to trigger unified institutional resistance. The public is not awake to the architecture, which is only visible when you begin to see the whole construct.
What is happening is clear. The question is whether enough of us will face the uncomfortable prospect of the destruction of our democracy. Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude, and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost, and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures found in the PEADS, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any congressional oversight.
We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes—to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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