When the Republic Almost Fell

What we can learn from new reporting on how the Trumpists have been contemplating despotism, the fault lines within the regime, and the prospects for a post-Trump MAGA

credit: iStock / mammuth

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The day after Donald Trump subjected the nation to his deranged birthday party spectacle of violence, the New York Times, on Monday, dropped new reporting that sheds light on how the MAGA government internally contemplated radical steps that would have potentially ended the American Republic.

The reporting focuses on two key moments: First, in late April 2025, White House deputy chief of staff and leading white nationalist ideologue Stephen Miller pushed for the president to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants in order to speed up the regime’s mass deportation efforts. Secondly, in late January, Miller and Vice-President JD Vance were urging for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy federal troops to suppress the protests against the ongoing paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis carried out by ICE and Border Patrol.

There are no earth-shattering pieces of news in the reporting – the new information generally aligns with how the regime was acting publicly. But we gain a significantly clearer and more detailed picture. And there is also value in having confirmed, with loads of testimony and written evidence, what we reasonably suspected.

(As an aside: The New York Times, with its access and unmatched resources, can produce such reporting – and that is tremendously valuable. It is also, at the same time, tremendously shameful for star reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan to *not* report this information immediately and instead sit on it until it is time to juice sales for their upcoming book, which will be published next week…)

The reporting, crucially, provides us with an opportunity to take stock and reflect on three broader questions that determine our understanding of this regime and the state of American democracy:

1) The timeline: When, exactly, did the Trumpists come closest to instituting despotism – and why did they ultimately fail to implement and/or decided against taking the extreme steps they were debating?

2) Internal dynamics and fault lines: What does the reporting tell us about the different factions within the MAGA government, the exact fault lines between them, and the role of Trump himself in the decision-making process?

3) The future of the MAGA government and movement: What are the implications of this internal strive for what comes after Trump?

What’s in the reporting?

Two camps emerge from the New York Times reporting. On one side, there are those who constantly demanded escalation, led by Stephen Miller and JD Vance. On the other, a group of people centered around White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

As a kind of smoking gun, the Times presents the secret memos written by a lawyer named Will Scharf who is serving as the White House staff secretary. Scharf seems to have addressed these memos to Wiles, outlining the arguments against suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act.

The internal debates over taking more radical measures that would have, in a very real sense, instituted despotism culminated in two separate moments. First, Miller’s attempt to get Trump to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants seems to have peaked in late April 2025. Anyone who has been detained by the government has the right to challenge their detention in court – they must have the chance to petition a court to order their release. That is what habeas corpus means: It is the bedrock principle of the rule of law, enshrined in Article I of the U.S. Constitution. But when you are trying to “purge” millions of people from the “homeland” as quickly as possible, due process is really annoying – and so Stephen Miller wanted to get rid of it.

However, in one of his memos, White House lawyer Scharf reminded his fellow Trumpists that the Constitution permits the suspension of habeas corpus only in times of war, armed rebellion, and invasion – and only when authorized by Congress. And even then, Scharf argued, the courts had made it clear that some measure of due process needed to be available to defendants even while habeas was suspended. The key concern Scharf tried to convey was that the courts were guaranteed to step in; the administration would be tangled up in legal battles, with little chance of success. Lots of self-inflicted damage for no plausible gain.

What role, exactly, the Scharf memos played in thwarting Miller’s plans is not clear from the reporting. Did they actually convince others to change their stance – or mostly serve to strengthen the position of those who had always been opposed? In any case, as the Times, puts it: “After weeks of uproar, and disagreement between government officials on whether it could be done, the proposal eventually faded from view.”

The internal conflict over whether or not to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops domestically for law enforcement purposes, lingered throughout the year 2025 before coming to a head in late January 2026, just days after masked Customs and Border Protection officers had killed Alex Pretty on January 24, and within weeks of an ICE agent murdering Renée Good in the streets of Minneapolis.

Once again, Miller was pushing for Trump to escalate further, and this time he had JD Vance by his side who lead the charge during a meeting in Susie Wiles’ office. As the New York Times puts it: “Mr. Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send - that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations - would make sure no one tried it again.”

However, Miller and Vance failed to convince the rest of the administration. Scharf and others in the Wiles camp argued that the situation in Minneapolis was already a public relations disaster for the Trump government – “the public was recoiling,” as deputy chief of staff James Blair put it, according to the Times –, and escalating further was only going to cost them more support from the public. The meeting ended without a firm decision. But Miller and Vance had effectively failed to achieve their goal of getting Trump to use the military to suppress protests.

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The timeline: When the Republic almost ended

What are we to make of all this? How should this insight into the internal debates of the Trump government impact our understanding of the MAGA regime and the state of American democracy?

Let’s start with the timeline. The New York Times reporting has, understandably, generated a lot of attention – and much of it seems to be focused on the moment in late January when JD Vance called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. The prospect of troops being deployed against American citizens in the streets of their hometown is indeed scary. And yet, I believe the key inflection point in this story came earlier, in the spring of 2025, when the regime was deliberating the suspension of habeas corpus.

If you have been reading or following my work in recent months, you will have heard me confess that I was never more pessimistic than in that very moment. The reporting, to me, confirms that this was indeed the most dangerous moment for the Republic.

I know it feels ages ago. But let us remember where the country stood. In the first three months after returning to power, the Trumpists managed to turn America from a democratic system – albeit one with significant flaws – into one that no longer deserved to be counted among the world’s democracies. The speed and the scope of the early assault on the constitutional order, on the foundations of democratic self-government was unprecedented. There was, unsurprisingly, zero pushback from Republicans in Congress. The leadership of the Democratic Party was shell-shocked and mostly occupied with figuring out whether or not it wanted to accept the role of an opposition party at all. The utter devastation of government brought about by Musk’s DOGE hordes, who had been given free rein to wipe away the system, was breathtaking. And a pervasive tendency to acquiesce kept America’s civic institutions from deploying their enormous financial resources to resist Trump’s attacks; U.S. civil society seemed to prove a lot less democratically resilient than it should have been on paper. More than anything else, my number one takeaway from the first two to three months of Trumpism in power was: The constitution doesn’t mean anything if no one enforces and defends it. If those tasked with upholding the constitutional order and defending democratic self-government aren’t actually able or willing to even put up a proper fight, then how much does it really take to bring the system down?

It was in this situation that the regime was escalating its mass deportation plans more quickly and more forcefully than most observers had expected. And in their attempt to purge “alien enemies” and the “enemy within,” they were suspending constitutional protections left and right. Despotism seemed to be rising fast.

The one immediate source of resistance in this early phase was the court system. Federal judges across the country were deciding against the administration almost on a daily basis. The were, at the very least, slowing the regime down – giving the rest of the system time to shake off the initial shock and, crucially, giving the American people time to organize on the ground.

With hindsight, we can see more clearly that time was working against the Trumpists. They had risen to power with a short-term strategy aimed at quickly overwhelming the system, hoping to neutralize all meaningful political and societal resistance within just a few months, forcing a comprehensive regime change before anyone could really react. They had an initial strategy to quickly overwhelm the liberal enemy – and nothing else. Any delay was threatening the whole project.

People like Stephen Miller understood this. That is why he pushed so hard for the suspension of habeas corpus: Mass deportation had been central to the Trumpist promise, it formed the core of the ideological vision of restoring national greatness by purging enemies without and within; the regime needed to produce results in this area – and it needed to find a way to handle the courts as the major hurdle that stood in their way.

I am recapitulating the events of last spring in such detail because I believe it’s impossible to overstate the significance of that moment. In the quickly escalating conflict between the Trump regime and the courts, the disappearing of Venezuelan migrants and the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia turned into major focal points.

In mid-March, the Trump administration had rounded up hundreds of migrants from Venezuela, declared them members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization based on no credible evidence whatsoever, then declared Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove them all from the country without due process. They were flown out to El Salvador on March 15 and dumped in what is best described as a labor camp, to be incarcerated indefinitely in one of the most brutal, most inhumane environments imaginable, subjected to physical and mental torture. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was on one of those planes with them (although in his case, the administration did not invoke the Alien Enemies Act, specifically).

The courts intervened immediately. In fact, when the Executive Order invoking the Alien Enemies Act came out and news broke that hundreds of Venezuelans were being flown out of the country, hearings were already ongoing before the federal district court for the District of Columbia in Washington, DC, because the ACLU had filed a lawsuit in anticipation of exactly these actions. And the presiding judge James Boasberg ruled that all these people from Venezuela needed to remain in the country so that the process that immigration law dictates could actually play out: He ordered the planes that were already in the air to turn around.

Would the Trumpists dare to ignore explicit court orders?

Publicly, they adopted a maximally aggressive posture. Trump called judge Boasberg a “radical left lunatic” and called for his impeachment. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson even brought up the idea that maybe the Republican-led Congress should “eliminate” those federal courts that proved unruly. And hardly a day went by without Stephen Miller ranting against the “tyranny” those “rogue Marxist judges” were imposing on America, and his desire to quash what he called a “far-left judicial riot.”

But in court, the government’s lawyers had, in the first two months after Trump’s return to the White House, pursued a different strategy, oscillating between open acts of defiance on the one hand and an attitude of obscuring and evading without openly defying on the other. This incoherence was the result of different MAGA factions pushing competing ideas for how to handle the courts: Some wanted to preserve plausible deniability and preferred a strategy of autocratic legalism, remaining within the confines of the law, at least nominally; others, like Miller, desired to properly go to war with the courts.

In late March, it seemed pretty clear that the overall trajectory pointed towards escalation. Even in court filings, the Department of Justice increasingly adopted an aggressive language towards judges. And on March 24, the DoJ informed the district court in Washington, DC that the government would not provide any further information regarding the deportation of the Venezuelan migrants and instead declared that the regime’s authority, because it derived from the “mandate of the electorate,” superseded and nullified any right of the court to intervene.

In this immensely dangerous situation, the Supreme Court got involved. First, on April 7, the rightwing majority (minus Amy Coney Barrett) ruled largely in favor of the administration, vacating a Temporary Restraining Order from a lower court, thereby allowing the government to continue the deportation and disappearing of migrants while invoking the authority of the Alien Enemies Act. Yet the Court also decided that detainees still had some due process rights and, specifically, needed to be given a chance to file a habeas claim. That part of the ruling the Trump administration completely ignored, however – prompting the Court to issue a late-night order on April 19 to stop removal under the Alien Enemies Act of anyone in custody at a particular detention center in Texas, because it was so utterly obvious that none of the people detained there had been given any meaningful chance to bring a claim. So egregious was the conduct of the administration that only Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from this decision. The whole thing was very typical for the Roberts Court: Chief Justice John Roberts really wants to help the Trump government – but he doesn’t like it when the Trumpists make him look like a fool for doing so. You can have your mass deportation, Roberts had basically told the government, but can we please make it so that we can keep pretending we are upholding the rule of law? Stephen Miller, however, did not want to pretend.

And now Miller had a problem, as several of the conservative justices had made clear there was *some* line they weren’t willing to cross on this issue. That is why Miller wanted to keep pushing – and to eliminate habeas corpus entirely. Allow no legal recourse whatsoever, so that no court ever gets to intervene and slow down the purge.

Why this would have ended the Republic

I know it sounds dramatic, but had Trump actually suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without authorization from Congress, it would have been a potentially lethal blow to the American Republic as an experiment in democratic self-government.

First of all, this would have been a radically unconstitutional step. Habeas corpus is the most foundational principles on which the rule of law is built. It goes back centuries, to at least the Magna Carta in 1215. Some legal principles are hard to grasp – this one is not. If the government can arbitrarily detain you, all other rights you may possess on paper are null and void. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood this clearly, which is why they enshrined it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Anyone who has been detained by the government has the right to challenge their detention in court. They must have the chance to petition a court to order their release. The burden of proof is on the government: It must convince the court that an individual’s detention is indeed lawful. Otherwise, that individual must be freed.

Secondly, suspending habeas corpus unilaterally would have taken the conflict between the Trump administration and the courts to a whole different level. The courts would have undoubtedly intervened and ruled against the government. At that point, the Trumpists would have been forced to either retreat in shame – or make good on their threats that Trump, as the embodiment of the “will of the people,” was no longer bound by the law or the constitution.

Finally, the Trumpists would have inevitably extended the suspension of habeas corpus beyond just unauthorized immigrants sooner or later. This regime, after all, is centered around the promise of purging not only the “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” but also the “enemy within” who is supposedly in cahoots with those nefarious outside forces. There is no way around the escalatory logic built into these foundational claims.

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They deliberated ending the Republic… but then didn’t dare to do it

It is crucial we grapple honestly with how seriously the Trumpists deliberated despotism – and with the fact that those who demanded it are still very much part of the inner core of this regime.

However, we also need to acknowledge that they ultimately decided against taking that step. They didn’t dare to suspend habeas corpus. And despite all the aggressive “will of the people” posturing: They didn’t start entirely ignoring the courts either.

For instance, the Department of Justice did return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States on June 6. Twice the regime detained him afterwards – twice a court ordered him released again. And release him they did. What he and the Venezuelan migrants who suffered torture in CECOT had to endure has certainly nothing to do with justice. But it is also not the case that the Trumpists went ahead and simply abolished the whole “liberal” court system.

And this is where we still are, over a year later. No matter how many times Stephen Miller may declare all dissident judges to be insurrectionists and domestic terrorists: The federal courts continue to act as the most effective bulwark in defense of democratic self-government and the rule of law. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against the administration, and in the vast majority of those, federal district courts have sided against the government, with federal judges issuing injunctions or restrictions that have undoubtedly slowed down the authoritarian assault. Yet the administration is still participating in the judicial system. They are still sending lawyers to argue in court, they are appealing to the Supreme Court, thereby acknowledging some legitimacy of the process. Despite all the posturing, the threats, the authoritarian propaganda about the “will of the people” prohibiting the courts from intervening: They haven’t really pulled the trigger.

Several inflection points – and regime retreats

Understanding what happened here, in that moment in the spring of 2025, is so important because it was the first of several times since Trump returned to power that the regime pushed the country right up to the edge of the kind of authoritarian escalation that would have taken America across the line into full-blown autocratic territory… but then failed and/or proved unwilling to actually go there.

There is a pattern here that stands in contrast to the idea of a relentless, unstoppable authoritarian advancement. Several times the Trumpists seemed poised to vanquish the democratic opposition, break through whatever obstacles the constitutional order was still placing in their path, and wipe away the system entirely – but then were either unable or didn’t dare to force that next step.

It happened again in the early summer, when the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles seemed to suggest the regime was ready to use emergency powers to quash the resistance in urban centers – but then pulled back from several major cities at the end of 2025; it happened after the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, when the Trumpists laid the pseudo-legal groundwork for a sweeping criminalization of all political and societal opposition – but then didn’t actually implement the type of comprehensive oppression the Right has been clamoring for. It happened, finally, in January, when the regime pondered invoking the Insurrection Act, but ultimately did not – and was instead handed a massive defeat at the hands of the good people of Minnesota who decided they were not going to acquiesce as their neighbors were being terrorized in the streets by masked agents of the state.

Among all these inflection points, the ultimately aborted push to suspend habeas corpus last spring stands out to me as particularly dangerous and significant because at that moment, the Trump regime was overall in a much stronger position than at any point since.

With every passing month since, Trump has lost public support. The myth of a foundational rightward realignment faded, as did the idea of Trump as the tribune of the people. Especially working-class voters, young people, and Latinos, whose larger-than-expected support had fueled Trump’s 2024 victory, quickly moved away from the president. Meanwhile, societal resistance has hardened. Whoever is still clinging to the idea that Trump’s agenda, his broader vision for the country, is supported by anything close to a majority of Americans is either not paying attention at all – or simply not arguing in good faith.

That doesn’t mean that these later inflection points weren’t immensely dangerous, or that there is no more cause for concern. The outcome of this struggle is not determined. But in the spring of 2025, before the massive decline in public support, before the tremendous mental decline the president has evidently been experiencing, the Trumpists were in a stronger position to end the Republic than they have been at any point since.

Internal dynamics, factions, fault lines – and the role of Trump

Why and how did the Trump government decide to *not* suspend habeas corpus or invoke the Insurrection Act? Who was responsible for those decisions? What was the role of Trump in all of this? The New York Times reporting provides a window into the internal dynamics, the factionalism, and the decision-making process that is shaping the actions of this regime.

It was always obvious that the MAGA government – just like the broader MAGA movement – doesn’t exist as a monolith. There are different factions and there is real friction between them. The reporting reminds us that there are not only different ideological camps, pursuing overlapping, but distinct visions of what America should look like. There are also, for lack of a better word, fault lines defined by temperament. The different factions aren’t entirely in agreement about how far they should escalate – they differ in terms of appetite for radicalism. Those two dimensions, ideological extremism and temperamental radicalism, are certainly correlated. It is not a coincidence that Stephen Miller, a full-on white nationalist ideologue, has consistently been pushing for escalation. But there are evidently other factors playing a part.

The overriding concern among those who argued against the kind of escalation Miller and Vance demanded was to avoid self-inflicted damage. That doesn’t mean they might not also have substantively disagreed. But what they feared, first and foremost, was a high-stakes battle with the courts they believed the administration would lose – leading to an ongoing public relations disaster and the further loss of public support.

The fact that public opinion so clearly factored into these decisions is unequivocally good news. It means there are still people in the White House and around Trump who follow “normal” political incentives – like: If what you are doing is vastly unpopular, maybe try to correct course. Their influence must be limited, as this regime has so far been largely incapable of adapting to the changing political and public environment. Instead of acting strategically, they keep overreaching, thereby continuously undermining their standing with the vast majority of Americans. These are the actions of people who are perceiving the world almost exclusively through the prism of the far-right media landscape, they have their delusions constantly reflected back at them and thereby confirmed. It often seems like this regime follows its own metrics, consisting mostly of a chorus of online extremists. Any sign that public opinion can still act as a moderating, restraining influence is therefore welcome.

And what about the man who holds the most powerful political office in the world? What is the role of Donald Trump himself in all of this?

Interestingly, the New York Times reporting dropped the day after Trump’s deranged cage match spectacle. In recent months, his attention seems to have been increasingly focused on such matters of monumental self-aggrandizement: The White House ballroom, the Triumphal Arch he wants to build… All of these projects are of great significance symbolically and politically, as they are manifestations of a worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Trump evidently does not consider himself an elected official, but a sovereign – the embodiment of the nation. There is therefore, in his view, no difference between celebrating his birthday and that of the country, no public good he isn’t entitled to abuse.

But obsessing over these projects is also not the same as governing. The day-to-day operation of governing Trump is clearly not very interested in. It is a weird form of personalism we are confronted with. Personalism is the type of authoritarian regime where control is centralized in the hands of a leader figure, the center of gravity is one person at the top (rather than a party apparatus, or perhaps the military), power and influence are entirely dependent on the relationship with the regime’s leader. What we have here is personalism with a lazy, increasingly delusional leader at the top who doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual work of governing and a bunch of sycophants and zealots around him.

In the spring of 2025, the Times reporting suggests, Trump was at least somewhat involved in the deliberations over whether or not to suspend habeas corpus. But even then, he was not willing to fully side with one camp or the other. In January 2026, as his vice-president and chief white nationalist were pushing for him to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump seems to have been largely absent. For that crucial meeting in late January the Times describes in great detail, Trump was not in the room. In key moments, when different factions within his government were engaged in a struggle for supremacy that would define the trajectory of his regime, Trump either hesitated – or simply couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, participate, and make a decision either way.

Who and what comes after Trump?

I don’t want to get too much into speculative territory, but I do believe this all has some interesting – albeit contradictory – implications for the question of who and what comes after Trump.

JD Vance is Trump’s designated successor. His position is anything but ironclad: His level of support from the base is uncertain; he is likely to face opposition from others like Tucker Carlson who may hope to pick up the mantle of MAGA “populism.” But Vance has the institutional support from the party. As of right now, he must be seen as the favorite to emerge as the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2028.

The question of what to expect from a Vance-led GOP and MAGA government is therefore hard to avoid. Would Vance be more or less dangerous than Trump? If at all possible, we should probably avoid such narrow, binary logic, when the correct answer is probably: “It depends.” In general, having an increasingly incoherent, delusional man like Trump occupy the most powerful political office brings a level of unpredictability and chaos that is unfathomably dangerous. Let us never underestimate how outrageous that situation is.

However, the New York Times reporting is a reminder that JD Vance is a proper extremist who believes his right to rule and impose a reactionary order transcends the law and the constitution. Had he been president in the spring of 2025, he might have gone along with Miller’s fever dream of suspending habeas corpus; in January, a President Vance might have escalated the paramilitary occupation of an American city even further. That he derided the protesters in Minneapolis as “paid agitators” is more evidence of his conspiracism: Vance exists in an information environment shaped entirely by rightwing media and an extremist online scene that has warped his perception of the political conflict for so long that anyone who dares to disagree looks like some acutely dangerous “enemy within.”

As an electoral strategy, it might be difficult for Vance to make Trumpism without Trump work: Trump’s celebrity, the fact that so many Americans mainly associate fame and wealth with him, played a big role in making MAGA’s ideological extremism more palatable for people (or lulling them into a false sense of “He doesn’t mean it anyway”). Vance doesn’t have that. Perhaps that counts as good news? But if Vance were to emerge victorious from what is likely to be a prolonged, chaotic, and dirty struggle between several radical factions for the leadership of post-Trump MAGA, we might also be looking at a more coherently extreme and more ideologically disciplined movement.

Where does it all leave us?

Should we feel more or less optimistic about the fate of the American Republic and the chances of defeating the Trumpist assault on democratic self-government after grappling with the broader implications of what the New York Times reported?

Frankly, if you are left feeling mostly ambivalent upon reading what I have outlined here, we have probably landed in the same place.

Not that it was really needed, but we now possess even more direct evidence that there are powerful people inside this government who are jumping on every chance they get to push for the imposition of despotism. And those people aren’t going anywhere. In fact, Stephen Miller has remained remarkably close to Trump and continues to make sure his white nationalist crusade is a top priority for this regime. His unquenchable desire for escalation has been rebuffed in crucial moments. But the internal dynamics are unpredictable, power may shift his way in just the wrong situation.

Miller, Vance, and the many extremists in this government will continue to look for opportunities to end the Republic. Yet overall, the regime is in a much weaker position to succeed than last spring.

Then again, even if the Trumpists are, as I believe, more likely to fail in their quest to consolidate authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they will continue to cause so much damage that by the time they are done, the country will face the daunting challenge of a proper reconstruction. There is no reason to settle back and relax here. There won’t be for a long time.

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