Are We in a "Soft" Civil War?

Declarations of hostilities from both sides have grown more frank, and it may be we're past the point of return to a Queensberry Rules politics

A group letter signed by natsec luminaries calling for citizens to “mobilize” was released before a visit by Donald Trump, Jr. to Bulgaria

On Sunday, April 27th, Donald J. Trump, Jr. joined an event in Bulgaria, hosted by controversial crypto firm Nexo. Nexo in 2023 was fined $45 million by the SEC and ordered to stop offering a product that was marketed as a way for investors to earn interest on crypto holdings. On Monday, it announced its “return to the United States,” quoting Trump Jr. as saying, “I think crypto is the future of finance.”

The visit by Trump, Jr. coincided with a sharpening public relations campaign at home. Former Treasury official Steven Rattner argued in the New York Times that we’re witnessing a “new low” in corruption, after $Trump meme coin investors were offered “Special VIP Tours” at the White House. It also came days after 200 former diplomats and security officials signed a group letter titled “The Assault on American Democracy: A Call to Action.” Featuring signatories like ex-National Security Advisors Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, and impeachment witness/former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the letter contained eyebrow-raising language:

Many of us have served in countries where democratically elected leaders followed a path to autocracy, and we know this crisis requires an urgent and unified response…Waiting passively for the electoral calendar to fight back does nothing more than give the administration additional time and running room to impose its authoritarian stamp… No American… can afford to be a bystander. Each of us in different walks of life must… speak out, mobilize, defend our way of life. The moment requires nothing less. We must recognize the seriousness of what is taking place and act collectively to restore our democracy and our security.

The word “mobilize” has been appearing in op-eds and political speeches with increasing frequency. “Mobilize, message, litigate” was a catch-phrase offered by Virginia congressman Gerry Connolly early in the Trump term, but lately mobilize seems to be carrying a different connotation, amid an often-unvoiced implication of coming revolt.

The recent letter received no press outside of Bulgaria, making it necessary to reach out to signatories like former CIA senior intelligence officer Anne Gruner to confirm authenticity. The call for ex-officials to act now instead of “waiting passively for the electoral calendar” appears to have been organized by former Ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin, who gave an interview about it on Bulgarian TV Saturday. Rubin has not responded to requests for comment.

The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been marked by blunt offensives against political opponents, from executive orders targeting law firms like Wilmer Hale, Perkins Coie, and Jenner & Block, to the firing of career officials from the National Security Council to the Justice Department, to the stripping of security clearances for figures like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. These moves prompted a cascade of news stories describing an “unprecedented assault on the constitutional order,” and those increasingly are accompanied by editorials calling for “mobilization” or revolution.

Coming from the likes of David Brooks, a call for a “national civic uprising” felt like a joke, but we’re starting to hear the same types of arguments emanate from more serious characters. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker just joined in the call for “mobilization” and “mass protests” in a New Hampshire speech, comparing Republicans to Nazis, saying their names will be reserved for museums dedicated to “tyrants and traitors,” and adding that “do-nothing” Democrats need to “step out of your comfort zone and step out into the streets” and “fight, fight, fight.”

The speech has been hailed across the pundit-o-sphere, with the Boston Globe saying Democrats “finally seem to understand the assignment,” while the Washington Post said the call to make sure Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” has already driven 2028 “campaign buzz.” Instead of making fun of an heir to the Hyatt fortune cosplaying Lev Trotsky, Republicans have grumbled in response. Stephen Miller suggested the speech could be construed as incitement to violence, an argument ridiculed when Democrats made it about Trump’s “fight like hell” comment on January 6th. There have been growing calls for resistance beyond things like “Hands Off!” marches, but those have been marked by an ominous vagueness. Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic suggested a reason resistance hasn’t been more forceful is a divide among protesting demographics, between those playing by old rules, and those ready for obliquely-defined “new” solutions.

“People have to understand what’s happening, and then they’ll figure out what’s the best way to resist it,” is how Applebaum put it on German television last month.

As Greg Collard notes in today’s Timeline on “Political Advocacy by Open Letter,” the Trump era has been marked by a comically high quantity of “open letters.” Many have involved intelligence honchos, from a 2016 group letter with former CIA chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security head Tom Ridge to a 2018 letter protesting the removal of former CIA head John Brennan’s security clearance, to the infamous “51 spies” letter, to a 2024 letter by the mysterious “NSL4A” (National Security Leaders for America) endorsing Kamala Harris and condemning Trump’s “vengeful impulsiveness.” The NSL4A, which features a half-dozen former CIA directors, still exists, still issues statements about episodes like SignalGate, and markets itself as the voice of the exiled intelligence sector so unabashedly that one almost expects the release of a We Are The Deep State single, with Brennan playing the George Michael role and Leon Panetta as Bono.

Since Trump’s second inauguration, these and other critics have been relentless in decrying an unprecedented “assault on norms,” which in their telling began in January and has been marked by such “dictatorial” severity as to require those “new solutions.” The White House obviously sees it differently. Current and former officials connected to the administration believe “norms” evaporated before Trump took office in 2016, with official spying via the Trump-Russia probe, the subsequent launching of multiple successful politicized investigations, the May 2017 opening of a second FBI probe into whether or not Trump was “working on behalf of Russia” after the firing of James Comey, the successful removal of Trump from Internet platforms, efforts to have lawyers who represented Trump disbarred, use of courts to try to remove Trump and other pols from the ballot, the censorship (and in cases like Steve Bannon, jailing) of media figures friendly to Trump, and countless other matters.

We forget how comprehensively institutional America became politicized before the arrival of this new administration. Never mind the prosecutions and investigations: officials from enforcement agencies issued so many warnings about “brazen” efforts by Russia and other countries to meddle in elections on Trump’s behalf that you could set your watch by them. Imagine if Kristi Noem or John Ratcliffe not only issued regular bulletins about Chinese efforts to buy American farmland or dominate “emerging technologies,” but every election season issued warnings about China seeking to “sow division” by “boosting Democrats” and “denigrating Donald Trump.” Op-ed pages would be full of frantic denunciations of the politicization of the DHS and CIA, news pages would be full of analyses correctly pointing out that intelligence can be manipulated in a dozen different ways, and newspapers would valiantly point out that they’re duty-bound to not repeat such assertions until proven. Ten minutes ago, of course, everyone in media felt differently.

How one views all this largely rests on whether or you believe those pre-2025 moves directed at Trump were legitimate. NBC for instance recently quoted a Washington lawyer named Dan Meyer, who called the revocation of security clearances of signatories of the “51 spies” letter as “the most politically saturated security action since the Oppenheimer case in the 1950s.” The Trump team of course sees the “51 spies” episode itself as the unprecedented action. Their executive order on the subject notes the 2020 letter, which suggested a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, didn’t involve retired officials only. The letter was also “sent to the CIA Prepublication Classification Review Board,” and “senior CIA officials were made aware of the contents of the letter.” Add the still-underreported scandal about the FBI falsely briefing Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley that the laptop story was Russian meddling, and it’s not hard to argue that intelligence and law enforcement agencies were improperly meddling in politics for years.

Trump is who he is. He makes outrageous statements, often means them, and has never been anybody’s idea of a tribune of Jeffersonian probity. In recent weeks he’s said and done a number of hair-raising things, from seeming to talk about deporting U.S. citizens as prisoners to El Salvador (“We have bad ones too… I’m all for it because we can do things with the president for less money”) to selling “Trump 2028” merch (classic Trump, but why do that, even as a joke?) to the aforementioned $Trump promotion, which seems like an homage to Bill Clinton’s Lincoln bedroom scandal.

On closer examination, however, most of the the “assault on the constitutional order” stories aren’t as alarming as advertised. The main complaints seem not to be about rule-breaking but his radical policy choices: deep cuts to the budget, mass deportations, giganto-tariffs, abandoning consensus on the Ukraine war, the withholding of federal funds and/or tax-exempt status from academia or organizations like Wikipedia, and other major departures.

Look at the allegations in the Bulgaria letter: Trump has “questioned the value of long-standing alliances in Europe and Asia,” he’s “intimidating independent media outlets with frivolous lawsuits,” he’s made “explicit threats to withdraw federal monies” from universities, and humorously, he’s undermining a “global economic order that ushered in a period of unparalleled prosperity for Americans.” (If that last line were true, he wouldn’t have been elected.) He’s also accused of “dismantling essential institutions,” which seems to be the key issue.

Every story that looks like it might be evidence of an irrevocable decision to cross a line, a modern version of Lincoln’s defiance of the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Merryman, turns out to be something less dramatic. The much-publicized “arresting a judge” story, which the Guardian described as a local justice’s punishment for “helping an undocumented man avoid abduction,” has been presented as an example of an administration willing to lock up judges who block policies via their rulings. Forbes for instance wrote:

They sent a chilling message: that the executive branch of government now claims the power to punish judges who stand in the way of its political priorities.

I spent months back in the early 2010s covering cases of undocumented immigrants deported under the 287(g) program, which dates to 1996 and deputized local and federal officials to run immigration checks on everyone taken into custody. I don’t remember judges railing against the injustice of that program, or wrapping arms around undocumented court vistors back when they were being shipped out wholesale by a more socially acceptable president like Barack Obama. I get the principle that even non-citizens are theoretically entitled to habeas rights, but a judge helping an undocumented person use a back door to escape deportation is absurd in a different direction. ICE arrests aren’t “abductions” or a program of “mass kidnapping,” as the Guardian called it, unless you think there’s no such thing as illegal immigration, an even more radical concept than Trump’s deportations policy. It’s as if everyone is choosing to lose their minds.

Since November we’ve moved a highly lawyered group of habitual rule-breakers out of office, and replaced them with a payback-seeking group that is often more interested in big results than process. Another way to view it is that we exchanged a group of officials who used executive power in an unprecedented way but didn’t admit it, for a group that is freely admitting its novel and at times unsettling use of presidential authority. It all makes for a fraught, dangerous moment and my main emotion as a voter is hoping none of this devolves into open conflict. Can we get through this with something like an intact legal system in the end?