Allan Stratton: It's time to consider the worst-case American scenarios

Every democratic implosion under Trump is a fantasy future until it becomes a tragic past

Photo by Sunira Moses on Unsplash

By: Allan Stratton

“I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fantastic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.” —Sir Horace Rumbold to London, 1933

It took six years from Hitler’s ascension to power at the beginning of 1933 to Kristallnacht. Those first years saw the vilification of minorities, censorship, the building of deportation camps, the mass expulsion of foreigners, and the need for Jews to show their papers on demand. Most Jews, left-wing activists, and other so-called undesirables stayed put: Germany had been their home for generations. They had friends and neighbours. They thought the unpleasantness would pass. In the end, the question wasn’t whether to go, but to where they might escape.

Today in America, the vilification of minorities is rampant from the Oval Office on down. Citizens are kidnapped, disappeared, and even murdered in the street by masked agents of the state. Detainees are held in subhuman conditions; over a thousand have vanished from the online databanks of a single deportation centre. Constitutional and civil rights protections are violated and institutional oversight is gutted. Brown Americans need to carry their citizenship papers to avoid arrest and detention; legal immigrants with proper papers are deported. The administration extorts media, corporations, universities, and law firms. The legislative branch is neutered. The Supreme Court permits race-based immigration stops. The Vice President endorses unconstitutional door-to-door searches. And the President, who tried to overturn a previous election, has questioned the upcoming midterm elections, pardoned his supporters, including the most violent, and directed the FBI and Justice Department to target his political enemies: The American government is functionally lawless.

Simultaneously, ICE, the immigration and customs enforcement agency, has seemingly been transformed into a national police force designed to project Trump’s personal power. It has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Marshalls combined; larger, in fact, than all but 15 of the world’s militaries. It will soon have more detention capacity than the entire U.S. federal prison system. And the Department of Homeland Security has enlarged its workforce by 120 per cent, with a recruitment drive featuring neo-Nazi themed slogans and videos.

In short, the regime has created what Nazi-era Jewish labour lawyer Ernst Fraenkel called “the dual state.” As former constitutional litigator David French explained in The New York Times, when discussing the ICE killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti: “The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal … But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.”

Many will call references to Germany in the Thirties indecent and alarmist. Still, if you told people a year ago that Donald Trump would oversee any of the above, they would have said you were out of your mind. (Much less that he would bomb Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela and threaten war against the European Union over Greenland.) Trump may not be Hitler, but do Stephen Miller or the other Nazi cosplayers in Trump’s orbit sound much different? Imagine this clearly fascist regime with another three years — or more — of unaccountable power.

At what point is it no longer irresponsible to imagine worst-case scenarios involving America? At what point is it simply realistic to consider the unthinkable? Not because it will happen, but because there are legitimate fears that it might. American friends of mine in Massachusetts are considering selling their home and moving to Montreal as they imagine a collapsed real estate market in a MAGA militarized north-east. Some might say they’re panicking. But every democratic implosion is a fantasy future until it becomes a tragic past.

While it may seem fanciful, for example, it would be wise to assess how many American refugees we can take should the United States devolve into a full-fledged tyranny with ever-expanding, unaccountable deportation centres. We took 50,000 draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. But millions could flee north in an Insurrection Act-inspired horror show in blue states. As a second order concern, how should we respond if Trump accuses us of harbouring radical anti-American domestic terrorists?

Worst of all, there doesn’t appear to be an off ramp. There is no chance the U.S. Senate will ever convict Trump in an impeachment trial: That would require 67 votes; Trump’s insurrection trial only managed 57. Likewise, there is no chance Trump will ever be removed for incapacity under the 25^th amendment: That requires a majority of the cabinet and the vice president, and if Trump resists, a full two thirds vote by both the House and Senate.

Some put their faith in November’s midterm elections. But nothing prevents Trump’s DHS from flooding Democratic strongholds with ICE thugs to suppress the vote. Trump has said he should have seized the voting machines in 2020. He has the power to invoke the Insurrection Act and mobilize the military to suppress public protests. And, looking ahead to 2028, Vice President J.D. Vance has said that, unlike his predecessor, he’d have manipulated the 2020 Electoral College to overturn the election and elect Trump.

An erratic tyranny to our south is a national-security nightmare. Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” asserts American control over the entire Western hemisphere. We need to ask ourselves if Canada is to the United States what Ukraine is to Russia’s “near abroad” or Poland was to Germany’s “breathing space.” This is critical as the American rationale for taking Greenland (to keep Russia and China out of the Arctic) directly applies to the Canadian north.

Would the American military refuse illegal orders from its Commander-in-Chief to seize the infrastructure of our Arctic monitoring stations or mining centres like Fort McMurray? One would have said yes, until this fall’s war crimes in the Caribbean when the U.S. military blew up a series of small boats and killed survivors; or when it bombed Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela without congressional approval; or when it removed the latter’s president to take the country’s oil. And it would be foolhardy to ignore Trump’s purge of senior military leadership and its replacement by regime loyalists.

Our own military is taking the threat seriously: It has war gamed a U.S. invasion of Canada not because it is likely, but because it is no longer beyond the realm of possibility. Our military planners believe the U.S. would defeat us within two days in a sudden decapitation strike, such as Putin attempted in Ukraine. They believe we would need to respond to occupation with drones and guerrilla warfare. Does this require a reassessment of the government’s policy on gun ownership?

One step we could take is to join with the Northern and Baltic states (NB8). The goal would be to extend mutual protection across the Arctic Circle from the Baltic Sea to our border with Alaska. Currently, the NB8 is designed to counter threats from Russia and China, but given America’s designs on Greenland (on hold, but for how long?), it is surely a third adversary.

We have other security concerns: Trump has repeatedly called for Canada to become the 51^st state; he has posted three maps showing the U.S. owning our country. Alberta separatists are welcomed at Mar-a-Lago and by under-secretary level officials at the White House. In Davos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly supported Alberta separating from Canada and joining the United States. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum tweeted a map of a “New Interior” which shows Canada, Mexico, and Greenland subsumed by America.

This is far removed from any acceptable international behaviour. It is a form of hybrid warfare. Do we continue to buy military aircraft from an openly hostile nation that mocks and threatens our existence? If we purchase equipment from Europe instead, how should we respond to the inevitable retaliation?

How do we counter the waves of MAGA disinformation as we face possible independence referendums in Alberta and Quebec? Should we regulate and block content on U.S.-owned social media sites? What would be the unintended consequences on our own speech if we could? What retaliation might we face from the Trump administration and its Silicon Valley allies?

And how do we combat a financial campaign to destroy us? Writing in The Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Adam Gordon posit an Alberta referendum awash in MAGA money that sees separatists losing, but with 30 per cent of the vote. Trump calls the “fake” result “rigged” and claims the separatists won. They ask the him for help to “stop the steal” and he sends troops to the border and demands that we let Alberta become the “51st state.”

Then there are the economic-security threats we face, starting with unpredictable tariffs and a renegotiation of trade agreements with a partner whose word means nothing. In his excellent Davos speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney outlined what middle powers like Canada must do to reduce the leverage of “the hegemon.” But this is a long-term fix confronting an immediate problem.

We also need to address the long-term consequences of de-dollarization. BRICS nations have tried for years to oust the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. They have failed because of America’s size and stability. But Fabio Panetta, Governor of the Bank of Italy and a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, is raising the issue in the EU, thanks to the domestic and geopolitical instability created by Trump’s rogue regime. How can we mitigate the effects of this global shift given our economic integration with America?

These are only some of the questions we face as the Unites States continues to transform from a pluralist democracy into a blood and soil dystopia. We shouldn’t panic. But we should definitely prepare for the possibility that the worst will arrive.

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