How to Try, and Fail, to Carry Out a Coup

 

 

By Ana Ionova

Jair Bolsonaro had just nine weeks to pull off a plan that was both risky and extraordinary. With the help of allies, prosecutors say, he was intent on overturning the October 2022 presidential election he had lost.

A close aide came up with a sinister solution: poisoning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had defeated Mr. Bolsonaro, before he was sworn in as Brazil’s next president on New Year’s Day 2023, according to a document that had been printed at the presidential offices while Mr. Bolsonaro was in the building.

“Lula does not walk up the ramp,” referring to the sloped path to the presidential offices, said another document seized during a police raid on Mr. Bolsonaro’s party headquarters.

Mr. Bolsonaro, who denies plotting to kill Mr. Lula, will stand trial on Tuesday before Brazil’s Supreme Court on charges that he oversaw a sweeping plan to cling to power in a case many see as a crucial test of the country’s young democracy. With a vast trove of prosecutorial evidence, most analysts say he is almost certain to be found guilty and could face decades in prison.

To piece together the case against Mr. Bolsonaro, The New York Times reviewed dozens of hours of testimony and hundreds of pages of police and prosecution documents from an investigation spanning nearly two years.

Prosecutors and Mr. Bolsonaro’s defense each point to the evidence to tell sharply diverging stories.

To investigators, Mr. Bolsonaro and dozens of ministers, military officials and aides worked doggedly to sow doubts about the election result; tried to enlist military leaders in overturning the vote; and drafted plans to jail, or even assassinate, perceived enemies.

To Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, the case is built on lies and weak evidence with the aim of sabotaging his political comeback in next year’s presidential elections. He denies plotting to kill Mr. Lula and says what the police portray as a coup attempt was simply his efforts to study “ways within the Constitution” to remain in power after losing an election he claims was stolen from him.

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Mr. Bolsonaro at a rally earlier this year. He faces years in prison if he is convicted of plotting to overturn the presidential election.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times

The plan to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power went into high gear in late October 2022, after Mr. Lula was declared the winner of the election, according to testimony given to investigators by Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, the president’s personal secretary.

Colonel Cid was in the room during many discussions among those accused of plotting a coup, and his testimony, which is part of a plea deal, is key to the prosecution’s case against Mr. Bolsonaro.

Mr. Bolsonaro first sought to discredit the results, Colonel Cid told the police, and he seized on Brazil’s electronic voting machines, which he had claimed for years were rigged, despite providing no evidence. He began planning an official complaint with electoral authorities, claiming that hundreds of thousands of votes had to be voided because of faulty machines.

Social media amplified claims of fraud, and supporters set up camps in front of army headquarters, demanding that the military nullify the results.

But the plan being hatched by Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, investigators say, went far beyond trying to provoke a popular revolt.

At 9:23 a.m. on Nov. 9., 10 days after Mr. Bolsonaro’s defeat, a document, later found on a cellphone seized by investigators, was created at the presidential offices. It sketched out an extreme plan calling for the “extinction of the winning ticket.”

Mr. Lula and his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, would be assassinated using “poison or chemical agents” or “lethal weaponry, such as explosives,” said the document, written by Gen. Mario Fernandes, a top aide to Mr. Bolsonaro.

A Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who had made decisions aimed at blocking online misinformation from Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies, was to be placed under surveillance, then jailed or killed, according to the document.

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Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former personal secretary, has provided crucial testimony to investigators who assembled the case against the former president. Credit...Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

After a day of editing, General Fernandes printed the proposal at 5:09 p.m., investigators say. Forty minutes later, Gen. Fernandes arrived at the presidential residence, where Mr. Bolsonaro and Colonel Cid were present.

But General Fernandes says the document was nothing more than musings and that he never showed it to anyone, including Mr. Bolsonaro, according to his testimony during a Supreme Court hearing in July.

“I printed it for myself,” he testified. “Soon after, I tore it up.” The visit to the presidential residence, he said, was “a coincidence.”

Three days after the plan was drafted, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mate and former chief of staff, called a meeting at his home to discuss implementing it, Colonel Cid testified. He told police that he and General Braga Netto were joined by two members of an elite special forces unit of the army.

General Braga Netto has denied the meeting ever took place, accusing Colonel Cid of lying to cut a deal with prosecutors.

As plans were made behind closed doors, the camps of protesters in front of military buildings were growing. Mr. Bolsonaro called the demonstrations “the fruit of indignation and feeling of injustice, regarding how the electoral process took place.”

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According to prosecutors, Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mate, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, left, called a meeting at his home to discuss implementing an assassination plot.Credit...Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Bolsonaro’s inner circle continued pursuing their targeting of opponents, investigators say. On Dec. 6, General Fernandes printed the assassination plan at the presidential offices for a second time, according to investigators. Mr. Bolsonaro was in the building, the police say, citing signals from cellphone towers.

At the same time, Mr. Bolsonaro and his aides were also busy trying to recruit the military’s help, investigators say.

Early on Dec. 7, Colonel Cid signed into the presidential residence for an important meeting, according to text messages and entry records recovered by the police. Soon, the leaders of Brazil’s three military branches began arriving.

During an hourlong discussion, Mr. Bolsonaro presented the top military brass a legal decree calling for the declaration of a state of emergency and new, “clean” elections, according to Colonel Cid and what one commander present told the police. He would remain in power until a new vote was held. The decree, which Colonel Cid said Mr. Bolsonaro edited after it had been drafted, also called for the jailing of Justice Moraes.

Mr. Bolsonaro has said, in court and in the media, that he never discussed doing anything illegal at meetings with military leaders but was instead exploring legal measures within the Constitution, including “a state of siege,” as he sought to remain in office while challenging election fraud.

This measure, which temporarily grants special powers to the president, is intended to be used only in times of great crisis or war. And, by then, electoral authorities had already concluded that there were no signs of any irregularities.

At the meeting, the proposed decree drew mixed reactions. The commander of Brazil’s navy supported the plan and placed his troops at Mr. Bolsonaro’s disposal, investigators say. But the leaders of the army and the air force flatly rejected the idea.

After the meeting, the group around Mr. Bolsonaro planned their next steps. On Dec. 8, General Fernandes sent a voice message on WhatsApp to Colonel Cid, recounting a conversation he said he had with Mr. Bolsonaro. The two, he said, had discussed the timing of the assassination plot.

“I said, ‘Come on, President,’” General Fernandes said in the message. “‘We have already missed so many opportunities.’”

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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arriving for his inauguration in January 2023. Prosecutors say the plot to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power included a plan to assassinate Mr. Lula before he took office.Credit...Eraldo Peres/Associated Press

But prosecutors say the failed pitch to the commanders worried the group because their plan to overturn the election would likely not succeed without the military’s support.

So, over the next week, the decree was tweaked and softened, according to Colonel Cid and digital records recovered by police. Plans to arrest Justice Moraes and other high-ranking figures were scrubbed from the text. At a second meeting, on Dec. 14, Mr. Bolsonaro pitched the revised plan to the three military commanders, the colonel said.

Gen. Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, the Army leader, again said no, telling Mr. Bolsonaro that his forces “would not act in anything that exceeded its constitutional authority,” he testified at a Supreme Court hearing. He told Mr. Bolsonaro that his plot carried legal consequences.

After the police found a copy of the decree declaring a state of emergency in Mr. Bolsonaro’s home during a search in February 2024, the former president questioned if it was really a plan to thwart democracy as prosecutors claim. “You call that a coup decree?” Mr. Bolsonaro said. He never edited the document, he added, and only printed it “to see what it was.”

Mr. Bolsonaro has also rejected accusations that he took part in drafting or approving plans to assassinate his rival. “If it had been proposed,” he told the Supreme Court during a hearing in June, “it would have been rejected, with immediate action taken.”

After military commanders refused to become part of any effort to subvert the election, prosecutors say that Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies abruptly dropped their plans.

Two days before the end of his presidential term, Mr. Bolsonaro flew to Florida. Breaking with tradition, he would not hand the presidential sash to Mr. Lula as he was sworn in on Jan. 1, 2023.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters, though, would not give up the fight.

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On Jan. 8, 2023, supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro stormed the presidential offices, the Supreme Court and Brazil’s Congress, an event that echoed the assault on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier.Credit...Adriano Machado/Reuters

A week after Mr. Lula was sworn into office, they stormed the presidential offices, the Supreme Court and Brazil’s Congress in a destructive riot that echoed the assault on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier.

After hours of chaos, the army finally arrived and began arresting the rioters.

In the United States, Mr. Bolsonaro was silent for hours. When he finally spoke, he condemned the destruction but rejected any responsibility. He had always operated, he said, “within the lines of the Constitution.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES  

 

 

 

He Faced Down Trump. Now Comes His Biggest Challenge.

 

 

By Andre Pagliarini

 President Trump seems to have it in for Latin America. Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has Washington pursued a policy of such hostility toward its southern neighbors. Yet one country has emerged as a special target of Mr. Trump’s ire: Brazil. In July he threatened 50 percent tariffs unless the authorities there halted the prosecution of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, accused of plotting against democracy after his 2022 defeat, and overturned a Supreme Court ruling on social media content.

The country’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, flatly refused. Instead, full of righteous indignation, he seized the nationalist mantle and cast himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty against Washington’s heavy hand. “At no point,” he told The Times, “will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.” The eye-watering tariffs were duly imposed, though some exemptions softened the blow. Yet Mr. Lula’s refusal to be bullied and insistence that Brazil play an independent role on the world stage have brought him a bump in support at home.

He’s going to need it. Next year, at age 80, he will seek an unprecedented fourth term when Brazilians go to the polls. The election will not merely decide the fate of the government or Mr. Lula’s legacy. It will determine whether Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, will join the authoritarian chorus reverberating across the Western Hemisphere. For Mr. Lula and his country, the stakes could not be higher. The Brazilian president may have faced down Mr. Trump, but his biggest challenge is still to come.

For much of his third term, Mr. Lula has struggled with middling poll numbers. Despite low unemployment, inflation has been a nagging issue. There has also been a feeling among a considerable slice of the electorate that his foreign policy priorities, such as an early attempt to broker a settlement between Russia and Ukraine, as well as his trenchant criticism of the Israeli government, were quixotic and unproductive.

But things are looking up. A majority approve of his conduct on the world stage, and many back his handling of the spat with Mr. Trump. Recent polls also show him beating every tested matchup for 2026, including the São Paulo governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, a Bolsonarist die-hard seen as Mr. Lula’s most formidable challenger. The public mood, too, has shifted: More Brazilians say they fear a comeback for Mr. Bolsonaro than worry about Mr. Lula staying in power.

The president is now less a fading incumbent than a resilient front-runner. Improving consumer confidence explains some of it, but the broader political picture is just as important. With Mr. Bolsonaro barred from office until 2030, his son relocated to the United States to lobby the White House full time. His efforts appear to have paid off. But the Trump administration’s attempt to cow Brazil into dropping charges that may imminently lead to a long prison sentence for Mr. Bolsonaro has backfired. Despite the Bolsonaro family members’ endeavors to blame Mr. Lula, more Brazilians fault them for Mr. Trump’s costly tariffs.

The wind may be at Mr. Lula’s back, but considerable challenges remain. For one, the coalition that led him back to office three years ago is extremely fragile. His party alone cannot deliver a majority in today’s fragmented political system. Victory next year will require stitching together a broad alliance ranging from the center-left to pragmatic conservatives, the same unwieldy bloc that sustained his comeback in 2022. That means tending constantly to centrist governors, congressional leaders and business groups, whom the current crop of would-be opposition candidates are also courting. Can Mr. Lula convince centrists that democracy is on the ballot even if Mr. Bolsonaro is not?

It remains to be seen, too, how Mr. Trump’s commercial assault on Brazil will play out. Thanks to a concerted effort to diversify its trading partners, Brazil is much less reliant on the U.S. market than it once was. Still, there is a fine line between a principled defense of one’s national interests and political posturing in the face of calamity. Mr. Lula insists that he is perfectly willing to speak with Mr. Trump and has introduced a contingency plan to help with the fallout. For the moment, that is going over well enough. But if the tariffs prove lasting and more painful than expected, his unflinching approach may grate.

The right, meanwhile, is far from finished. Mr. Bolsonaro may be hobbled by legal troubles, but Bolsonarismo — a noxious blend of conspiracy, resentment, religious fervor and nostalgia for military order — is not so easily contained. While 39 percent of voters in a recent poll identified with Mr. Lula’s party, 37 percent favored Mr. Bolsonaro. The most credible heir remains Mr. de Freitas, a technocrat who owes his political career to the former president. Polling competitively, he must decide whether to tack toward the center in next year’s contest or pledge himself ever more faithfully to Mr. Bolsonaro’s reactionary movement.

If that strategic dilemma will define the opposition campaign, Mr. Lula’s will depend on whether he can keep the economy steady enough to blunt attacks on his management and frame the election as a referendum on democracy itself. He has already begun to do so, presenting himself as the bulwark against foreign interference and authoritarian relapse. If he can make 2026 about whether Brazil continues as an independent, pluralist society or veers back toward a pattern of democratic erosion that defers to the interests of the United States, he stands a decent chance.

Mr. Lula has always thrived on long odds. He rose from poverty to the presidency, returned from prison to defeat an incumbent for the first time in Brazil’s postdictatorship history and has outlasted every obituary written for his political career. Yet the election ahead may be his greatest trial yet. Mr. Trump and his allies will surely seek to influence the race in some way, putting the Brazilian incumbent’s famous campaign skills to the test.

Mr. Lula is undoubtedly a legendary figure of the country’s past. Now he must convince voters that he can lead it into the future, too.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

Why R. Crumb Worked With a Biographer

 

 

 

By Molly Young

How fortunate that my first parasocial relationship, as they’re now called, was with a genius. I encountered Robert Crumb’s work at the age of 8 or 9, when his comics could be found — lurking and sweating — in the “Counterculture” section of my local used-book store in San Francisco. Frightening stuff for a kid. Titillating, too. But “Counterculture” was crammed with scary and spicy material. Only Crumb’s work, specifically the autobiographical comics, wormed under my skin.

The worming occurred, I understood much later, because of the material’s intimacy. Few artists have the technical ability, desire, intellect and courage (or berserk compulsion) to render their souls legible on a page — not to mention their kinks, agonies, protruding Adam’s apple and sub-ramrod posture. What I was sensing in my bookstore adventures with Crumb was an early glimmer of what it might mean to truly know a person, with all the joy and terror that such knowing entails. It hardly mattered that I would never meet the man.

Except, 30 years later, I did. One morning in April an elegant figure in a fedora strolled up Avenue A in the East Village. He was instantly recognizable for his spidery hands and Coke-bottle glasses. With him was the author and curator Dan Nadel, who has written “Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,” a superb biography of an artist who, starting in the 1960s, changed the shape of comics in every decade that followed. Nothing escaped the penetrating eye of Crumb, whose work took on liberal hypocrisy, sexual and racial violence, Christianity, drugs, the C.I.A., existential distress, love, consumerism and death.

To help promote the book Crumb had flown over from France, where he has lived since 1991 in a house that his late wife, the influential artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, found for the family.

We met at the restaurant Superiority Burger, where the artist and his biographer slouched in a red booth and deplored the state of modern pants.

“Modern pants are stingily designed,” Crumb, 81, griped. “They have a low waistline and a high crotch, so your junk is all bunched up in there. Are they supposed to be sexy or what?”

“It’s a complicated thing, getting dressed,” Nadel said.

Crumb: “It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

“You want to look like an adult.”

“A dignified adult,” Crumb said. “People these days wear untucked T-shirts with some stupid logo on it and shorts and sneakers. Clown outfits. They look like idiots. Fools. You can’t look intelligent in an outfit like that.”

“Tell that to Zuckerberg,” Nadel said. They chuckled.

In person, as on the page, Crumb has a charmingly rude ’tude and a steel-trap mind.

By the time Nadel conceived of the biography, other writers had been circling, but none had the encyclopedic knowledge of comics history required for the job. “When Dan came forward, he already knew all that stuff,” Crumb said.

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Crumb spoke about his wife and collaborator Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died in 2022. “To be in Aline’s presence, you felt like life was going to be interesting.”Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

Still, the six-year process had a slow start. Nadel wrote a letter to Crumb on stationery and mailed it off. No response. A few months later, he followed up by email. A reply came: If Nadel was serious about the project, he had to come to France. In the days before traveling, Nadel grew so nervous he choked on a piece of lamb and wound up in the emergency room. The trip was postponed.

Eventually he made it to Crumb’s village in southern France. The two had dinner, played records and came to an agreement the following morning: Nadel could write the biography under the condition that he address the (plentiful) charges of sexism and racism against the artist’s work head-on, as Crumb had no interest in brooking a hagiography.

Unlike paintings or novels, comics hit the beholder with a double whammy of visual and verbal expression, and the result can electrify as swiftly as it can alienate. Over the decades, many have been alienated by Crumb, whose Dürer-level hand is attached to a mind that rages and leers as often as it probes and theorizes.

Part of Nadel’s motivation, he said, was to contextualize a figure who had zigzagged from the margins to the mainstream and back. “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form,” he said. “Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.”

To write the book, Nadel submerged himself in a colossal archive. Because Crumb doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, he reads email on printouts provided by his assistant, Maggie. He then composes a response by hand, which Maggie types and sends. Hard copies of both messages are then filed in boxes. Nadel estimated that he had read between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of correspondence alone.

“You buried me in paper,” Nadel said over coffee and French fries. “I didn’t know how I’d swim through it all.”

“What amazes me is that you did.”

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There’s gold in them thar rubbish bags. Nadel and Crumb examine a found object — and decide to keep it.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

After lunch the two went for a walk. Despite earlier flirtations with spring, the temperature had sunk to 34 degrees and New York’s organisms were suffering from confusion: The daffodils drooped, the humans shivered in light jackets and only one of dozens of cherry blossom trees in the neighborhood had mustered itself into bloom.

On East Fifth Street Crumb spotted a faux-African statue buried in a heap of trash bags. He strolled into the rubbish and lifted the statue, brushing away coffee grounds and a lemon peel. “This is so wacky,” he said in delight, tucking the statue under his arm.

Next on the itinerary was a visit to the apartment of Crumb’s friend and bandmate John Heneghan, who is a collector of rare 78s. Heneghan answered the door with his wife, Eden Brower, who sings and plays ukulele and guitar in Eden & John’s East River String Band, along with Crumb and other guests.

“I found this on the street,” Crumb announced, presenting the statue as a house gift. It was admired and displayed in the apartment kitchen.

The three men and Brower, who wore an ethereal pink skirt, settled into the living room and stared down Heneghan’s collection of records: rows and rows of fragile discs in brown sleeves, all neatly labeled and arranged beneath portraits of bluesmen by Crumb.

They played Daddy Stovepipe, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, Gus Cannon, Bradley Kincaid. Crumb closed his eyes and hummed along, knees bouncing, ecstatic in aural submission.

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The gang laughed when Crumb revealed his (negative) opinion of the film “A Complete Unknown,” which stars the actor Timothée Chalamet — “Timothée Whatshisface” to Crumb — as Bob Dylan.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

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A gallery of heroes — some in two dimensions, some in three — at Heneghan and Brower’s apartment.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

It was time for the journalist to see herself out, leaving the aficionados to their mournful jug tones and melodic plaints. Earlier in the day Crumb had confessed bafflement toward the ongoing interest of the media, or biographers for that matter, in his life.

“There’s no more public person than me,” he said, alluding to decades of radiological self-exposure. “Everyone knows more than they care to know about my private life.”

“Why did you agree to let me do this book?” Nadel asked.

Crumb thought about it for a moment, worrying the fabric on his fine trousers.

“I guess I felt sorry for you,” he decided. They both cracked up.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

VITRA - The Brazilian Artist Who Listens to Minerals

 

  

 

By Siddhartha Mitter

The car sped southward from Belo Horizonte, the highway climbing out from Brazil’s third-largest city into the surrounding hills. Red dust from oncoming convoys of heavy trucks drifted onto the windshield. On board, Luana Vitra — one of Brazil’s fastest-rising young artists and the offspring of a long lineage of manual workers in this rugged, iron-mining region in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais — was offering a quick précis of the land and local temperament.

“We have a culture that is made from iron,” Vitra said. “What our ancestors lived inside the mines made us the way we are now.” People in Minas Gerais, she said, were shaped by a legacy of watching out for others and forming survival strategies in mines where labor was exploited and collapses were frequent. Her grandfather, she added, attributed his longevity to the prayer to Saint George — who is associated in Afro-Brazilian religion with Ogun, the spirit of iron and metallurgy — that he kept tucked in his helmet. “Iron is very much in my history,” she said.

The daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, Vitra grew up in Contagem, a city in the Belo Horizonte agglomeration known for its concentration of heavy industry. Now, at 30, she has emerged as one of the most visible and distinctive — in Brazil and abroad — of a wave of young Black Brazilian artists who are finding new languages with which to explore their histories and connect to the world.

She places her region’s materials — particularly iron ore and copper — at the heart of elegant, often room-scaled installations, their characteristic reddish tones set against deep blue fabric or painted backgrounds. The compositions extend to beads, ceramics, glass and clean-drawn lines on various surfaces. They favor symmetry, with a ritual feel that nods to Afro-Brazilian religion — the metal arrows, the talismans — but also to broader and nonspecific sacred geometries.

Shaping every installation, she said, is an “equation” — not mathematical but metaphorical, calibrating the emotional architecture that results from particular material combinations, as if working from “a periodic table with feelings connected to minerals.”

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Two of Luana Vitra’s works at SculptureCenter: “Dança” (“Dance”), foreground, and “Terremoto” (“Earthquake”), background, both from 2025.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

This season, Vitra — who has already shown in prestigious venues like the 2023 São Paulo and 2025 Sharjah biennials — has taken over the main space of SculptureCenter in Queens, through July 28, with “Amulets,” one of her largest installations to date, and one that is characteristically precise.

Metal arrows rise from urns or dangle from textile-swaddled stems. They pierce iron rocks or hold the center of anchor bowls set with crystals and stones. Clay vessels are wrapped in white fabric and studded with nails. Iron, crystals and gemstones — selenite, sodalite, kyanite — are arranged on rectangles of sand. Walls of feathers, dyed white and deep blue, soften the space.

Though the materials were assembled on site, they were shipped from Minas Gerais — a prerequisite for Vitra, for whom local minerals carry histories as specific as her own. Her region’s iron tells its own distinct story; her position is to listen and channel this information. “I’m interested in the perspective of the matter,” she said. “I’m thinking about its desire, trying to understand its subjectivity.”

For Jovanna Venegas, the SculptureCenter curator who organized the show, it’s Vitra’s insistent commitment to her terrain that makes her art resonate beyond the region. “So much of Luana’s work is about Minas,” Venegas said. “It departs, of course, into other dimensions, of materiality and sculpture and spirituality. But it was important that the iron come from there.” (Only the sand was sourced in New York, Venegas said.)

On the road, Vitra noted a row of trees along the highway. They concealed an enormous open-pit iron mine, Capão Xavier, one of many in this area, known as the Iron Quadrangle, whose scale is undeniable on satellite images even if hidden at ground level.

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A detail from Vitra’s “Terremoto.”Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

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Walls of dyed feathers soften the space.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

“They’ll plant trees to block it,” she said. For all the verdant beauty, she said, many of the surrounding mountains were similarly ravaged. “That’s the reality of the landscape here,” she said. “Everything is super beautiful, but completely destroyed.”

The minerals, she noted, were here long before humans intervened. “The minerals exist,” she added. “Sometimes I think that all we do is disorganize everything. Other times I think we are part of it: We have these minerals inside us. Still, when I look at the mines, I can get a bit angry about humanity.”

Minas Gerais — the name means “general mines” — has been an extraction zone since its first gold rush in the 17th century. It became Brazil’s largest destination for enslaved labor, a practice that was only formally abolished in 1888. Today the region produces half of Brazil’s iron, plus gold, zinc, lithium and niobium. The environmental fallout includes horrors like the Brumadinho dam disaster of 2019, where 272 villagers perished in a toxic surge of liquefied iron-mining waste when an iron-ore tailings dam collapsed.

Vitra won’t look away. But where some artists might channel such material into visual investigations rich with documentary footage and interactive databases — think of the work of Forensic Architecture on petrochemical pollution and its disproportionate racial impact in south Louisiana, for example — her method is at once more personal and more abstract. Minerals, she argues, shape us in more ways than economics or public health can grasp.

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Luana Vitra’s “Equilibrio” (“Equilibrium”), 2025. The materials were assembled on site but were shipped from Minas Gerais, a southeastern state in Brazil.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

For Hélio Menezes, former director of the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo and a curator of the 2023 São Paulo biennial — where Vitra’s installation included silver and copper canaries, alluding to both the danger of suffocation in mines and dreams of freedom — she has “dismantled in a very sophisticated way” any remaining art-world assumptions that work by Black artists — particularly Black female artists — be principally figuration or self portraiture.

Instead, Menezes characterized her work as a way to imagine a relationship beyond exploitation for humans and minerals. “When she researches metals and minerals, she thinks of them not in economic terms, but asks if we could speak their language, what would they tell us? She opens a speculation on how to create a vocabulary, a common language between metals, minerals and us.”

Vitra prepared the SculptureCenter show in residence at JA.CA, an art center in Nova Lima, outside Belo Horizonte, built from colorfully accessorized shipping containers; one served as her apartment, up a staircase with a mine view. When we met in April, the work was en route to New York, but she pointed out leftover materials — chunks of hematite rock, rust-red with gray speckles — and she estimated their iron content and where on the mountain they came from.

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Iron-rich rocks used for Luana Vitra's sculptures, seen at the art center in Minas Gerais where she prepared her new works.Credit...via the artist; Photo by Nina Morais

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A supply of metal arrows, a frequent element in Vitra’s installations.Credit...via the artist; Photo by Nina Morais

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Another detail from “Terremoto” with clay pots arranged in a cross. Vitra’s work is both personal and abstract; at home in Brazil, she said, “When I look at the mines, I can get a bit angry about humanity.”Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

The Minas Gerais terrain and history have inspired distinctive art practices. One of Vitra’s teachers at the art school of the State University of Minas Gerais was Solange Pessoa, whose sculptures often refer to the area’s natural materials and its architecture and archaeology. Around town, Vitra often saw Paulo Nazareth, the multidisciplinary artist who journeys by foot and bus across the Americas when not in Palmital, a hardscrabble hillside settlement where he hosts community gatherings; he became a mentor and friend.

But as Vitra’s own visual language took shape, she found a key prompt at home. Amid her father’s bric-a-brac on their terrace were rusted metal cans — improvised planters from a project he once envisioned of planting trees in the neighborhood. Years of oxidation had left them jagged; when they were flattened, Vitra found, they resembled ridges and tree lines.

It was as if the manufactured product, now decaying, yearned to go home. This insight — part material, part poetic — would birth “Desejo-Ruína” (“Ruin Desire”), a series of works debuting her artistic engagement with iron. “When natural materials are removed from their origin,” she wrote in a description of that series, “they carry within themselves a desire for ruin, which is what returns them to their original state.”

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Installation view of “Giro,” 2023, Luana Vitra’s ongoing exhibition at Inhotim, the contemporary art museum and botanic garden in Minas Gerais state, Brazil.Credit...Victor Galvão

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The series “Desejo-Ruina” (“Desire-Ruin”) is made from rust-eroded metal cans that Luana Vitra flattened into wall-mounted pieces, having observed that their jagged forms recalled mountain ridges and tree lines. It marked the start of her work with metals and minerals.Credit...via Tomie Ohtake Institute

Nowadays Vitra operates at large scale. (In addition to SculptureCenter, she has an ongoing installation at Inhotim, the art institution and botanic garden outside Belo Horizonte, that fills a former wood shop; later this year she will appear in the Thailand Biennale, in Phuket.) But her relationship to the materials remains intimate, attentive to the poetic and spiritual possibilities connecting them.

“Copper is softer than iron,” she said, as an example. “When you touch it, if your hands are warm, it will warm very fast; iron will not.” Properties like density, resilience, conductivity, carry meanings far beyond economic use. Thus, to connect copper with clay is to join a material that is conductive to one that isolates. “Both energies are necessary for transcendence,” she said.

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The artist, walking through her installation, “Amulets,” through July 28 at SculptureCenter. “I want to understand how the invisible moves,” she said.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

Running through Vitra’s project is the belief that relations among beings and with nature can be far richer and more reciprocal than the violence of extraction. This is, in some ways, an age-old notion in many traditions. But for Gabi Ngcobo, a South African curator who runs Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam — where she held an exhibition by Vitra in 2024 — it’s also a growing interest, driven by young artists in the Global South.

“Luana has an ability to translate ancestral intelligences,” Ngcobo said. “I see that as a movement of a lot of artists, in Brazil but also on the continent in Africa, who are not shy to go toward these questions in order to understand something about the future.” “It’s very futuristic to use these technologies that were stripped away from us to reconnect or remember,” Ngcobo added.

Having refined her method in Minas Gerais, Vitra is exploring other knowledge systems — of Zulu bead-makers in South Africa, weavers in Ghana. “I want to understand how the invisible moves,” she said, paraphrasing the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva: “Our work is to return complexity to the world.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force

 

 EZRA KLEIN

You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and depending on where and how you focus your eyes — maybe you’re looking at a vase or two faces — the image keeps flickering back and forth? Looking at the Trump administration is like that for me — though the flickering is between: This is democracy — the American people are getting what they voted for, good and hard. And: This is authoritarianism — or at least the road to authoritarianism.

I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He’s just doing what he promised. He’s tripling ICE’s budget. He’s funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In L.A., protesters tried to obstruct him, so Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington to do something about it, to show Americans that he’s doing something about it.

I don’t like any of this. I certainly didn’t vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans voted for, the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel. So I can see that picture.

And then it flickers. My eyes refocus. And I see the evisceration of due process. I see detention centers being built where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people inside. I see men in masks refusing to identify themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they’re an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital.

What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot?

In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?

Because that’s the other picture I see — the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control.

And I wonder: Are these pictures even different? Trump promised all of this. It is possible to destroy democracy somewhat democratically.

Radley Balko is a journalist who has written about policing and criminal justice for decades. He’s the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces,” and he writes the terrific Substack The Watch, where he has been tracking the militarization and the escalation of law enforcement under Donald Trump.

Ezra Klein: Radley Balko, welcome to the show.

Radley Balko: Thanks for having me on.

I want to start here by following the money a bit. The Atlantic reported that in Donald Trump’s 2026 budget you had the F.B.I. seeing a big budget cut. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: a big cut. The Drug Enforcement Administration: again, big cut.

At the same time, they’re passing a bill to triple the budget of ICE to all-in add $170 billion to immigration enforcement.

What’s behind this pattern of the big crime agencies seeing their budgets cut and immigration enforcement entering a kind of budgetary expansion we have never seen before?

I think it’s just a continuation of the hollowing out of institutions that we’ve seen over the last six months.

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government. So I think Trump sees those two as the most loyal to him. Also, obviously, the mass deportations are going to ensure that those two agencies remain relevant throughout his administration.

The F.B.I. has had a long, proud history and culture. There are a lot of stains on that history and culture, but it’s an institution that has prided itself on its independence. Same with the A.T.F., which is often bucked by Republican administrations. I’ve certainly had my problems with the D.E.A. over the years, but there is a separate culture and sense of independence there.

I think this an effort to build up the two federal policing agencies that Trump sees as most loyal and deferential to him.

One quote that I came across while I was preparing for this episode from the journalist Caitlin Dickerson — you know these things and then you realize you don’t really know them, you’re not tracking their scale.

She writes that it makes the budget of the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies:

larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — just one component of the Department of Homeland Security — is getting more money than any other law-enforcement agency in America.

We’ve already seen pretty big changes in how ICE is acting. We’ve seen pretty big changes around how border police are acting.

You’ve tracked internal policing for a long time. What is different about what we’ve seen over the past months of the Trump administration versus what we were seeing from them, say, five years ago?

What we’re seeing now are the tactics, operations and policies that, over the last 20 years, I refrained, or tried to restrain myself, from warning about because it would sound too unhinged.

I’ve warned for a long time about police agencies becoming too militarized, too aggressive and too us versus them. Militarized both in the sense of the equipment that they use but also in the mentality that they bring to the job. But it was always in response to a real threat. So it happened during the crack epidemic, which killed a lot of people. It happened again after Sept. 11, when you had these attacks on American soil. Homeland security started equipping police departments across the country with this military-style police gear.

What we’re seeing right now is a response to a manufactured crisis. I mean, yes, crime is real, and crime is higher in D.C. than in other cities. But there is no crisis in D.C. — as we’ve all documented, crime is down pretty significantly there.

In Los Angeles, there were a few incidents of violence — or more like property destruction during the original protest against immigration enforcement. But it wasn’t anything different than you see in a big city at any given time, particularly during the summer.

So what we’re seeing is this massive increase in aggressiveness and brutality — in response to a crisis that is completely of Trump’s own making. What we’re seeing is not a good-faith effort to go after the worst of the worst. If you look at polling, overwhelmingly, that’s what people wanted. They wanted them to go after people who had violent criminal histories and criminal records.

But you can’t hit the figures that they wanted by just targeting the dangerous people. Dangerous people don’t make themselves available to ICE — they hide. It’s a hell of a lot easier just to send a couple of ICE agents to a courthouse to arrest people as they show up — as they’re supposed to be doing — for their hearings.

So that’s what we’re seeing. It’s a lot easier to go to Home Depot and just massively racially profile and arrest anybody you see, and then sort through the paperwork later. It’s a lot easier, as we saw here in Nashville, to just pull over every driver who looks Latino. If they can prove their citizenship, you’ll let them go. Or if they’re white, you’ll let them go. And if they can’t, you detain and arrest them and send them through the process.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the way Stephen Miller has gone into meetings with the head of ICE and other agencies, lashing into them for not deporting enough people.

They want to get deportation numbers up around a million, which is very difficult to do without creating a lot of tearing into the social fabric. But there has been a sense and a fair amount of internal reporting that one of the things happening here is the heads of these operations are just getting hammered by top officials in the Trump administration for not having their numbers up. They’re demanding they hit a quota.

Yes. That’s my understanding of what’s happening, also. In fact, in Los Angeles, the raids on Home Depot parking lots came after a rant by Stephen Miller. That’s how they interpreted what he wanted done.

Stephen Miller is a menace. He’s been very clear about what his intentions are. He has been very clear that he does not believe the United States should be a place that takes in refugees from other countries. He has been very clear that he thinks the United States should be a primarily Western culture country. We’ve read investigative journalism about his being influenced by white supremacists. He has not pretended to hide who he is.

The personnel numbers that they’ve set for ICE in order to meet the mass deportation figures, the goals that they’ve set — they’re going to have to hire a lot of people. And they’re going to have to lower standards, which they’re already doing.

But also, they’re going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ICE — terrorizing families, arresting children and pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They’re going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say: That’s what I want to do for a living.

Then we’re also seeing these pretty explicit appeals to white supremacy and white culture. I think in one of the social media posts, they had said something like: Defend the homeland — join ICE.

Is that the one with the painting of a very Western cowboy family cradling this extremely white baby?

Western expansion. Right.

The caption and the photo or illustration really told a tale — even if you’re not out there looking for dog whistles.

There’s another one of white settlers chasing Native Americans off the land and a kind of a white angel hovering over the landscape — which history books actually teach as an embodiment of the worst excesses of Western expansionism. They’re embracing these ideas that we’ve always looked at as kind of a regrettable part of our history.

Then there was another one where they explicitly refer to a textbook that was written by an unapologetic white supremacist. You have to know that name and that book to get that, but those are the people they’re appealing to. Why do you make that reference, if it’s going to be opaque to most people? You’re appealing to people who know what the reference is.

So anybody who is left in these agencies who still takes an institutional view of policing — the idea that police should be accountable, that they should serve these communities and not occupy them — they’re going to be overwhelmed by these new people. I think whatever culture of community service was left inside of these agencies is pretty quickly going to be overwhelmed as these new hires start to take effect.

The other thing we’re seeing is, obviously, the masks. And there’s an anecdote I’ve told a lot over the years about the writer Michael Ledeen, who around 2007 or 2008 was one of the neoconservatives agitating for war with Iran.

There was a series of photos of a cocaine raid in Tehran that came out, and all the officers in the raid were wearing masks. Ledeen wrote at the time: When the agents of the government hide their faces, it speaks volumes about the relationship between the government and the people. He was saying that this is a sign of a totalitarian state. And now it’s just routine. We’re seeing this all over the country.

So I think we’re in a pretty terrifying spiral right now. I have tried over the course of my career to be levelheaded and refrain from expressing things in too dire of terms. But I think we have entered kind of the worst-case scenario, and it’s hard to see how we get out of it.

What is the worst-case scenario?

I think the worst-case scenario is that Trump sends active duty military troops into any city that displeases him — any city where there are protests.

During his first administration, we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act. He wanted to send active duty military in to put down the George Floyd protests. And he openly floated the idea of just shooting the protesters.

To be fair, he said shooting them in the knee. I guess it’s not as bad as it could be. What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.

I’m a journalist, not a historian, but I’m a student of history. There aren’t very many countries in which the figurative political head of the country assembled his own personal paramilitary force that was loyal only to him where things turned out well. So that’s where I think we are right now.

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Let me try to take their stated perspective on this for a moment. You talked about this as a manufactured crisis. D.C.’s crime rates — we can talk about those in a minute. I agree that it’s a manufactured crisis — at least for the purposes of their takeover of D.C.

But Donald Trump ran for president in 2024 saying to the country that we have seen record illegal immigration into this country — which was true, actually — and that America is buckling under the weight of all these illegal immigrants — which is arguable. It’s not my view, but it’s their view. And he promised the country mass deportations. He said it aloud — clearly and repeatedly — and he won the election.

We’re here talking about paramilitaries. But what they’re doing is simply following through, in their view, on what the country voted for. Mass deportations are going to be ugly. They’re difficult. They’re violent. They require not just shutting down the border but ejecting the people already here. That’s going to require more ICE agents. It’s going to require confrontations. But this is not something outside the boundaries of what should happen after an election. This is exactly what they ran on. And now they’re just following through as they told us they would.

I think my response to that would be that we have the Bill of Rights for a reason. You can’t vote away basic constitutional rights. They aren’t subject to the whims of a majority.

What we’re seeing is suspensions of due process for people who are here and undocumented. We’re seeing people being arrested when they show up for their hearings. When they’re abiding by the law, doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

The Trump administration has revoked protected status for refugees from countries who were fleeing violence, political persecution, famine and natural disasters all over the world — and is now detaining and moving to deport them.

These are people who came here legally — who were invited here, in fact. They’re firing immigration judges who aren’t ruling the way they want them to rule. They’re freely admitting that they’re racially profiling.

My bottom line is: The government is not allowed to start violating our basic constitutional rights just because people voted for that in an election — or thought they were voting for that.

I’ve found it a little shocking to watch them sending masked agents to courthouses where immigrants are showing up and participating in the system exactly as the system has asked them to participate. These are clearly not people hiding. They are walking into the courthouse, even knowing that in recent weeks and months, people have been yanked out of courthouses. And they’re being arrested before they talk to a judge. They’re being arrested during their process.

What exactly is the policy here? You are allowed to go to a hearing and claim asylum. That’s the legal pathway. Have they decided they don’t qualify for asylum or they no longer get hearings? Beneath what they’re doing, what is the process they are asserting that should exist?

This gets into the weeds of immigration law. I’m going to tell you my understanding of it with the caveat that I’m not a lawyer.

As I understand it, these are people who, during the Biden administration, went through the proper channels to request asylum — whether it was through the app that you could use or, in some cases, people who just crossed the border and immediately turned themselves in and said: I’m requesting asylum.

So they were entered into the asylum process. But because we can’t hold or detain everyone who’s requesting asylum, they’re released on the condition that they show up for these hearings as their case progresses.

So what’s happening is that these people are showing up for their asylum hearings. The government is saying at these asylum hearings: We’re going to dismiss the government’s case against this person. So at that point, the person is no longer someone who went through the proper channels to legally request asylum. At that point, they are now just someone who is undocumented and here without authorization. So now ICE is legally permitted to detain them and sweep them up because they’re no longer in the asylum process.

Now as I understand it, that is legally dubious, to say the least. It’s being challenged in federal court. But it’s a way for them to apprehend these people. And it’s a way for them to boost their deportation figures.

Among other things, it seems like it would make a lot of immigrants go to ground. If that’s what you get for showing up, why show up?

It’s a very similar and really scary thing we just saw with the I.R.S. now sharing its taxpayer data with ICE. One of the big arguments you always hear on the right is that undocumented people are receiving government benefits and not paying taxes.

But that’s not true. They do pay taxes. They pay all the payroll taxes.

So by going after them, to the I.R.S., you’re now punishing the people who are paying taxes, who are giving back. You’re going to encourage people now to find ways to avoid that.

What they’re doing is they’re prioritizing the cruelty. They want the images, they want the video, they want the social media hits, and they want to project to their hardest-core supporters. They want to fulfill that kind of thirst and glee for seeing cruelty done to people who they think are, as Trump himself put it, less than human — people who poison the blood of the country.

It seems to me they want to inspire fear. There have been all these videos of people asking ICE agents: What’s your badge number? What authority are you here under?

And in many cases these people are masked up. What is more frightening to a public than masked agents of the state operating without clear authorities or oversight, who seem able to do whatever they want to you?

The other reason they cite for the masking is that people are doxxing ICE agents — publishing their names. That’s not illegal. There’s no crime against publishing the names of law enforcement officers — particularly those who are doing this aggressive policing.

They keep pointing to these numbers, and the number keeps growing. I think the last I saw was a 400 percent increase in assaults on ICE officers.

Philip Bump and some other journalists have broken that down. I can’t remember the exact figures, but it’s gone from a two-digit figure to maybe a three-digit figure.

When you consider the number of altercations and encounters between ICE agents and residents, it actually seems pretty low.

I understand the masks as a tool of fear. Police get attacked. Police can fear being doxxed. But they show up in their uniforms and look a certain way because they’re meant to project authority.

But they’re also meant to seem like part of the community. People you could talk to. People you could go up to and ask a question. People who are there serving you.

But the policy is not just cruelty. The policy is fear.

Part of projecting fear is flaunting your unaccountability — that you’re above the law.

One of the first things Trump said when he sent the National Guard into D.C. was that he specifically told them when he takes over the D.C. police department, police officers will be able to do “whatever the hell they want.”

Federal agents are almost completely immune from civil liability. There’s a case called Bivens from the early 1970s where the court created a way for people to sue federal agents for violating their constitutional rights. In 2022, the current court basically all but completely overturned that ruling. Gorsuch, in fact, in a concurring opinion, said: We might as well admit what we’re doing here, which is we’re obliterating Bivens.

So there’s no civil way to hold federal agents accountable for violating people’s rights in these cases. In theory, they could be held criminally accountable, but that would require Trump’s Justice Department to bring charges against them. We know that’s not going to happen.

There’s no criminal liability. There’s no civil liability. So what’s left? I mean the only way that you can hold these agents accountable in any way for the displays of abuse and cruelty that we’re seeing is social opprobrium or social shaming. By wearing masks, they’re removing that last remaining bit of accountability.

Tell me about another piece of the institutional attack, which is the attack on people who work with immigrants.

You had a newsletter about a lawyer who contacted you, who had been asked to give some pro bono advice to some immigrants who were facing deportation and what happened to him.

Can you tell that story? What do you understand happening on the more macro level?

What happened to this lawyer is that he doesn’t work in immigration law. He did real estate law — I think title defense or title insurance. But he walked into a gas station that he walked into regularly, where he knew the people who worked there.

And he had previously, I think, given some advice to an immigrant family, and they said: There’s this other family where the father was recently detained in a workplace raid. They’re worried — could you just stop by and give them some basic advice?

So he did that. I don’t have my story in front of me, so I’m not sure about the exact timeline. But I think it was a couple days later — he said he was working at home on his VPN, and the VPN went down.

A way of accessing the internet.

Yes, it’s a way of anonymizing yourself when you’re out on the internet. His VPN went down, and then he got a knock on the door.

He went and opened the door, and he saw two people who identified themselves as law enforcement — but wouldn’t say which agency, wouldn’t give him their names or their badge numbers.

He basically asked them what it was about, and they asked if he had recently given some advice to undocumented people.

At that point he said he wanted to talk to a lawyer, and he wasn’t going to talk to them anymore. And he shut the door.

It’s a disturbing story because you’ve got ICE agents — presumably ICE, though I guess it could be any federal or state agency — this was in Texas — coming to someone’s private home. Clearly that meant they had to look up his address.

He had a door camera. Presumably they saw that and decided they didn’t want to be on camera. And so they shut down the Wi-Fi so it wouldn’t work.

This is speculation. I guess it’s possible that his Wi-Fi coincidentally went down at exactly the time that they came to his door. Seems unlikely.

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He was disturbed by this. So he told his employer about it and said he was worried about it. And the response he got from his own employer was pretty cold. Clearly, they didn’t want to be dragged into some fight with the Trump administration over immigration. He eventually lost his job — specifically because he made a big deal out of this internally.

That’s one incident that’s pretty, pretty disturbing, I think. But beyond that I’m currently working on a book about public defense and public defenders — which is not going to be at all timely when it comes out, given everything that’s going on. I’m not sure it’s a topic anyone is going to want to read about. But part of that was I embedded myself in a lot of public defender offices all over the country. Some of the better, more-equipped public defender offices have immigration defense. You’re not entitled to a public defender if you’re detained on immigration charges. But a lot of cities provide it anyway, just out of a sense of obligation.

Before Trump’s taking office, I did interviews with a lot of these attorneys. After Trump took office, none of those groups wanted to talk to me on the record anymore. They are all terrified. They do not want to be on the Trump administration’s radar.

Trump is going after these groups that provide aid to immigrants in a lot of different ways. One is they’re shuttering down all federal funding for these groups. So that’s done.

Trump is targeting student loan forgiveness for public service. And judging by a lot of his executive orders, it’s pretty vague. But what it seems to be doing is saying that if you go into one of these areas of public service that we don’t like, where you’re defending criminals and illegal immigrants, we’re not going to forgive your student loans.

Public defense is heavily reliant on people who go into that to take advantage of student loan forgiveness. So if you take that away, these groups are not going to be able to staff themselves anymore. So they’re really trying to erode the ability of these immigrants to obtain representation.

And I will say, if you talk to people who do this work, in their studies of this, the odds of your getting a favorable outcome in an immigration hearing significantly improve if you have an attorney than if you don’t.

They have also been going after big law firms for what kind of pro bono work they do and don’t do and shifting that.

I think it was in a piece from you or someone else: Paul Weiss, which is one of the very, very big white-shoe law firms, did a lot of pro bono work. Now if you look at what kind of pro bono work they do, immigration has disappeared from what they say on the website.

Maybe one of these isn’t that big of a deal. But you look at it in totality, and you’re trying to destroy the structures that keep some amount of legalism around this.

And now you have the construction of these massive new detention centers. It’s worth saying that under U.S. law here — and I think this is still how they describe it — immigration detention is supposed to be nonpunitive. You’re not being sent to prison.

But they’re building these things that seem like holes where it’s very hard to get reached by a lawyer. Your family doesn’t always know where you are. You get moved around.

What do we know about that buildup in camps?

On the one hand, it’s something that they were very open about. Stephen Miller talked about opening tent prisons along the border, just huddling people in them.

It is terrifying to me. It’s not even just terrifying that they’re doing it. What’s terrifying to me is the rush to be on the cutting edge of this. To show your fealty and loyalty to this administration.

It’s things like: In Indiana, the lieutenant governor giddily announced the opening of a detention center there that they were going to call the Speedway Slammer — because it was near where the Indy 500 was going to be. The governor of Nebraska just announced the Cornhusker Clink.

We’re coming up with these cute alliterative names so that we can — what? Sell merchandise?

This is all coming from Alligator Alcatraz, I assume?

Right.

I mean, we’ve memeified fascism.

Yeah.

And you could say fascism always memeifies itself. But it has created an exulting in not just cruelty but a gleeful obliteration of any kind of process or sense of restraint. The sense that maybe we need to do these policies but we do them with a heavy heart — or that we can make mistakes, so we need to make sure that those mistakes can be easily corrected and people can talk to lawyers.

As I understand it, you come out of the libertarian movement. This was not a crazily left-coded set of ideas.

In fact, I remember not that long ago how much the attack on the left was: There’s not enough due process when you’re getting canceled by the woke mob. Not enough due process in universities.

And now, you’re looking at the actual state itself just eviscerating due process.

You could go even further than that. I think there’s a sentiment that I am increasingly seeing on Facebook — and occasionally when I just check in to see the horror show that is Twitter or X — that due process itself is woke now. [Laughs.] The idea of letting people who are here illegally have access to the courts is just beyond the pale to people. There’s no understanding that’s always the way it’s been.

And like you said, this is a civil violation that we are now treating — I mean, literally, we disappeared people to a prison in El Salvador without letting them ever consult the courts. And later, we find out that I think at least half of them had no prior criminal record of any kind in any country.

You saw during the Republican National Convention — with those mass deportation signs — the sneering joy that people got at the idea.

Those of us who were alarmed by all this would talk about: So you’re OK with pulling grandmothers out of their homes? And going into schools and arresting people when they’re there to pick up their children and isolating their children?

And it was: Yes, we love that idea. There was absolute glee at the thought of this.

I don’t know how we got to the point where 35 percent to 40 percent of the country thinks using politics as a way to impose physical harm on people who they think are on the other side or enemies is standard political discourse now. But it’s a pretty scary place to be.

I think that opens up one of the fundamental questions for a lot of us. I have this line from another show — that authoritarianism is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

So one way of looking at this is that there is a profound and, I would say, barbaric escalation against undocumented illegal immigrants. That Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, JD Vance and that administration have a view that America is being destroyed by an invasion — which is the word they use about illegal immigrants — and they’re going to do everything they need to do to turn that back. But that’s all it is: To the extent that it’s here and unevenly distributed, it’s around a group of people who are not here legally.

But then there’s this other way of imagining it: When you see movements like this, they often start with one group of undesirables — and they expand out. Who is on the other side? Who is the danger to saving this country? And it seems to me that one thing we’re watching in recent months is a series of escalations.

Let’s start with what happened in Los Angeles. You had the Trump administration deploying the National Guard and a certain number of Marines. This was done over the objection of the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California.

That’s not normal.

It has never happened before. The last time that active duty troops — not National Guard — were deployed in the U.S. was during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. That was at the invitation of the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles. So what Trump did in Los Angeles has never happened before.

What led to Donald Trump deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles? What was his stated rationale?

The argument in court was that immigration enforcement is a federal power pretty explicitly in the Constitution, and that these protests were preventing federal immigration officers from doing their jobs.

Now there was not a lot of evidence of that. There were protests. But there’s not a lot of evidence that there was violence or threats against immigration agents. There were people winding up at courthouses expressing their opposition to the way the Trump administration was carrying these out.

But the court took the administration’s argument at face value — that deploying these guard troops was necessary to let these immigration agents do their jobs.

The Ninth Circuit bought that argument. Well, the Trump administration’s argument went even further. Which was that as long as the president says that there’s a need to send in the National Guard — that’s not even reviewable by the courts.

And so the Ninth Circuit at least said: No — that’s not true. We can review, it is reviewable. But in this case, we find the argument plausible, and so we’re going to let you do it.

Kristi Noem publicly said that the reason the National Guard was in California was to liberate the city of Los Angeles from its socialist leadership.

I want to read her quote really quickly. Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security:

We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

Those words “liberate the city” from its duly elected Democratic leadership at the state and local level. When I say there’s one version where you look at these and say: Well, this is an immigration policy. That doesn’t sound like an immigration policy. That sounds like something quite different.

And it’s a sentiment that Trump has said repeatedly, too. That he’s going to take over blue cities. He’s going to set policy, particularly crime policy, in blue cities.

So she says that. And this isn’t some low-ranking administration official. This isn’t some MAGA person who can be easily disavowed. This is the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s not Laura Loomer.

Right, exactly. Although Loomer, at this point, may have more power than Noem. [Laughs.]

Fair enough, yes.

But if she had spoken out of turn, if she had been caught up in the moment and regretted saying things in that particular way, she could have retracted that, and the administration could have distanced itself. It could have said: No, that is not our policy. But they didn’t retract it, and the Ninth Circuit didn’t even consider it because it wasn’t part of the record.

So I think this is a really important point, because there’s this dual path that we see in authoritarian states, where they justify these massive power grabs with a plausible — if not persuasive — but at least kind of legally-based argument. That’s what they argue in court.

And so this dual doctrine rests on this assumption that the executive is going to be arguing in good faith.

An assumption that the courts make.

Right, that the courts make. So they tend to take the arguments at face value, even when there’s ample evidence to the contrary. Even when the administration has shown its willingness to just brazenly oblige the court in other cases, you have to show in each case that they’re lying. Each case, one at a time.

But at some point, I think the courts have to acknowledge what the administration is arguing in court. And to be frank, what they’re arguing in court is now to the point of outrageous — and often easily disprovable, as well.

On the ground, they’re doing the absolute worst version of this policy.

Just because it’s so grim, I want to note that this dual state theory of fascism is written by a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany. It’s an analysis of how Nazi Germany worked as it built to what it became.

Exactly. And it’s so consistent across other authoritarian states. This is part of every authoritarian playbook.

I think one of the really damaging things that came out of U.S. v. Trump — the decision that gave Trump this broad, wide-ranging immunity — was: There’s no downside for Trump to try to do these really extreme, extra-constitutional things. There’s no punishment if he goes too far. At the worst, what happens is maybe three or four years down the road, a high-ranking federal court tells him he can’t do that anymore. But in the meantime, he gets to do it for the most part. There have been a few injunctions, but they tend not to last.

So there’s no penalty for going too far. The way our system is set up right now, the president can kind of do whatever he wants. He can take whatever power grabs he wants. And the worst thing that’s going to happen is that maybe a few years later a court says: Nah, you can’t do that anymore.

What did the National Guard and the Marines do while they were in Los Angeles? Some are still there, I should say.

Mostly, they just provided support for the federal agencies. I think there was maybe one instance where some active duty Marines detained and arrested someone who was later shown to be an American citizen and just wandered into the wrong area.

If I recall correctly, I don’t remember seeing many incidents where either National Guard or the Marines were actively using force or making arrests.

What then happened in MacArthur Park?

You had Border Patrol — and, I believe, the National Guard there for support — conducting this sweep of a park in an immigrant-heavy area. There was nothing going on. There was no reason for them to be displaying force at this park. But they marched through the park. The entire exercise was a demonstration of force. It was: We’re going to create these images showing the community how powerful we are.

Again, that is the kind of thing you see regularly in totalitarian countries. We don’t use the military or militarized police purely for imagery or purely for symbolic purposes. But this administration is doing it regularly. They do this to create videos that they can post on social media to scare people and to inspire their followers.

Everything is a spectacle. But everything, too, is a test or a model.

Corey Lewandowski, who is a top adviser to Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security said: “I want everybody to understand the Trump administration is bringing this path across this country to make sure every sanctuary city understands that we can touch people at any place, anytime.”

Then there is an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that was written by Pete Hegseth’s brother, who, for some reason, has become a significant —

Hired only on merit, of course.

Hired only on merit. [Laughs.] Yes. The best people.

He wrote this memo leaked and reported by The New Republic, describing the need for the military to “more effectively support D.H.S. during the next instance of ‘L.A.-type’ operations.” He wrote: The U.S. military leadership “need to feel — for the first time — the urgency of the homeland defense mission.”

So there’s clearly an internal structure being built, a case being built, and attempts being made to merge the military and — as Phil Hegseth put it — the “homeland defense mission.”

Tell me about the ways the military and homeland have typically been kept separate and what it might mean for them to be merged.

In this country we’ve long had a tradition of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement. It goes back to the founding. The founders didn’t even want to have a full-time standing army because they saw what happened in cities like Boston during the colonial era, where the British crown stationed soldiers in the city, mostly for the purpose of tariffs or ending black markets. But it resulted in a lot of anger and resentment and violence. You had these general warrants where they could go into any house at any time to enforce tariffs and import bans. It ultimately led to the Boston Massacre, which is one of the precipitating events of the American Revolution.

The point here with the history lesson is this is why we have the Third Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. You could argue that’s why we have the Second Amendment.

There was this fear that standing armies create problems and that using the military for routine domestic policing — that’s not what the military does. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The job of law enforcement is to protect our rights and enforce public safety.

We’ve done a pretty good job over the course of our history of keeping the two separate. There have been times, very briefly, when the military has been called up to put down riots or insurrections. And you could argue about whether that was justified or not.

The only time the military was brought in to consistently enforce routine, domestic law enforcement, was during Reconstruction. That was obviously, hopefully, a once in our country’s history sort of event.

So we’ve kept these two things separate. And one of the really healthy things about our democracy is that the institution that has been most consistent and aggressive about enforcing that separation has been the military.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration and leaders of both parties in Congress wanted the military to come in to enforce the drug war. They wanted Marines marching up and down streets and conducting raids and arresting people. It was the military that said: We want nothing to do with this. There was a high-ranking military official who testified before Congress and basically said something to the effect of: History is replete with examples of countries that have brought the military in for domestic law enforcement, and disaster is always the result.

So while there was some use of the military for training, there was the transfer of military equipment to local police agencies, the idea of using the military for active day-to-day law enforcement was shelved because of opposition from the Pentagon.

Throughout the course of my entire career writing on these issues, I’ve always been worried about the idea that our police are getting more militarized. They’re getting more and more like soldiers. They’re seeing their job as more like soldiers. And that means they’re seeing the people they’re supposed to be serving as the enemy.

What I feared was that another Sept. 11-style event was going to exacerbate that process and make the police even more militarized. Even in the worst-case scenarios, I never thought we’d reach the day when a president would just start openly deploying the military in cities across the country simply because they don’t support him.

A lot of people have made this point. It’s hard to describe what is actually going on right now without sounding crazy: The idea that the president is going to deploy the military into cities and states that didn’t vote for him because he’s angry at them for that — or he is going to stop sending them disaster relief because they didn’t vote for them — that is clearly the stuff of totalitarian regimes.

I guess they would say it’s not because they didn’t vote for them, it’s because of something else. So in the case of Los Angeles, it’s because of protests — [Sighs.] I so want to try to do the fair-minded thing of describing this in the way they would describe it.

They are unleashing ICE agents in a way that seems to be designed to create backlash. And then they use the backlash as an escalation cycle — at least in air quotes.

In the Los Angeles case, it was connected to this immigration mission, which is very central to the Trump campaign.

But D.C. wasn’t. D.C. isn’t.

What has been their rationale for taking over? When I talk to the people there, it feels like they’re militarily occupying Washington.

The justification is this unique relationship that Washington has with the federal government. The federal government ultimately has jurisdiction over D.C. pretty much in any way that it wants to assert itself.

Now, Congress is the primary overseer of D.C., and Congress has passed various home-rule bills over the years that have given D.C. a certain amount of autonomy.

So what Trump is doing is violating those bills that were passed by Congress. But as we’ve seen in just about every other area, in order for that to matter, Congress would have to stick up for itself. And that clearly isn’t going to happen here.

So you could argue that Los Angeles was tied to immigration enforcement, which is a federal power. You could argue that what’s happening in D.C. is based on this unique relationship that D.C. has with the federal government. And in both cases you could say these are exceptions, but Trump is openly promising to send troops into Chicago, into Oakland and into Baltimore. He is not claiming that he wants to send troops into those cities to enforce immigration. He’s saying it’s because crime is out of control in those cities.

And incidentally, all three cities have seen dramatic drops in crime. Baltimore is in, I think, a 30- or 40-year low in violent crime. Oakland has dropped pretty dramatically. Chicago has dropped a little bit.

But what he’s promising to do going forward makes it clear that this isn’t about federalism or keeping the nation’s capital safe. It’s not about immigration enforcement. These are all very blue cities. They’re cities with large Black populations, with Black political leadership, and they’re cities that Trump has been disparaging for his entire political career.

When I look at what they did in D.C. and Los Angeles, and when I look at what they’re talking about doing, the potential for genuine catastrophe feels very high.

Let me spin out a scenario that has been on my mind. I’m sitting here in New York City. Zohran Mamdani is the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York.

And I think that, to the Trump administration, Zohran Mamdani is the exact kind of politician they would relish confrontation with if he were elected mayor. They would find his very existence immensely offensive — the fact that he was elected in New York City, a city that obviously Donald Trump has very deep feelings about.

They want to deport him.

They want to deport him.

I think they would also see him as a soft target of a certain kind. He’s very inexperienced, does not have a lot of political background or political alliances.

So you could really imagine Mamdani coming into office and the administration stepping up ICE raids even above where they are now — I mean, during his primary campaign, Brad Lander, the comptroller of New York City, ended up arrested as he was accompanying immigrants in a court during these ICE raids.

So you could imagine them really stepping up ICE raids and then using some kind of backlash to that as pretext for sending in the National Guard, as they did in Los Angeles. Or sending in, as Phil Hegseth wants, the National Guard plus more Marines and other kinds of military officials or soldiers.

And you could imagine something going really wrong — or maybe from their perspective, right. So in D.C., there was a case of a guy who appeared to be drunk. I think he threw a sandwich at a federal agent, and they made a very big deal out of this. Maybe in New York or elsewhere, maybe it’s not a sandwich — maybe it’s a rock. Or maybe there’s gunfire. Or maybe there is a car backfiring that some member of the National Guard thinks is gunfire and they open up retaliatory fire. Maybe there’s, all of a sudden, a bunch of people dead. Maybe there’s violence. There has already been tear gas at these things.

It’s there for a crisis point to be reached, where then they’re saying: It’s an insurrection — and now we’re invoking the powers of the Insurrection Act.

The conditions they’re creating seem very frightening.

Yes. And I think it puts the residents of these cities in a really can’t win position. You either submit and allow this to happen and get accustomed to the idea of looking out your kitchen window and seeing soldiers march by.

Or you put up resistance, in which case you create exactly the kind of scenario that you just described — which I think they want. Let’s say Pritzker in Illinois activated the Illinois National Guard to protect immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago from these raids — particularly if we see they’re arresting or harassing U.S. citizens and people who are here legally. And then you’ve got this standoff.

Especially if you get what we’re seeing in D.C., which is that red states are now sending National Guard troops into Washington D.C. to assist with whatever it is they’re doing there — all of a sudden, now you’ve got red states sending guard troops into blue states that don’t want them there. It is a recipe for exactly the kind of catastrophe you’re talking about.

I think the Trump administration relishes the idea of an incident like that. Because it will give them an excuse to grab more power and to become even more aggressive.

Think back to something that happened in the first term that you mentioned: You have the murder of George Floyd. You have nationwide protests that break out afterward. You have Trump wanting to unleash the military on these protests and suggesting to top military brass that they should open fire at their knees. And the military says no.

But you write: “Nearly everything he” — Trump — “has done in his second term with respect to the military appears to have been done to ensure that no order he gives will ever be questioned again, no matter how cruel, abusive, or unconstitutional.”

Tell me what he has done differently about the chain of command and oversight in the military now, compared with 2020?

Part of Project 2025 was to purge federal agencies of institutionalists, of people who had these silly allegiances to the rule of law and the Constitution, and replace them with people whose primary loyalty was to Trump.

We could start at the top with Hegseth. Hegseth wrote in his book about his fierce loyalty to Trump. This is a guy who thinks that the military should be enlisted in a holy war and believes that Trump was sent by God. That is who is heading up the largest and most powerful military in human history.

One of the other things they did was they immediately purged all of the generals who they thought were insufficiently loyal — people who still clung to ideas like separation of the military from domestic law enforcement. Those people were rousted.

They got rid of all the JAG Corps, the senior ranking legal lawyers in the military who do things like write use of force policy. These are the people whom the president consults when wanting to do policies like this, and they’re usually the ones who tell him no. They’re gone.

Instead you have this policy written by not the least qualified person I think to ever have been nominated to head up a major federal agency — but by that guy’s brother. That is the person who is writing up the policy about when Trump is going to start sending active duty military into cities around the country.

It’s so grim. I mentioned a minute ago the possibility of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act. So what is the Insurrection Act? What does it allow him to do if he invokes it? And why haven’t they yet?

It allows him to bring up active duty military — to put down a threat to take over the country or to depose the government.

I believe the first instance of it was when Washington invoked it to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. It has been used pretty sparingly over the years. But it’s supposed to be something the president can invoke in the case of an emergency. Eventually, they’re supposed to get approval from Congress after doing so. It’s supposed to be temporary — for immediate threats that we have to address quickly to put down.

It is not supposed to be a way to suppress dissent or suppress protest. Trump wanted to invoke it in his first term. If I recall correctly, I think Mike Pence supported the idea. But it was Esper and Milley who said: No, that’s completely inappropriate for what we’re looking at right now.

Mark Esper, the defense secretary, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Both of whom Trump has since accused of treason. I think he actually suggested Milley should be executed for treason in part because of that and telling people about it afterward. It’s supposed to be in response to a direct threat to the sovereignty of the country.

The reason they haven’t invoked it is because they found ways around invoking it. I think invoking it they know at this point would be hugely controversial. There would probably be a lot of backlash.

So they found these other ways around it without having to go through the Insurrection Act, which I think even they realized would be really divisive.

Temperamentally, as a person and as somebody with a public platform, I really try to not be overly alarmist and to make people completely panicked about things they cannot control.

But something I’ve been saying recently, when I talk to people I know about my work, is: I can tell you a story where these things maintain some kind of containment. They’re already much worse than I would have imagined — like the masked officers pulling people off the street. But things didn’t get as bad as I thought they might have in Los Angeles. Maybe everybody holds back from where it could go.

But if I imagine reading a history of this period in 10 years and this period having gone really badly — having either created a tipping into authoritarianism in a way that you cannot deny or having created some kind of genuinely violent flashpoint between the government and a citizenry that resolves in some way we can’t predict right now — this is the way I would have expected this set of chapters in the early months to read. These are the chapters where, if you were reading them and it gets worse, it wouldn’t feel like a surprise. It would feel like a linear progression.

It’s almost a cliché at this point to say: How would this latest thing that Trump has done read if it were happening in, say, Albania or Peru or Uganda?

I mean, we would say: It seems pretty clear there’s an authoritarian takeover going on.

I was at a conference on liberalism and democracy last weekend, and one of the keynote speakers was a Russian dissident who saw Putin’s rise. And what I found particularly haunting were the similarities between the quick speed with which he started dismantling institutions.

That is Project 2025. Part of the strategy there is to move so quickly on so many fronts that you overwhelm people, and it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on now.

Russia was a much younger democracy with much weaker institutions, so it was easier to topple them within a year. But what we’re seeing right now, like you said: If you were trying to replicate that path to autocracy, I don’t know what you would be doing differently than what Trump is doing now.

What then is the role of civil society and of political opposition here?

You talked earlier about the no-win position these cities and people in them are being put into. On the other hand, opposition to this seems to have revitalized Karen Bass’s mayoralty in Los Angeles and seems to have lit a fire under Gavin Newsom in interesting ways.

You said you’re a student of history. I don’t ever think it’s fair to ask people what works in these scenarios. Everything is different, and it’s all very complicated. But when you see civil society and political opposition doing X, it makes you think: OK, there’s life in this — versus what worries you, that we’re on the speedway to authoritarian takeover?

I think the least optimistic I feel is when we see these powerful institutions cave and crumble out of fear. Watching the Ivy League schools falter — even the most cynical Supreme Court watchers seem pretty certain that they would win in court and what Trump is doing to these schools is pretty clearly an attack on free speech, free expression and academic freedom. Watching the law firms cave. The case that they would have in court is even stronger.

Watching media companies cave. The “60 Minutes” edit of the Kamala Harris interview was just basic, standard journalism. The idea that their parent company capitulated over that.

These are extremely powerful, wealthy entities that could stand up to Trump if they wanted to. They’ve chosen not to. I think that watching them fall one by one has been really disheartening and disorienting.

I think sources of optimism include the “No Kings” protest. I think the count estimate was around 5 million people around the country had come out.

My wife and I were at my parents’ place in Nashville, Indiana, at the time — which is an overwhelmingly white, rural part of Indiana — and there was a protest with about a hundred people. Maybe a little less.

The interesting thing to me is that where we’re seeing the bravest resistance is from the people with the least amount of power. You see the Little League coach in New York who told ICE agents off when they started questioning his kids and his players about their immigration status. There was just an incident where a bunch of kids in backpacks in D.C. basically ran off a bunch of ICE agents and federal and maybe National Guard — it’s hard to tell them apart at this point. But federal agents who were there to do immigration enforcement — and literally schoolchildren yelling at them until they had to leave.

We are seeing inspiring resistance from people with the least amount of power and who would be easiest for the administration to target. Even the sandwich guy — I don’t recommend throwing sandwiches at federal agents. But he kind of became a folk hero after that. Because I think when you see literal troops marching in your backyard, there’s a visceral reaction to that. It’s angering.

But then also you see the administration’s reaction to that. He wanted to turn himself in. They wouldn’t let him. Instead they had to send a SWAT team, basically, with a video recorder to his apartment so that they could post on social media that this sort of resistance was not going to be tolerated.

As a lot of people pointed out, saying “Kill the cops!” to your comrades during an insurrection on the Capitol gets you a high-ranking Justice Department position, whereas throwing a sandwich at a federal agent in this administration gets you a felony charge. That speaks volumes about where we are.

To answer your question, I think we need to take heart in that Little League coach. And then the people who don’t want to live in a country where their neighbors, friends and people they go to church with, eat breakfast with and who landscape their yards are being yanked off the street into unmarked vans and taken to undisclosed locations.

If the big institutions and the law firms and the universities are going to roll over to that, we need to take inspiration from the people who are standing up to it.

Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

I was trying to think of three interesting, maybe a little off-topic, books.

The first will be on topic: Jessica Pishko’s book “The Highest Law in the Land” is a narration of how the sheriff in the U.S. has become such an integral part of the Trump movement and MAGA, and how they’ve lent a lot of institutional support for it, including some pretty outrageous tactics, and how they’re above the law in much of the country. So that’s one that’s on topic.

I’m going to recommend a fun history book: David Mitchell, the British comedian, has a book that came out maybe a year or two ago called “Unruly” — which somehow manages to make a history of medieval-age British royalty interesting and funny. It’s a review of all the early British or English kings, but in his style. I found it very endearing, and I listened to it on tape, so in his voice it’s particularly fun to listen to.

The last one would be my friend and former colleague Kerry Howley’s book “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” which is a book on the surveillance state, Reality Winner and how the national intelligence community has evolved into what it is now. I think it’s particularly relevant because of the way Trump has been able to manipulate these tools that have been put into place by previous administrations that are really opaque and unaccountable and pretty dangerous. And now I think we’re going to see just how dangerous they are when they’re in the hands of the wrong person.

Radley Balko, thank you very much.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

THE NEW YORK TIMES