If You Can Keep It
What we lost, what we ignored, and the people who are replacing the republic with something else. Unless we recalibrate.
We Were Too Late
Trump watched Kid Rock perform “Fight! Fight! Fight!” sporting a bizarre square bandage on his ear. A week later, Kamala Harris was handed the baton by Joe Biden in a spectacle of celebrity endorsements and recycled hope. I cringed from my couch. History wasn’t repeating; it was rebooting in high definition.
“Stop rolling out Beyoncé. This isn’t a halftime show.”
That moment needed more than popularity or Cardi B.; it needed a concrete strategy. While Democrats focused on emotional appeals, their opponents had completed Project 2025 and were already prepared to challenge existing American norms.
From the Heart to the Hollow
I lived in D.C. for 2 decades before moving to North Carolina a few months ago. When Trump, Pam Bondi, and Stephen Miller launched their latest “look over here” tap dance about the unsustainable crime in the Capitol, I rolled my eyes. Of course, there’s crime. Name one city, or suburb, where there isn’t?
But I still saw the iceberg coming.
D.C. is known for “Taxation without Representation” for a reason. While it’s not correct protocol for a president to send the National Guard into cities (like Los Angeles), D.C. is fair game. No statehood. No governor. No protection. Just open season.
So, I watch from a suburb outside Charlotte, with the realistic viewpoint of someone who lived there. I see the chaos on TV, on Substack, in sanitized clips: a white man hurling a sandwich and sprinting (badly) from police; a well-dressed woman in Georgetown, asking a masked officer for his badge number. As if badges are still issued.
On Thursday, Trump and a line of clean-shaven men in crisp shirts stood in Anacostia (Southeast D.C.), where crime rates are high, boasting about the “success” of his Police state. After the cameras, the gourmet hamburgers, and the pizza disappeared, I had to wonder: Who would be there to stop the 15-year-old from shooting a rival’s girlfriend after they left? Who picked up the third overdose victim from the sidewalk with Narcan in hand? Who helped the man with a gun pressed to his temple during a carjacking?
Because those who should be, aren’t. They are being forced to create a false narrative.
While the National Guard takes selfies and face-covered squads pull a Latino delivery driver off his bike, that’s what people miss. It’s real. It’s cinematic. It’s horrifying.
And no one notices, because we still want to believe democracy will hold.
The Political Infrastructure Behind Trump
As I write this, the media still clings to the illusion that Donald Trump is the problem. That if we pull back the covers, shout over him, or Dunk on him hard enough (Thank you, Gavin Newsom), the fever will break.
It won’t.
Because Trump has never been the disease.
He’s the rash. The visible symptom. The bloated, orange mascot of a much deeper, strategic campaign. One that was well underway before the Biden administration ever took office. While people were busy rolling their eyes at Trump’s spelling errors and tantrums, his handlers were redrawing the battlefield.
Quietly. Permanently.
Behind the curtain (yes, that curtain, the one we were told not to look behind) was a network of people obsessed with control: control over circuit courts, local election boards, ballot access, voter rolls, state legislatures, and obscure legal loopholes you can only find if you read the footnotes in the Constitution backward.
While Democrats were crafting hashtag resistance slogans and appearing on late-night shows, the Stephen Miller machine was reshaping the legal architecture of the country. Not in splashy headlines, but in county clerk races, state supreme courts, and gerrymandered districts drawn with surgical cruelty.
(And no, I’m not talking about the headline ping-pong game between Texas and California. I’m talking about entire states being locked into minority rule for a generation through manipulated maps.)
This isn’t about Trump’s Truth Social posts. It’s about judges who owe their robes to Federalist Society loyalty oaths. It’s about voter suppression laws passed in daylight while everyone watches Trump scream about how he knows grass better than anyone else, because he owns golf courses. It’s about the political operatives (Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, Leonard Leo) who are transforming the judiciary system into a partisan armada.
That’s the part too many people still don’t want to look at. Because it’s not fun, and not a meme.
The Fallacy of Hope
And so here we are.
Every day, prominent people who still have integrity, wielding gavels, microphones, and influence, are abandoning the old guard’s obsession with “playing fair.” The belief that there can still be civility in politics. Bipartisan decency. Rules-based governance.
Why? Because it’s just an artifact now. A relic from a time when bad actors still felt shame. And that’s over.
So, when I hear people say on their 11:00 AM Live Substack video, “We’d better do something because we’re about to lose our democracy,” I say: Where have you been?
Finally, people cheer when a Democrat lands a clean verbal slap at a town hall (yes, Jon Ossoff, I’m looking at you), or when Gavin Newsom posts something that makes Fox News fold in on itself like a dying star. But they’re cheering for wins in a game that’s already over.
Because we don’t live in that republic anymore.
Wins in Congress are purely symbolic at best, and we’re learning, painfully, that even those are rare. Court rulings can be delayed, defied, or overturned by judges whose only qualification is unbridled loyalty. Subpoenas are now optional. Oversight is a press release. There are no longer free and fair elections. Even if they are, they aren’t. And the Supreme Court seems fully committed to defying the very idea of justice.
Still, the show goes on. A scandal breaks, and a committee forms. A witness refuses to testify. A judge delays the trial. Cable news talks about “momentum.” People post GIFs of Elizabeth Warren looking stern. And clips of Susan Collins saying she’s “deeply concerned.”
We wanted to believe justice is slow but steady. That if we “trusted the process,” everything would self-correct. But faith in process is no longer noble.
It’s dangerous.
Because while we yell, “Finally, the republic is waking up,” the people dismantling it have already moved on.
They’re busy building the next steps, and the steps after that.
The Closing Truth
On Friday, Pete Hegseth authorized the National Guard to begin carrying firearms while patrolling the streets of D.C. There will be outrage loud enough to sound real. People will say, “We will not accept this.”
But we will. It’s a continuation of the normalization when one watches a coup.
Hegseth also fired the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for contradicting Trump’s fantasy about successful strikes against Iran’s nuclear program. And just like that, dissent becomes disloyalty, and honesty becomes ground for removal.
Here’s the Net-Net: You don’t give the National Guard guns and then take them back. You don’t create a fake crime wave and then not respond with force.
So, when a civilian is accidentally shot in the streets of D.C. next week, because it will happen, remember, this was already written.
New names will be added to the enemies' list. The same list that mocked the Alaska Summit. Expect more homes to be raided. Expect fewer headlines each time.
And here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: there is nothing we can do about it.
Not with the tools we were given.
Tools like checks and balances, independent courts, press accountability, and ethical standards were once ours. We built them slowly, with thought and purpose. We amended them when needed. Strengthened them with clearer language. They weren’t perfect, but they were ours.
And when it came time to protect them, we didn’t.
Not because we didn’t care. But because we were exhausted. Distracted. Complacent. We believed too much, for too long, from too many voices. Until the voices blurred, and we sank into apathy without feeling it.
On September 17, 1787, as the Constitutional Convention concluded, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
He replied: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Franklin knew what we forgot: a republic is an experiment. And experiments fail when people assume someone else is doing the work.
The republic wasn’t stolen.
We lost it. Piece by piece. By watching. By waiting. By hoping someone else would fix it.
And now?
Now, it’s time to build a new one. Before the puppeteers holding Trump’s strings finish building theirs.
It will be scary. Doubtful. Exhausting. Exhilarating. It will feel like both collapse and creation.
And that’s exactly why ambition must be made to counteract ambition.