President Donald Trump's abuses of power are something no Trump supporter would tolerate for a second if they were on the receiving end of it, Isaac Saul wrote for Tangle on Friday — and he proposed a number of thought experiments to prove it.
"I want to share my perspective on the moment we are living in," wrote Saul. "And the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way. And, to me, one of the driving forces behind all of this is the Trump administration."
For right-wing and pro-Trump readers, "I think it’s important to put it into terms that I hope clarify the issue," wrote Saul — so he offered a few detailed analogies, beginning with one that focuses on Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
"Imagine President Biden had won his election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America," wrote Saul. "So, in turn, he claims he has a 'mandate' to send the National Guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws."
"Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents; tables are flipped over, desks are emptied, customers inside are zip-tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime," wrote Saul. "Helicopters buzz overhead as back-up. The agents don’t flash warrants or ID themselves; in fact, they’re all masked and it’s not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven’t committed a crime. Local police and politicians try to intervene, but they are ignored and forced out of the way."
As all this is going on, he added, "federal courts stacked with Democratic-appointed judges greenlight the troops’ actions. Then imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something, and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid."
For another analogy, he turned to Trump allies' attacks on the No Kings protesters as "terrorists," and imagined former President Barack Obama had done the same with anti-abortion demonstrators.
"Imagine President Barack Obama responding to the March for Life rallygoers by framing them all as anti-abortion 'radical' extremists and terrorist 'lunatics,' and then deploying the National Guard to protect federally funded facilities offering abortion services in Republican-led states. Imagine that when this move draws blowback from the protesters — and Republicans, and conservative media — Obama responds by having the troops tear gas crowds, incite violence, and then arrest anyone who fights back for assaulting police."
Lastly, he challenged Republicans to imagine that, just as Trump has done with pro-Palestine protesters, a future anti-Zionist president "deploys ICE agents to snatch up Israeli immigrants in the country on green cards for opinion pieces they wrote defending Israel from claims of genocide in their university newspapers. While trying to deport them, this hypothetical president ships them off to a prison thousands of miles away from where they were arrested on the grounds that they support a racist, colonial, terrorist state called Israel."
"As hypotheticals, they are ... far more possible with the precedent Trump is setting," concluded Saul. "The central difference is that Trump is targeting the people many of his supporters want targeted. But Trump won’t be president forever, and what we deem acceptable now will — as it always does — come back to haunt us in the future."