The regime's project is to destroy all alternative visions of the future.
Patrick Lawrence
Dec 13, 2025
Patrick Lawrence
Dec 13, 2025
How do you like my imaginary America? (The White House/ Wikimedia Commons.)
13 DECEMBER—The Trumpster is not yet finished his first year back in the White House, and I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants with whom he has surrounded himself. And it occurs to me lately that neither I nor anyone else is supposed to imagine any kind of future—good, bad, in the middle—beyond 20 January 2029, when President Trump will no longer be President Trump. The future will not be the point by then. By then we are supposed to be living in an imaginary past that we won’t have to imagine because the imaginary past is to be the actual present.
It is not quite three months since Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa,” the more or less fictitious “organization” of antifascists, a “domestic terrorist organization.” In the Trump White House’s rendering, antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.” To this end, it organizes and executes vast campaigns of violence. It coordinates all this across the country. It recruits and radicalizes young people, “then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”
I didn’t take the executive order containing this kind of language the least bit seriously when it was issued on 22 September. Antifa, so far as I understand it, does not actually exist. It is a state of mind, or it signifies a shared set of political sentiments vaguely in the direction of traditional anarchism—a hyper-individualistic ultra-libertarianism when translated into the American context.
Trump’s executive order describing antifa as a terrorist organization reminded me of nothing so much as those flatfooted fogies back in the Cold War years who, nostalgic for a simpler time but understanding nothing of the present, went on about “outside agitators” as the root of America’s ills.
I was wrong in one respect, maybe more, about Trump and his adjutants and what they have in mind. These people are not flatfooted. They are shockingly stupid but know exactly what they are doing, and they are moving swiftly to get it done. It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.
Three days after the antifa executive order, the White House made public a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM–7, as this document is known, is formally addressed to Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney–General Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.
This thing picks up where the one-page executive order leaves off. It cites various assassinations and attempted assassinations—Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive, the two attempts on Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign—and fair enough, although casting political violence as terrorist violence is a sleight-of-hand too far. It is when NSPM–7 invokes recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” that you sense the trouble to come.
It is not quite three months since Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa,” the more or less fictitious “organization” of antifascists, a “domestic terrorist organization.” In the Trump White House’s rendering, antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.” To this end, it organizes and executes vast campaigns of violence. It coordinates all this across the country. It recruits and radicalizes young people, “then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”
I didn’t take the executive order containing this kind of language the least bit seriously when it was issued on 22 September. Antifa, so far as I understand it, does not actually exist. It is a state of mind, or it signifies a shared set of political sentiments vaguely in the direction of traditional anarchism—a hyper-individualistic ultra-libertarianism when translated into the American context.
Trump’s executive order describing antifa as a terrorist organization reminded me of nothing so much as those flatfooted fogies back in the Cold War years who, nostalgic for a simpler time but understanding nothing of the present, went on about “outside agitators” as the root of America’s ills.
I was wrong in one respect, maybe more, about Trump and his adjutants and what they have in mind. These people are not flatfooted. They are shockingly stupid but know exactly what they are doing, and they are moving swiftly to get it done. It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.
Three days after the antifa executive order, the White House made public a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM–7, as this document is known, is formally addressed to Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney–General Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.
This thing picks up where the one-page executive order leaves off. It cites various assassinations and attempted assassinations—Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive, the two attempts on Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign—and fair enough, although casting political violence as terrorist violence is a sleight-of-hand too far. It is when NSPM–7 invokes recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” that you sense the trouble to come.
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