Imagine waking up to find your president has unironically decided to go full Gilead. What a time to be alive.
On Monday, April 28, 2025, Donald Trump signed “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” an Executive Order (EO) that reads more like the plot outline for a seventh season of A Handmaid’s Tale, rather than a policy document. “Unleashing” is just a hell of a word to use there. Why use normal words when deliberately terrifying ones will do?
The EO kicked off with what amounts to a legal force-field for cops (as we all agree, there’s historically been way too much accountability for American police officers…), promising to foot the bill for any civil lawsuits that officers might incur while “aggressively” upholding “law and order.” This mechanism will “include the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers,” ah, so that’s what they were doing with law firms Paul Weiss and Skadden. Now it makes sense.
The order doesn’t stop there; the President has deputised Delta Nu Sorority Fascist Attorney General, Pam Bondi (Bondee? Bon-dye?), to go on a state-sanctioned witch hunt for local officials deemed insufficiently supportive of the regime’s law enforcement tactics under the guise of ‘Holding State and Local Officials Accountable’ a phrase so deliberately chilling that I could apply it to the sight of a burn.
State and local officials who dare to question a federal officer’s judgment risk obstruction charges and civil penalties designed to make them think twice, maybe even three times, before doing their jobs. Within 60 days, every federal consent decree and judicially supervised reform is flagged for review, with instructions to “modify, rescind, or conclude” any agreement that might “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” What might those functions be? Whatever the fuck I say they are, I’m the guy with the gun, see? Isn’t power rad?
Trump also orders department heads to maximise the use of federal resources to “aggressively police communities against all crimes.” If you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury or you’re a Pauline Hanson voter, you may think this sounds okay. Who doesn’t want all crimes prosecuted? Crimes are bad, right? When you have the judicial system by the short and curlies, just about anything could be construed as a crime – and it’s not hard to see how this power could be abused by everyone’s favourite vindictive, small-handed, orange-dusted psycho. Trump is not above utilising the department in this way, as we saw this very month when he directed the DOJ to investigate people who hurt his feelings.
If you ever wondered what happens when you mix a trillion-dollar military-industrial complex with a case of malignant narcissism, then… congrats, now you have that. You wished it into existence like The Secret. It’s your fault. Couldn’t you manifest world peace instead? What’s wrong with you? Why are you like this?
Now here’s the terrifying shit: a 90-day plan to repurpose “excess” military and national-security assets—think surplus Humvees, night-vision goggles, and maybe a tank or two, just to pull someone over for a broken tail light—normal, cool-country stuff. The sort of stuff that the good guys in movies do. Surely this is what the glorious founders had in mind: the military tooling around in an M1A1 Abrams tank on Main Street, enforcing a police state. It’s not like militarisation of the police hasn’t already been a problem for a full decade or anything. The same GOP that used to decry any federal agent doing their job as a ‘jack booted thug’ is apparently fine with all of this now? Incredible.
This redefinition of “excess equipment” as anything not needed for active foreign engagements smooths the way for law enforcement to start collecting toys once reserved for the battlefield. If you were trying to recreate the opening scenes of domestic social unrest in Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), congrats, you’ve done a great job. Again, why are you still imagining things? I am begging you to stop. Imagine an apology for Kyle Gass instead.
Lawfare analysts point out that these extraordinary domestic-deployment theories were always meant for emergencies, not routine crime fighting. But if Trump just declares everything an emergency (like he did with the Southern Border), then apparently everyone’s powerless to stop him all of a sudden. No national emergency for universal healthcare in a pandemic, just the Nazi stuff – gotcha. Using old laws like the Alien Enemies Act (1798) to deport migrants who are in the US legally – Good! Posse Comitatus (1835), which was created to stop exactly this scenario – bad! Got it.
The real issue with this executive order is the whole “we decide what’s a crime” thing and “I am the senate” thing, and Trump always yelling “Execute order 66!”. They’re so weird. You might be asking, Jorge, how they can do this? They can’t, but they’re doing it anyway.
If the government can just pick and choose what counts as illegal, and then go full banana republic in prosecuting anything, what’s to stop them from prosecuting anyone? As we know from the book Three Felonies a Day, US citizens generally (knowingly or unknowingly) commit roughly…. Three felonies a day.
Federal laws are opaque and complex and require judicious application. In the hands of the ‘ponderous judge’ Merrick Garland, that’s not really a problem. In the hands of Delta Nu Sorority Fascist Pam Bondi, it might be a different story. As said in the TV show Succession, “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs.”
The ‘Greggs’ in this case being democracy.