2026, nonsense orders, and the flood… (part 2)
No to making America small. No to living in the lie. No to thinking freedom is something only some people can have.
A year ago, just after returning to the Oval Office, President Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release water from two California reservoirs. It wasn’t for any reason. He could, so he did. He was conducting an operation to populate the propaganda narrative with content. The Army Corps of Engineers complied.
This should have been the moment when it was clear what we were facing.
That this would not be a warmed-over Trump v1 reboot, but a deliberate acceleration of constitutional deconstruction via monarchic assumptions of executive power and abuse of the role of commander in chief.
That there would be constant small blitzkriegs beyond legal and constitutional boundaries in such rapid succession that no one had time to map them and calculate the losses.
That many, many bad men representing many dangerous ideologies would ride the Trump pony far and fast and foaming toward whatever dark fantasy they perceived was now possible.
The compass was spinning. The poles were reversed. The (literal) floodgates had been opened.
In the lead up to the 2025 inauguration, many people asked what me what the warning sign would be that Americans had lost control of their democracy. I said there were a lot of things, but when the president issued an unlawful order and the military complied, we were f-ed — in particular if this was connected to the use of the military as a tool of internal control against American civilians.
The opening of the dams became the point I referenced for how worried I was about Trump’s second term and the lack of preparation by any systems to contain his wanton damage — in this instance for the sake of a piece of performance art meant to act as the truth of a lie.
It wasn’t an unlawful order — but it was a nonsense one.
The Army Corp of Engineers knew it. Everyone knew it. Water from the northern reservoirs would flow down to other storage or evaporate off, possibly diminishing agricultural and other supplies during the summer. The water wouldn’t go anywhere near where the fires, now mostly contained anyway, were. Despite the immediate and future dangers of opening the dams with no preparation and opening them for no reason, the decision was made to comply-ish with the order to avoid ending up in the target. They opened the dams, took the photos, and then slowly turned down the dials.
The military has gotten plenty of nonsense orders in its day. But this wasn’t “fly my nephew over the Grand Canyon in a Blackhawk” but “pull a lever that might injure people or American food production just for the lulz.” To sidestep the issue of what to do with the nonsense order that has real life consequences just raises the cost of tolerating the next one.
All through the 2024 campaign, Trump returned to a favored theme from his first term — weird statements about forest fires that decoupled natural disasters from the reality of climate change and devolved federal accountability to anyone around he could point toward. A new variant became a story about how California was refusing to “send water” to put out forest fires that were raging across the state. California tried to rebut his fabulism, but Trump ordered the dams open anyway when he could — to the dismay and confusion of farmers, engineers, and local officials.
Growing up in the mountain west — most of the summers under the kind of drought where everyone peers down into the reservoir on the drive past and shakes their head — we were constantly, subconsciously measuring water. How deep is the snow pack, how fast is the spring run off, what hours for the watering restrictions, which agricultural water priorities won out, how far out of their ranges were animals moving looking for forage, how many miles from the house are the fires, how many days had it been since it rained, was the level of the reservoir below the giant measuring bar that ran up the side. Water was art, science, engineering, necessity, magic. It was a relationship between the natural world, the people, the government. It was a reminder that all around you in the mountain west, the federal government still owns most of the land, and can manage it in wise or completely arbitrary ways depending on what whims that day. Wasting water was unconscionable. Fire season gets longer every year.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which silently maintains and operates much of the nation’s mass water management infrastructure, detailed the timeline of actions and communications related to the opening of the California dams in a memo that essentially explained they were following a request from the White House to open the dams and send pictures of the water — pictures which the president posted on social media. An unconscionable action on every level by a man who cannot imagine life in America’s less concrete and manicured spaces.
It was a blip of a story then and after — the succession of tiny blitzkriegs erased it from memory, outrage feasting upon outrage until the the numbness is as deep as the insulated silence of the deep forest during a heavy snowfall.
But complicity with the nonsense order greased the gears for a year-long battle of eroded states rights and expanded executive authority, executive order after executive order issued by the White House recentralizing control of previously and traditionally federalized authorities. California’s “misuse and mishandling of resources” is one measure of a narrative cadence of actions against blue states. Of a new America where the assumption of unequal rights among citizens has been accepted with merely a whisper.
So many of the most powerful voices of Soviet dissidents wrote precisely of this prison. That participating in the lie of the system, even in the smallest and seemingly most meaningless ways, is how a system of oppression survives. In some of the most important periods of American history, brave individuals and then groups challenged the lie to break it apart and expand true rights and freedoms for all Americans. These periods were typically uncomfortable and turbulent and few living through them wanted them to be that way. The current administration has — with great ease — done more to erase and repress those brave Americans and their stories and voices than any real American wants to admit. Slowly they grind down the meaning of “American” to a repulsive nub of limp violence that is the smallest possible vision of what America ever was or could ever be.
And the problem is, of course, that this grotesque masquerade has been placed upon the power of the United States of America. Its military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural power. Its narrative and connective power.
In the strangest way imaginable, allies and enemies alike must now participate in this dance. Be complicit in the lie in their own ways.
As I highlighted in part 1 — “The resolve of our adversaries — and their desire to surprise us — remains unchanged and relentless.” We must reflect on what this means. Trump admires American adversaries. This statement is as true of him as Putin or Xi.
People are stuck thinking — hoping — that Trump v2 mirrors the chaotic, unfocused incompetence of v1 — and it doesn’t. This idea is becoming similar to the “the Russian economy is about to collapse” narrative — which is to say, Russia is constantly beset by weakness but still able to cause mayhem across the globe without significant consequences (though Ukraine is changing that equation, thankfully). Trump is constantly chaos but now has the focused capacity to damage the most critical architecture that protects human freedom.
Whether you think of the current US administration as an overt adversary or not, what is terribly stark is their embrace of the thinking of the adversary and their decision to help realign the board toward the advantage of not only THE adversary but a wide range of midling and mediocre adversaries of human freedom, as well. Or, you know, whoever will pay the highest price into the account in the Qatari bank.
Like Russia, Trump and his ideologues crave disruption as some kind of sacred right, and they think they can manage the outcomes to their advantage. Tech bros and venture capitalist backers of the engine of imaginary money worship the same god of bold disruption, and this would inevitably put them at odds with the preservation of the architecture of the free world.
And it has.
A year ago, two dams were opened to spill something vital out into a meaningless void. And now it seems America is also spilling out into a void, evaporating away for absolutely no reason and nothing at all.
Of course this administration was going to yoink a foreign leader and put him on trial for alleged crimes against America in a regular American court, maintaining a system of repression in another nation in so doing.
Of course they would issue nonsensical imperial demands against sovereign nations, peoples, and allies.
Of course the military was going to be sent into American cities as nonsensical window dressing to the deployment of a paramilitary force operating outside American law, constitutional principles, and the very ideas that fueled our independence as a nation.
Of course the media would be purchased and controlled.
Of course the White House would be destroyed.
Of course the 250th birthday of our nation would be celebrated with bloodsport.
Of course the operation will be conducted to populate the propaganda narrative with content.
Of course, of course, of course.
Because the floodgates were open, and no one who could do so said no.
Well, for my part: No.
No to making America small. No to nonsense orders. No to living in the lie. No to thinking freedom is something only some people can have. No to preserving what is left and not fighting for the rest.
But more about that in part 3.
— MM
