On Rubicons Crossed

When Gaius Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and entered the territory of Rome at the head of one of his Gallic legions, in 49 BC, he officially violated Roman sovereignty, broke the imperium, and began the civil war that would lead to the final collapse of the Roman Republic. Victorious in that war, he would then be installed as dictator for life– a term ended decisively a short five years later by dozens and dozens of stab wounds.

The Rubicon River, the border between the colonial province of CisAlpine Gaul to the North and the central Roman domains was, like all borders, a symbol, a metaphor, a political convention held up by violence, obedience and tradition. There was nothing geographically special about the river. It was not particularly wide or difficult to ford. In fact, so unremarkable was the crossing logistically that we don't even know the exact day Caesar did it, and thereafter gave us a metaphor for the moment at which a crisis passes the point of no return.

Today, April 14, 2025, a lot of people are saying that Trump has crossed the Rubicon and finally shattered the Constitutional Republic. In a jovial press conference held in the Oval Office, El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele laughed and joked with the US president that he would not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, while Trump smiled and nodded along.

Last week the Supreme Court, alongside numerous federal benches, ordered Trump to retrieve Garcia at once. Garcia, a fully-documented immigrant living in the US, was sent to Bukele's special labor camp and torture prison CECOT as part of the Trump administration's fascist spectacle making, through a highly choreographed, video-produced and mediated ICE raid on "gang members".

Over the weekend Trump lawyers argued they couldn't bring Garcia back because they couldn't force Bukele, a sovereign leader, to do what the courts command. This was extremely weak, as far as argumentation goes, but it left just enough wiggle room to keep the judiciary from an immediate showdown with the Trump admin. But today Trump ripped off the bandaid. Footage from the meeting posted on Bukele's social media also shows Trump telling the Salvadoran president he needs to "get 5 more of those prisons ready" for some "home grown criminals."

So, there you have it. The president laughing as he agrees that the Supreme Court's decisions don't mean shit. Gladhanding with a foreign leader while making quips about extra-judicial concentration camps to send his domestic political enemies to. All of it pointedly performed for the cameras.

While there may have been some folks out there who still somehow hoped that this wouldn't actually happen, for those of us who have thought, acted and moved as though the Republic is already a dead letter, the question was when, not if. And like almost every move taken in this fascist coup, that 'when' has proven to be impulsive and poorly timed. There were no weeks of op-eds back and forth about the legal arguments of the Trump regime, no stoking of a particular scandal or deep dive into Garcia's personal history to make him seem like "no angel." Instead, an arbitrary and sudden escalation that seems at odds with the pace of the strategy of delay and deferral pursued by the administration up till now, guaranteed by Trump to capture maximum news splash and attention.

They were always heading here. But that fact doesn't make this less of a fucked up and terrifying moment. Just because you see a train coming down the tracks doesn't make it hurt less when it hits you. I do however want to bring our attention to something about the way the Rubicon functioned to protect the Roman Republic from its various would-be-dictators before Caesar: no governors, consuls or generals were allowed to cross it at the head of an army.

Because while the Rubicon itself may be just as good a physical boundary as the river Po, its purpose as political limit was not nearly as arbitrary: an army could not be allowed within proximity of the city of Rome, capable of marching on it and taking the imperial seat by force.

Trump did not show up with an army today. His forces are no better organized or more ready to carry out his plans than they were on Friday. In stating his absolute unwillingness to follow the law, Trump is forcing the confrontation with the judiciary. But it does not make the regime any more (or less) logistically capable of mass arrests and crackdowns on the population.

This is the prelude to the fight, not the fight itself. And while hindsight, metaphor and mythology make it seem inevitable, Caesar's victory in the Civil War was far from assured the moment his legion placed sandaled foot on Roman soil. He gambled, correctly as it turns out, on his prowess as a military commander, his popularity with the troops and the citizens of Rome, and the political divisions within the Senate camp.

When South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol made a similar gamble in December of last year, his attempt lasted less than 24 hours. Members of parliament jumped over fences and physically fought police officers, driving Yoon right back over the river: the sorry attempt ended with him disgraced, impeached and thrown from power within a few months.

Again, this is not to deny how scary today's actions are and were. I was briefly thrown into angst, my mind going over for the thousandth time the emergency plans and preparations me and mine have made, wondering if it was time to move up the scale of urgency. That lasted for ten excruciating minutes. Then it passed.

Because while we didn't know it was going to happen this day, or this way, we already knew it was going to happen. It made me feel sick to my stomach to see those ghouls smiling and laughing together. I feel such rage on behalf of Garcia, of all those men flown to CECOT by ICE, of all the men imprisoned there before they arrived. It mingles with my fear and fury for our siblings in Gaza, for the millions in the concentration camps already built here through mass-incarceration and "normal" border enforcement, for the thousands drowned by fortress Europe, bombed by Putin or Erdogan, killed by RSF forces in Sudan or junta forces in Myanmar.

This world grows bleaker every day, and there is no solace to be found in pretending otherwise.

And also? We already knew Trump wanted this, we have been kept all too privy to his petty desires, his half-formed thoughts, his pathetic beliefs, his turmoils and his promises. Declaring to the world that he wants full dictatorship is just that; To bring that world into being was always going to come down to power, real material power, not media image, projection and declaration.

A scarier more competent fascist would stage this scene after Bukele had already built the five extra prisons. A powerful dictator's goons would already have the lists of citizens and the deployment plans all ready to fill those prisons. A really type-A personality might have the jets already waiting on the tarmac. But Trump's laying it all out on the table because he's too impatient and scattershot, his machine too partial and reactive to actually get there organizationally, and so he needs to normalize it, requires society to accept it, because society is going to have to carry it out.

Powerful fascist regimes have started by making the arrests, not talking about them. It doesn't mean MAGA don't want to. It doesn't mean they won't, eventually. But if they could, today? They would have. And they would have done so while also maintaining legitimacy, even secrecy. It was always clear that Republican veneration for the constitution was just as mealy mouthed as their veneration for the troops. But the thing is, they kept venerating them because it kept their political base in line, because that was the political cover and motivation that the passive, detached patriots needed to stand up and argue and fight in public for their men, for their vision. But now some percentage of the troops and their families, the military brass and their supporters are actively organizing and politicizing against the regime.

Historically, the dictators who initiated serious repressive violence right out of the gate were able to do so because they captured power through a civil war, "restoring unity" to an already traumatized, exhausted and blood-thirsty public. Even motherfuckers like Suharto or Noriega made a big show of following constitutionality for years into their regimes.

History is not destiny. There are hardly rules to dictatorship– in fact, that's exactly the appeal. But a sizeable percentage of thousands of years of political philosophy, thought and letters worldwide has been devoted to dissecting, criticizing, arguing and considering best practices and strategic missteps in the pursuit of individual political sovereignty. You could fill a sizeable library collection just of books dedicated to its modern practice. That's because personal dictatorship is a really hard thing to maintain.

Maybe the fact of America's position in the global system is sufficient to make all those previous examples moot. But Trump's behavior here is in perfect accord with the prevailing corporate mode of which he is such a crude avatar: massive, short term gain by priming the pump with flashy statistics, bold claims and broad projections of power, may the long-term outcomes be damned.

Bringing the media into the oval office to boldly declare "fuck the constitution" is a sign of weakness, not strength.

As late as the start of World War 2 there were still Jews in Germany and all over Europe who believed Hitler didn't mean what he said. We look backwards and ask "how is that possible?" because in retrospect the horror is so clear. But at the time the regime spent incredible efforts at maintaining plausible deniability and tight media control, while building popular acceptance and quietude through industrial and social policies that materially transformed many people's lives if not cleanly for the better (wages under the Third Reich stalled out completely and labor hours increased), at least in ways that people had been demanding (employment, activity).

Trump, frankly, could've had the same. The Democrats prepared it for him perfectly. He's betting instead that the US public is willing to do Naziism without the niceties of personal disavowal or moral cover.

There are a hell of a lot of Good Germans in this country: look no further than how your average USian talks about incarceration, criminals, prison, Indigenous and Black people. But no society, no matter how cruel, is made up of a broad majority of people happy to see themselves as the baddies. They will do almost anything as long as they can see themselves as normal, patriotic citizens. I never want to underestimate the depravity of white people, but it takes a fair amount of organizational work to turn them consistently into lynch mobs.

In Trump one, he buried each scandal under the outraged chaos produced by the next. But all around him he had semi-competent advisers and professionals cleaning up the mess. And the messes were way smaller. The damage to the global economy from the last two weeks of tariff bullshit doesn't go away just because the markets have stabilized for a few trading sessions. DOGE may have left the headlines for now, but that doesn't change the extreme dislocation caused by hundreds of thousands of federal layoffs. These are not just moral outrages, these are deep material blows to the daily functioning of society. And to ride out the consequences is gonna require more than just shamelessness and a compliant media. He's gonna need some loyal and well armed legions.

None of this means we're gonna be fine. Lives are being destroyed already. But fascism has arrived in the guise of one of the world's most despised men, a man whose regime and street forces we defeated once, only a scant few years ago.

That man, an entertainer, a TV presenter, a clown, is well past the height of his powers. He has lost his swagger and his punchlines, he is surrounded by doltish sycophants and dogs who finally caught the car. We already beat this motherfucker once, when he was sharper and his people more clever.

We gave the system a chance to right itself, but the courts, the Democrats, the Republicans, the businessmen and the tycoons decided he deserved another go. Sobeit. They've made their date with history. They've rolled the dice on dictatorship. Time for us to show them what they've won.

(as is becoming habit, this is an adaptation of a thread I wrote on Bluesky earlier today)