What is the greatest danger the United States must avoid ? What is the greatest danger threatening the country since January 6, 2021, the assault on the Capitol and the failed trumpetist coup d’Etat ? There is only one real danger that threatens every society : the polarization between divergent economic interests and/or opposing philosophical beliefs.
These interests or beliefs exist in societies. But they do not crystallize and violently clash in all. The crystallization of violence only occurs through the action of a group of men, who provoke, stir up and respond to reciprocal violence. This is what Hobbes tells us in Leviathan : bellum omnium contra omnes.
What Donald Trump understands perfectly well is that when, like him, you want more State control over people’s lives (confer the Project 2025) or simply more State power for yourself as a tyrant, legally and politically, you have to escalate the tension. Donald Trump does this by sending troops into the streets, persecuting transgender people, prosecuting migrants, and waging his Kulturkampf.
What does he hope for doing this ? A new George Floyd incident and the policies of repression/segregation like those before civil rights; the incarceration of homosexuals like in the last century, his cherished « Golden Age »; the disappearance of the immigrant lumpen prolerariat, the dregs of our developped society.
But by doing this, Donald Trump polarizes the two extremes so much that sooner or later your neighbor picks up his rifle, joins his buddies, and either kills you or enlists you in his little private troop. The civil war can begin.
I beg to disagree, Mr. President, when you don’t attend Melissa Hortman’s funeral in Minnesota, and you make simultaneously all this noise about Charlie Kirk’s political assassination, I am choked. You are a partisan and you are deeply polarizing the society in which I live.
Tonight, I’m afraid of my neighbor. And that’s not totally normal. Mr President, I will soon leave you to fend for yourself.