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the Trump administration has deployed the US military and National Guard to cities against the will of their state governors. It has put pressure on state legislatures to disenfranchise opposition voters in extraordinary ways, and floated the idea of disenfranchising all voters residing outside the US by ending mail-in voting. It has used the power of the state to censor books, bully the media and “cancel” comedians who regularly make fun of Trump. It has seized executive power in alarming and potentially illegal ways, including the use of tariffs, immigration policy and targeted exemptions to generate subservience among powerful corporate actors. An over-fixation on whether actions are legal or not misses the forest for the trees: constitutionality is, practically speaking, whatever the supreme court decides. If the supreme court acquiesces to fundamental changes in the nature of what the US is, that is merely one more sign of how deep the rot goes. And from concrete policy to the decision to publicly venerate the Confederacy, the intended direction of travel is clear. The disguise dropped a little bit more, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder – one more tragic datapoint in the merging of the US’s epidemic of gun violence and its growing political violence. At his strange funeral-rally-spectacle, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave a speech dripping with everything Eco sought to warn us against, raging against a diffuse “they” who “cannot concei