Reflections on Trump Derangement Syndrome – and a new marker of tyranny in America.
The warrantless arrest and detention of student organizer Mahmoud Khalil signals a new chapter of Trump’s authoritarian coup and has further galvanized a growing grassroots resistance.
Thousands of New Yorkers joined an emergency rally to demand Khalil’s release.
Photo: © Jackie Rudin
(Note to readers: I have added a Wed. afternoon (3.12) legal progress update on Mahmoud Khalil case at the end of this newsletter — AC)
7 a.m. Wednesday, March 12th Day 52 of the Trump-Project 2025-DOGE coup….
It’s happening again, just as it happened in the 90s for a whole long decade. I find myself moving at a far faster pace than is normal and healthy, because the world around me – well, us, all of us, not just Americans, but the world – is a spinning cyclone of shocking headlines, most of it about the systematic picking off of our government safeguards, rules, workforce, and the institutions we considered reliable as the perimeter of our Constitutional civil liberties and rights as Americans.
Boy, that was a long sentence, huh? It’s like I can only speak in paragraphs, worse than my usual tendency to do so, because one event leads to another and is preceded by another and will result in another. I was just on the phone with my ex-turned-bestie-family who is in France, living with her girlfriend and working there when she is not here, sharing a home with me and one of my adult daughters. We were taking the pulse of the past week in America, in Europe. She listened to me narrate how we – my friends and I, us, you, everyone – are feeling about the escalating cyclone of shitstorm Trump 2.0 and DOGE-Musk madness.
When I took a breath, she said, Did you know some people call it Trump Derangement Syndrome? Like madness. And I thought, yah, I can see why. Like political psychosis. Due to a poison Trump and his kind are infusing into our body politic.
Graphic © AV
We debated a number of things, which captures what passes for chitchat with me these days. I was recounting my last few days, what a whirlwind it has been, the lowlights, the highlights, and the fact that we – you, me, all of us again, the US this time – just crossed a red line of authoritarianism into what some called Gestapo territory. That was in reference to Trump’s gleeful, boastful tweet that he had ordered the utterly un-Constitutional arrest, detention, and – for a good number of hours, disappearance – of a Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, holder of a Green Card (i.e., a permanent citizen of the US ) and married to a US woman (who is also eight months pregnant,) that was carried out by ICE without a warrant or even a charge. They are now detaining him in a Louisiana ICE jail.
Trump’s boast is meant to make it utterly, utterly, clear that his administration gives no care to the rule of law, and signals his administration’s utter, utter, belief that Trump is immune to serious prosecution – that their army of lawyers can defend an overt flouting of the laws. Theirs is a muscular flex of impunity. They know they have a majority of the Supreme Court in their pocket. The law takes time to advance; they can break things and deal with the damage. The arrest of Khalil was a signal to all of America that Trump and his minions are going to rule by terror, while ironically seeking to tar anyone critical of his Mideast (or other) policies a domestic terrorist.
The question is, why are we surprised? This is what Trump and his entourage want and he has always sought and now he feels emboldened to seek it – with help from Musk and others, who want the same.
That is what my friends, me, likely you, probably everyone, is talking about, has been newly sobered to encounter: we have crossed the full line into a police state, acting without any concern for law. And the brush of terrorism is so broad and vague that Trump didn’t even feel he had to charge Khalil with anything. All they said was that the arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and that Khalil, while at Columbia U last year, “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”
Those activities are peaceful campus protests calling for the US to stop arming Israel in its war in Gaza. The justification for this police state arrest is so absurd that even Ann Coulter, a right-wing pundit prone to make grotesque pronouncements about her political enemies, distanced herself from the arrests by posting to social media, “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t it a violation of the first amendment?”
Well, yeah, gee, isn’t it then? But it’s far more than that. It’s the biggest throw-down of the glove – the gauntlet – yet by Trump. The most overt display of his disregard for our Constitution and its cherished protections of the citizens of America. Trump’s tweet has made that crystal-clear by arresting someone with a Green Card – while ICE threatened to arrest his very-pregnant wife, when she demanded to know on what charge he was being arrested. ICE originally said it was because Khalil had violated his student visa; when the arresting ICE officer was informed Khalil was a Permanent Citizen, he quickly recovered and said, well that status had been revoked, too.
Meaning, we’ll do whatever the fuck we want. You have no rights in our America.
That was the message, and we – me, you, all of us, the world watching – we got it. We got the message. I think even Ann Coulter got the message and is surprised she’s helped elect a regime that has no interest in any legal authority.
Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia University student leader, illegally arrested by the ICE, on Trump’s orders
Before I went to the emergency protest Monday afternoon at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan to denounce Khalil’s arrest and demand my own first amendment rights, I quickly read up on the legal defense being mounted to prevent him from being deported back to Algeria, or possibly Gaza or the torture center in El Salvador being used to detain US ICE deportees, or the Guantanamo Bay internment camps in Cuba. His lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, which I had to read about, to know what laws protected him – and me, you, any of us now – against random, state-sanctioned arrest, kidnapping, and detention on no real grounds whatsoever.
I learned a few things. One is that the revocation of a Green Card is indeed a rare thing, as I’d suspected. The Department of Homeland Security can start the process of revocation if and when a lawful permanent resident has been connected to an alleged criminal activity. But in such a case, the government must present material evidence of the crime. DHS and ICE did not present anything, just snatched him. And, as his lawyer and many pundits have noted, Khalil has not committed a crime. Since the arrest, Trump officials have said they have been combing Khalil’s social media or activities and have come up with proof to back up their accusations. But never mind, they didn’t need it. They just declared him revoked.
Habeas corpus is Latin for that you have the body. A writ of habeas corpus is a petition brought in a civil court – a civil action -- submitted to determine the legality of someone who has been detained in an institution (like a mental patient involuntarily admitted to a hospital) or prison. The petition is made against the person holding the defendant, often a warden, in this case, likely ICE. That’s the petition that Khalil’s attorney submitted as soon as she could figure out where he was. In Jena, Louisiana, it turns out, far from New Jersey where he was whisked to after being arrested at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Columbia’s extensive campus and real estate holdings stretch for blocks and blocks.
I am a Columbia U graduate, and a graduate of Barnard College, too. I have yet to write my declamatory letter – my own personal writ of habeas corpus – regarding Khalil’s arrest to the deans of those universities. The academic institutions I chose in part because of their commitment to a liberal education and academic freedom, including the first amendment. But I will; I will get right on that. It will change little because the boards of these universities are totally cowed and the universities are essentially corporations, and big right-wing donors who are pro-Israel have pulled their funding, while Trump is freezing federal research grants they depend upon, arguing that they are anti-Semitic.
The habeas corpus first originated as a civil action to protect the good citizens back in 1215, via the 39thclause of the Magna Carta signed by King John, which stated: “No man shall be arrested or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” That was in England of course, the place our American forebears fled to rout the tyranny of kings and establish what has existed until now as a constitutional democracy, one that also separates church and state. Up to now, habeas corpus has been “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action….” It also can’t be suspended “… unless when in Cases of Rebellion of Invasion the Public Safety may require it.” Only Congress has the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
The law has been updated a bit since then, particularly in light of early Guantanamo alien detainees designated as enemy combatants who were being denied their US
Constitutional right of habeas corpus. We’ll have to see how far Khalil’s lawyer gets with her writ, a legal weapon designed to force whoever is holding a detainee to provide a valid reason (as in show their evidence) for their detention or immediate release them -- unless there are sufficient legal reasons and grounds to hold them.
The reasons are Donald says so.
The reasons are also Project Esther, a playbook for weaponizing anti-Semitism that was published last fall by the Heritage Foundation, by the same folks behind Project 2025, which is the instructional template for the DOGE purge of government and the coup. It’s a playbook that calls for weaponizing anti-Semitism as a means of purging liberals from academia and destroying the left, while unconditionally supporting the State of Israel and criminalizing Palestinians and anyone critical of the US position on Israel.
I read the Project Esther paper last fall, as part our Stop The Coup 2025 research and campaign work. I also read other papers published by the Heritage Foundation that argue the Gaza campus protests are funded by the same extreme left groups that funded Black Lives Matter. So the greater goal of weaponizing anti-Semitism is actually to destroy the US progressive left. I kid you not. Quote, unquote. They mean it. They think large like this.
Their initial goal is to target and replace several liberal deans of Ivy Leagues by declaring them anti-Semites, which had started before Heritage made public their Project Esther playbook. The goal is to eliminate progressive faculty and courses and ideas that reflect secular liberal education and replace them with Christian conservative ones.
That’s where the anti-DEI attacks come in, too.
Under the guise of protecting Israel, Project Esther advances an agenda of Christianity and whiteness. Why? Because the architects of Project 2025 and a lot of the Trump cabinet members like key coup architect Russell Vought, and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, and Linda McMahon, who’s moving to destroy the Department of Education this week, are end-times Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists. So is They are end times dominionists; they believe Israel must exist and be occupied by Jews to make way for the future return of Christ (at which point all the Jews must convert to Christianity). Yup, no kidding, either. Read all about the Christian dominionists of the fast-growing evangelical New Apostolic Order here. Everything happening with Khalil and the universities is linked to a bigger political and social goal of establishing Christian theocracy, and the universities are key to this goal.
It’s important for us to connect the dots, to understand the whole.
We should have seen a lot of signs protesting Project Esther in the protests, and the Heritage Foundation. We need to explain to Americans why Khalil is a Trojan horse proxy arrest for the erasure of liberal ideas from public discourse, declaring dissent dangerous. We should have said, watch for the round of faculty who they will now pick off, one by one, not only the students. They have given us the playbook; let’s make it more visible and call out the agenda of Christian and white supremacy being advanced under the guise of anti-Semitism. Wake up people!
© Photo: Jackie Rudin
Back to the protests Monday. They were well attended, and many anticipate the writ of habeas corpus will put a brake on Khalil being sent on to inhumane detention outside of America. But Trump has warned that many other students who protested have been identified by ICE. In fact, we understand that the new AI surveillance agents favored by MUSK and owned by DOGE advisor Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, have allowed them to comb the social media and personal information of students who participated in campus protests. (Read here for more) So, never mind their Green Cards. Never mind if they may be US citizens, maybe, even. Trump has told us what is coming: many arrests of people deemed criminal because they are ‘aligned’ by their belief that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, and thus, that belief is criminal.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is probably already being clinically defined, and it will likely begin to include many categories of thought and fresh forms of anxiety we associate with his administration’s actions. Fear of kidnapping, arrest, involuntary detention, revocation of one’s identification documents and legal status, involuntary transport across state lines, withholding of communication with loved ones, being threatened with charges of terrorism…they can be added to the list now.
I stayed at the protest Monday for an hour, long enough to hear two of the speakers tell people that such detentions are not new; we saw something of this under Trump 1.0. They didn’t talk about the CIA black sites at the protest, but we know all about them, too. They are part of the ugly underbelly of American empire, including extrajudicial Bush-era CIA ‘black site’ internment and torture centers against deemed Islamist terrorists. Obama ended the US use of black sites, then Trump planned to re-open them in 2017 but publicly backed down after the outcry. Then, oops, last week the DOGE may have inadvertently exposed a secret CIA black site in Virginia when it released a list of government properties going up for sale. Wired magazine didn’t label it a black site, but a “sensitive complex housing a CIA facility” and “the area’s worst-kept secret.” Raw Story wrote about the DOGE’s misstep last week.
© Photo: Jackie Rudin
I also left the Khalil protest before it morphed into a powerful blocks-long march because I’ve made a commitment to myself to pace myself to avoid succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which could happen to any of us if we don’t take great care. I left because I’d already planned to write about what’s ahead for the other students now terrified about the AI bots who have scoured their social media tweets and shared them with ICE officials readying to arrest them, too, snatched enroute to class or getting coffee with friends. Kids now studying at what were deemed two of the best universities in America until not so long ago, until the deans conceded to allow ICE onto their campuses. This, despite NYC being a sanctuary city. We can thank Mayor Adams there; he also made a political deal to save his own skin, agreeing to allow ICE into NY as/after the feds dropped their corruption lawsuit against him. Rise and Resist has shown up to protest every hearing of that case – and continues to.
They have forgotten what made Columbia and Barnard worthy of our regard, which includes a history of dissent that marked the student-led movement against the Vietnam War on Columbia’s campus, and the civil rights, and women’s and LGBTQIA+ activism there and at Barnard. The same for Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The same for the historically Black colleges and universities -- the HCBU’s – who are feeling the attack on DEI and racism. It goes to the heart of their mission of promoting Black visibility, knowledge, history, excellence. Who loses when student loans are weaponized? Black and brown kids going to HCBUs, among others.
I also left earlyish because I’d already marched two days earlier at the International Women’s Day March, where I got lured by Rise and Resist pals to then head over to a spontaneous Tesla protest led by a large number of young folks. They included students from myriad New York campuses who are calling out the takeover of America’s government by unelected billionaires, including Elon Musk and others backing the DOGE.
The scale of corruption is so big already, and we are witnessing it daily, a wholesale theft, and Tesla EV smart cars, with their tank-like impenetrable design, and outrageous cost, and AI-assisted efficiency, are perfect symbols and metaphors for the capture of the state by a tight-knit group s 1% oligarchs who also advise DOGE and who are also radical libertarians, including some end times Christian warriors.
© Photo: Jackie Rudin
So that’s what I was talking about to my friend in France, at 7 a.m. with a fresh coffee in hand. How I’d been to the protests, and need to pace myself. How everyone is newly alerted to the fact that we’ve sailed into the uncharted shoals of US tyranny with Khalil’s warrantless abduction-arrest-jailing. I didn’t get a chance to tell her how it was heartening to see how many people, including younger folks, showed up for the emergency call to show up for Khalil, and how some kids who are newbies at activism had gotten arrested for entering the Tesla showroom hours before we showed up – the OG ACT UP, Rise and Resist, Stop The Coup 2025 campaign elders. The action is part of an ongoing anti-Tesla national movement that has successfully cratered Tesla’s stock. Musk has lost billions.
In law, corpus means the property or premises of a trust for which the trustee is responsible. America’s democracy is our collective corpus, to defend and renew. And with every lawless action Trump and Co. take, that many more Americans and people around the world are joining in this collective resistance to tyranny.
© Photo: Raw Story
Before I close, just another bright note, to remind us of the fact that tyrants never last,
though they can endure, as the czars and Stalin and now Putin has in Russia.
Yesterday came satisfying news that the once seemingly-invincible Philippine autocrat, Rodrigo Duterte, 79, was arrested by Interpol agents working with the International Criminal Court (ICC). Duterte infamously ordered the killing of scores of Philippine citizens, as part of his vaunted war on drugs. I have Thai friends in ACT UP who were very engaged in helping harm reduction activists organize against Duterte, expose the crimes. His were extrajudicial murders, dotting the Philippine islands. A show of terror that other dictators admired. Duterte is being charged with crimes against humanity by plaintiffs who have brought their cases to the ICC. Our harm reduction activists get our share of thanks for their decades-long activism, too.
Even as we pace ourselves to resist Trump Derangement Syndrome, then, let this moment of unfolding justice serve as a beacon. Let it inspire us and remind us: we are the majority and the majority believes in a democracy. Let us reach out to learn from and organize with people in other countries with corrupt dictators backing Trump – the loose global network of Autocracy Inc., as author-journalist Anne Appelbaum labeled her 2024 book. This is a global populist rise; we need to understand that and fight back in global allyship.
We decide what happens to our country. See you at the next protest. -- AC
PS: A Wed. afternoon update on Khalil case: He has not been able to meet his lawyers. Trump prosecutors requested that the case be moved from New York to New Jersey or Louisiana, where Khalil is currently being held, in a letter sent Tuesday. They are hoping it can be heard by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, the most conservative court in the country (hears cases from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi). I profiled these courts and the judges in a pre-election round-up Special Report on our campaign website. The Fifth Circuit’s importance derives from the willingness to consider conservative lawsuits and arcane laws and arguments that aim to change, reverse, or block national policies. Judges include:
Priscilla Richman A 2017 Trump appointee and ex-Texas Supreme Court judge, Owen ruled the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional in 2020, upholding a lower court ruling, and argued against same-sex marriage rights in Bishop v. Smith (2014).
Don Willett A 2018 Trump appointee and vocal advocate for originalist legal principles. He ruled to invalidate parts of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in a 2021 case.
Kyle Duncan A 2018 Trump appointee, he ruled to uphold Texas’s state authority to sharply restrict abortion.
James Ho A 2018 Trump appointee, Ho ruled against DACA protections for dreamers in a 2021 standout case, and supported state challenges to federal immigration policies.
Keep your eyes on this! — AC