Opinion | What I Expect if an Unconstrained Donald Trump Retakes Power

Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, why our bags aren’t packed.“It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X.

National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in.But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday.

They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them.But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.Partly, I just feel frozen with horror.

This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis.Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American...