Violence in Istanbul Foreshadows Our Future Under Trump
We Should Expect Violent Crackdowns, Democrats in Prison, and a New Constitution
On May 1, 2025, workers’ rights supporters clogged streets in Bangladesh, donned Joker masks in Indonesia, braved the rain in South Korea, waved red cloths in Italy, blew bubbles in Serbia, and built make-shift coffins in Senegal, symbolizing workers who’d been fired en masse, fragile livelihoods tossed to the wind.
In the U.S., thousands marched in L.A., New York, Denver, Chicago, and Washington to denounce mass firings of federal workers and Donald Trump’s diabolical attacks on non-criminal immigrants. In Manhattan, AOC told crowds, “When they see us in the streets, (politicians) get very afraid!”
But in Istanbul, things were less jubilant. In the city center, Taksim Square, demonstrations have been illegal for 12 years. On May Day, the government still erected fences, shut down public transportation, and sent 50,000 police officers to guarantee order. They paced the area, brandishing large guns for all to see. They arrested 100 people for “planning” to protest.
Still, hundreds of Turkish souls marched toward the square, signs and banners foisted skyward. The officers, dressed in black, pounced, pinned protesters to the ground, shoved elderly sign-holders, and manhandled over 400 onto buses to be imprisoned. The crackdown culminated two months of chaos sparked by Turkish President Erdogan, sending his main political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, to prison.
This was police state activity, where brute force is a hammer that makes every presidential annoyance look like a nail. Many believe the U.S. will never be this way. But that confidence should evaporate now that innocent people have been snatched off American streets and disappeared to foreign gulags, Supreme Court orders have been defied, global tariffs have been flipped on and off like a light switch, and an unelected immigrant-billionaire, under criminal investigation, fired thousands from government and snatched billions in federal contracts.
President Erdogan of Turkey took 20 years to twist his country into an authoritarian pretzel. Trump will aim to do the same in a matter of months. Erdogan’s trajectory suggests that we in the States should prepare for Trump to begin violently assaulting protesters, jailing his political rivals, and securing power beyond his second term.
These moves are already being telegraphed. In his first term, Trump tear-gassed protesters in Lafayette Square to stage a photo shoot. Two weeks later, Trump sent unmarked Customs and Border Patrol agents to Portland to detain suspected protesters in unmarked vans without informing them of charges against them. Before Lafayette, Trump reportedly urged his military to shoot protesters.
In term two, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has refused to say he would not shoot protesters. Students protesting Israeli bombings of Gaza are emerging as the dissident flashpoint that BLM protests were to the tail end of Trump’s first term. The difference now is that Trump has years to experiment with repression tactics and secure immunity for them with judges, local officials, and the viewing public. With that long runway, we should expect illegal detentions, beatings, and disappearances of protesters of Netanyahu shelling and other stances irksome to Trump.
Trump is working to achieve similar immunity before jailing his political rivals. He famously rode chants of “Lock Her Up” to the presidency and then never jailed Hillary Clinton. But Trump 2.0 has issued a criminal referral against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a woman with more leverage over Trump than Mrs. Clinton. The administration alleges James falsified bank records, charges - spurious or not - James will have to devote time, money, and professional capital to fighting. A friendly judge can help Trump ruin James’s career and bring heavy pressure on all other attorneys to avoid enforcing laws against Trump.
We should expect more aggressive prosecutions and eventual apprehensions of other combative AGs, like Michigan’s Dana Nessel, bombastic governors like Illinois’ J.D. Pritzker, and troublesome members of Congress, like Senator Adam Schiff and Representative AOC.
Many pundits have stated that seeking a third term is “a bridge too far,” even for Trump. This is despite Trump selling “Trump 2028” merch on his website. Others assert Trump “is just joking,” despite Trump recently stating, “I’m not joking.” Washington Post columnist David Van Drehle, with irrepressible confidence, recently wrote,
“Donald Trump will not be on the 2028 ballot because he cannot legally be elected…This is not open to interpretation. It was written in plain English into the Constitution itself, in the text of the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Legal interpretation doesn’t get much simpler than that. Who can be elected president more than twice? No person. Case closed.”
This is shocking ignorance of the myriad ways Trump can twist our country into a Constitutional knot requiring many courageous defectors to untangle. Trump has assured the world his inner circle is brainstorming these options, telling reporters, “There are ways in which you could do it.”
Constitutionally, Trump is barred from running for a third term by the 22nd Amendment and from running for Vice President by the 12th Amendment. But realistically, he is barred only by the Supreme Court’s willingness to uphold these Amendments. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has flexed anti-authoritarian courage recently, but her feelings are likely to change once the Democratic nominee surges in the polls.
In 2028, Trump can rain massive chaos down on the election by declaring a state of emergency, which would empower his government to take “extraordinary actions” during “a time of crisis.” He can declare martial law, allowing his military to wrest control over all civic operations. Soldiers can then seize voting machines, barricade the White House, and detain election workers, members of the Supreme Court, the Democratic nominee, governors who refuse to ratify a third-term enabling amendment, or anyone who tries to constitutionally force Trump from the White House.
In the mode of foreign authoritarians, Trump could “write” a new Constitution, containing no term limits and wild new powers, to be “ratified” by his cabinet, GOP allies, Republican state legislatures, supplicant governors, and the military, which Secretary Hegseth is currently purging of dissenters.
What is certain is that Trump’s team is gameplanning all of these options, plus others that normal individuals, burdened by a moral compass, could never fathom. In this strain of political chicanery, Trump would hardly be a pioneer.
In the 1990s, Turkey’s current president was elected mayor of Istanbul. His term ended when he was indicted for inciting racial hatred. He returned to politics, established a new party, became its leader, and was elected Prime Minister. He instituted economic policies that exploded inflation and depreciated the Turkish lira. He threatened to invade Greece and Armenia, and inflamed crises in Syria and Libya. The media has accused him of election fraud and members of his cabinet of massive corruption.
The people are protesting. They bang pots and pans at 9 pm each night to show their disapproval. Erdogan has called them “riff-raff.” Barred from running for another term as Prime Minister, he won the Presidency, a ceremonial position, until he wrote a new constitution giving him sweeping power, including to intervene in the legal system.
In 2016, factions of his military attempted a coup. Erdogan narrowly survived, threw 50,000 people in prison, and purged 150,000 from his government. The current mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, was rising as Turkey’s most hopeful challenger to Erdogan, until the president charged him with terrorism and threw him in prison.
Erdogan has been in power for 22 years, but faces another term limit in May 2028. His spokesman has recently said running for another term is “on our agenda.”
Donald Trump is walking a path well-worn by authoritarians before him. We need to prepare today for these maneuvers from abroad to hit our shores tomorrow. We need to urge our representatives to take the proper precautions, communicate dangers to the most vulnerable, and embrace strong reactions when even small steps toward crushing our democracy are taken. If history is any guide, ousting Trump from power will take more than banging pots and pans.
This isn't a warning. It’s an obituary for democratic complacency. In the US, we are on dead ground!
Brent is right to draw the Erdogan parallel, but let’s stop whispering about what’s coming and start saying it with our full chest. Trump is not flirting with fascism. He is engaged, ring on finger, planning a wedding at Mar-a-Lago, and every Republican with a shred of spine is either RSVP’ing yes or mysteriously missing.
What we are seeing, in Istanbul, in Trump’s America 2.0, in the MAGA-run state houses, is the erasure of accountability. The playbook is ancient. Strip legal protections. Criminalize protest. Target the opposition. Control the media. Rebrand loyalty as law. And when that fails? Write a new Constitution. One that legalizes the crime scene and punishes anyone who dares to remember what came before.
Trump isn’t joking about 2028. That was the test balloon. The merch is real. The immunity plans are in motion. And with Pete Hegseth salivating over the prospect of turning the military into a presidential enforcer squad, we’d be fools to pretend the guardrails are going to hold. Because they didn’t in 2020. They held just enough. And Trump has been planning revenge ever since.
Letitia James is the beginning, not the end. Prosecutors, governors, judges, journalists, all are on the chopping block once Trump consolidates power. The apparatus for mass criminalization already exists. ICE. CBP. Fusion centers. Unmarked vans. He doesn’t have to build a secret police. He just needs to rebrand what’s already there.
And don’t count on the Constitution to save us. The Constitution is just paper if the people sworn to uphold it treat it like toilet tissue. Trump doesn’t need a legal right to a third term. He needs enough chaos and enough cowardice. That’s it. That’s the game.
So what do we do?
We stop acting like pots and pans will save us. They won’t.
We stop pretending institutions will self-correct. They won’t.
We stop wringing our hands and start organizing. Voting. Striking. Whistleblowing. Leaking. Resisting.
Loudly. Publicly. Permanently.
Sun Tzu understood the terrain of power better than most generals understand the ground beneath their feet. Dead ground — where retreat is impossible — forces soldiers to fight like hell. That’s where we are now. No escape. No delay. Just the clarity of survival through collective, unrelenting resistance.
No doubt there are those who'll see this piece as excessively alarmist. I'm not among them. Neither our constitution nor our 250 years of democratic stability immunize us against authoritarianism, including its worst manifestations as described here. And clearly nothing Trump has done or said thus far suggests he has any ideological aversion to it...quite the contrary. What's more, the protests roiling the country will eventually beget at least some violence...they always do...providing a perfect excuse for deploying our military and other heavy handed tactics against his own people. That said, protest we will until our own crisis reaches Turkish proportions, at which time I suspect we'll turn to some sort of "virtual" resistance, national sicks outs or something else that someone much more clever and than I am will devise.