How It Stops. How It Ends.

The ICE Out for Good protest in Las Vegas on Jan. 12, 2026 | Susan J. Demas

We are in a moment of national crisis unknown since the Civil War.

America is teetering on a thin edge, poised to descend into state violence, mass repression, and the elimination of life and liberty for million of American citizens at variance with the Trump regime.

We must stop it. We must end it.

There’s a difference between how it stops and how it ends.

It may seem like a trivial parsing, but it isn’t.

What is happening in America today must stop, but it must also end.

There is no alternative if we believe in the dream that America once was, the dream of a nation and a people bound not by blood-and-soil nationalism or grunting populism, but by a sacred inheritance, a propositional nature in which being an American meant being governed and bound by laws and the Constitution.

Nothing will make a low-tier MAGA “intellectual” (an oxymoron of such ludicrous toxicity I hesitate to even commit it to print) squeal faster than describing America as a democracy. They’ve heard just enough to fear democracy as the untrammeled rule of the mob, the horde, the people who want things, and they believe their first-year dorm room B.S. session affect of, “We’re a republic, not a democracy, libtard” settles any argument on this front.

What they miss is that the party, the leader, and the power structure they’ve embraced with a fiery passion in the last decade has ended that Republic, to say nothing of the democracy it once governed.

I’ll say it, and with a damn heavy heart.

We have squandered the astounding inheritance of ten generations of Americans before us, shattered the bond of faith and trust in a system of representative government unique in the history of the world, and replaced it with a grotesque mirror image of freedom, liberty, and self-government.

What has replaced it is dark, sick, and broken. It is a government led by the most egregious criminal in American political history, a man with a dark soul, a twisted mind racked with mental disorders and pathologies, and a will to power that rivals the dictators and strongmen we once understood without a blink of doubt or question to be the antithesis of our values. He is the kind of man Americans once sent their son to fight and defeat.

He is served by a party, a movement, and a media that view him as a nearly religious figure, a man of destiny willing to smite the people and cultures they hate. Some view him as a useful idiot, delivering regulatory and tax giveaways to America’s struggling billionaire class.

Some view him as a messiah, God’s arm to smite the unbelievers. Some see him as the future of a nationalist authoritarian system better suited to their ends than the messy Republic for which we stood.

He is empowered by a mendacious, cowardly, and sadistic cadre of aides, advisors, Cabinet officials, and influencers across a constellation of social media platforms wired to divide America and promote his goals.

The results are now playing out in our streets, and the butcher’s bill for his corruption of America is being written in blood.

Renee Good’s death was a feature, not a bug, a goal, not an accident.

Renee Good was a casualty of war against the American people, of a calculated indifference to the rights and liberties of every American citizen at the hands of a criminal enterprise masquerading as law enforcement.

Her death serves as the definitive proof that the “blood-and-soil” rhetoric of this Administration has a tangible, human cost. The machinery of government has weaponized against its own people, meant to strike terror into Americans who oppose the Administration.

Her violent and bloody murder served a purpose: it signaled to the MAGA movement that the old rules, the sacred inheritance of the rights of every citizen to life and liberty, were officially dead. “Cross us and die” is the new reality.

Hers was the first death to penetrate the minds of the American people at the hands of this evil Administration, but she will sadly not be the last.

The catalog of the sins of the Trump Administration in its second term goes far, far beyond what I can include in one article, but this moment demands we examine how to stop this man and end his evils.

The criminality, cruelty, and corruption of this moment have put America into a permanent state of grim anxiety, a fear not just for ourselves, but for our families, and the future of this long experiment we call the United States. We roar toward 250 years as a nation not with joy, but with the weight of pain and loss hanging over us, and the knowledge that we have failed to stop this corrosive man and his evil government.

But it is not over yet.

Our nation is stronger than the evils of this world if we let ourselves live by honor and courage in the coming days and weeks.

To stop the immediate crisis, we must weaponize the very “propositional nature” of America. This involves a tactical veto of civil society: a collective refusal by elected leaders, local governments, businesses, the legal community, and civic and religious leaders to facilitate the “will to power.”

By creating friction in the gears of the state, we transform the grim anxiety of the populace into a functional resistance that protects the remaining guardrails of the Republic until the momentum of ICE can be broken at the ballot box.

To end the movement, we must embark on a national lustration, a public and legal purging of the rot. Democrats, once back in power, will return to their mean and try to pass feel-good measures and win over America with policies their technocratic hearts crave. They’ll mutter “let’s put this behind us” and “it’s time to move on” while the enablers and architects of Trump’s violence and viciousness roam free to plot a swift return to power.

It’s like treating cancer with a foot massage; what is required is a national run of political chemotherapy, and there is no substitute for the pain and misery that awaits us in that process.

This is anchored by the National Commission on the Rule of Law, which documents every “butcher’s bill” and ensures that names like Renee Good are never forgotten.

By forcing a transparent accounting of the catalog of crimes and assaults on the laws and Constitution of this nation, we strip the messianic veneer from the leader and expose the enablers and architects who enabled him for their dark and un-American ends, for profit, and for the cruel pleasures they found in the abuse of power.

We’ve never done this before, even after the civil war, but anyone involved in the crimes and unconstitutional assaults on the rights of Americans in the Trump orbit will face accountability and a permanent exile from the halls of power. It’s de-Nazification, American-style.

I’m no expert on these matters, and it will take an army of smart lawyers to make this happen, but I offer this modest proposal:

Criminal Accountability for the Violation of Rights.

True “ending” requires more than just barring officials from office; it demands the active prosecution of those who used the machinery of the state to crush the “sacred inheritance” of the people.

A purged and reformed Department of Justice would pivot from being a tool of Trump’s criminal and corrupt regime to an instrument of restorative justice, utilizing statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 241 (Conspiracy Against Rights) and 242 (Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law). Smarter people with legal degrees can likely add to this list, but those are pretty facially obvious as a starting point.

These laws, ironically born of the first Reconstruction to fight the original “blood-and-soil” movement that brought us the Civil War, provide the criminal framework to prosecute any official who willfully conspired to “injure, oppress, or intimidate” citizens in the free exercise of their Constitutional rights.

The assaults on Americans’ civil rights by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are particularly egregious, and for those found to have abused their power, no matter how far up or down the political food chain, must face criminal liability in both state and Federal courts. No blue wall of omerta. No “hero cop” narratives. These men are the core of an American SS, and have become violent enforcers for the Trump Administration.

By seeking indictments for people like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, and Tom Homan, and hundreds of lower-ranking DHS and ICE officials who executed these abuses, we demonstrate that in America, the rule of law is not a suggestion, but a binding commitment that carries a price for its betrayal.

Criminal Accountability for Corruption.

Trump’s family, business associates, friends, and Administration officials at every level have engaged in a corrupt scheme to monetize his Presidency.

The betrayal of the American was not merely ideological and constitutional; it was transactional.

The presidency was treated not as a sacred trust, but as the ultimate distressed asset, stripped for parts and sold cheaply by his family and friends, all of whom viewed the law as something they could simply ignore.

From the blatant “pay-to-play” funnels of foreign real estate deals to the shadow-brokering of federal policy for the benefit of private business associates, this was a coordinated scheme to monetize the highest office in the land.

Reversing Trump’s corrupt pay-to-play pardons for donors is an obvious legal decision, though as a non-attorney, I know this is fraught.

To end this, criminal accountability must be absolute. We must deploy federal anti-corruption and anti-bribery statutes broadly and aggressively, and leverage Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges, to ensure that every dollar siphoned from the American people is accounted for and every Trump-connected ally who facilitated this kleptocracy is held to the standard of the law.

If we do not treat this corrupt monetization of the Oval Office as a crime against the Republic, we invite the next strongman to view the Treasury as his personal vault.

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Institutional Restoration, Day One.

The politicization and monetization of Federal agencies warrant a three-step process: transparent investigations and reporting, aggressive criminal prosecution of wrongdoing, and unprecedented ethics reform with severe consequences for future transgressions.

Beginning with the Department of Justice, this process is vital to restoring the rule of law in the United States. The abuses of power under Pam Bondi’s Department of Injustice and Kash Patel’s FBI are unrivaled and deeply corrupt. The DOJ must not, and can never again, serve as “The President’s Law Firm.” This should be a constitutional amendment, but a strong law would work in the interim.

Reversing and auditing every executive order for Constitutional and legal breaches, and for orders passed for corrupt purposes, is vital. Trump’s overbroad use of executive power is a precedent the next President must lead on by example, vowing to use it narrowly and judiciously, and to first seek solutions with the Legislative Branch before

The President must work with Congress to create legislation that narrows the Supreme Court’s United States v. Trump decision on executive immunity. The “get out of jail free card” of that decision has emboldened the worst and most dangerous actions of the Trump Administration in its second term.

Restoring USAID shutdown would begin to right the ship of America’s battered reputation in the international community. A renewed commitment to NATO and ASEAN in the face of Russian and Chinese malfeasance in the world will begin to, at least marginally, reverse the decade of free-play Trump handed the world’s two most dangerous authoritarian states.

Reexamining the withdrawal from international treaties, organizations, and agreements seems like another reasonable step toward restoring our soft power at home and abroad.

Restore Honor and Dignity To The Presidency.

The ballroom gets leveled, the gold Temu junk gets taken off the walls, the Rose Garden is lovingly restored, and the East Wing is rebuilt with love and care, not a perfect replacement, but an atonement. The Kennedy Center is restored to its former dignity. His name comes off everything, everywhere in the Federal system. States are informed that Federal funding will be denied for infrastructure projects honoring him.

Petty? Granted, but there’s a purpose. The virus of his brand, image, and name must be treated like political smallpox: a deadly memory, stored in sealed vaults. He deserves no honors, no mention beyond condemnation, no praise. His legacy must be a cautionary, not laudatory, tale.

The next President works with Congress to pass stringent ethics laws covering the Executive Branch, from the President down to the lowest GS-9 level.

Lustration and Disqualification.

You cannot allow the old Washington games to continue. It will be a hard-fought battle in go-along-to-get-along D.C., but any official who served Trump is disqualified from public life.

Each of them has clearly and definitively violated their oath of office and must be barred from ever holding public office again, whether elected or in paid, unpaid, consulting, advisory, or “special government employee” positions.

Congress must pass a permanent ban on anyone employed in any appointed or consulting capacity in the Trump Administration from any form of Federal government contracting or consulting, and permanently deny security clearances to any officials in this category who hold or seek them.

It goes without saying that we must investigate and fire every Trump appointee, nominee, Schedule C, SES, and consultant from any Federal government position, and remove those employees who converted from an appointee to a civil service position.

Not one will be left to metastasize into bureaucratic power or to sabotage the restoration of civil governance.

These ideas are what my brain came up with on a weekend afternoon. They are necessarily incomplete, and the lawyers will rightly argue over the architecture. Fine. Let them.

But the point isn’t my checklist, but also the moral posture behind it: if we only stop this, it pauses. It catches its breath. It mutates. It creeps into the shadows to recover, grow stronger, and attack again.

And it comes roaring back the moment decent people get tired and start longing for “normal.”

Ending it means we refuse the oldest lie in Washington: that time itself is accountability. That the political and the legal consequences are never connected. That the calendar turns, the headlines change, and the victims become footnotes.

Renee Good doesn’t get that luxury. She doesn’t get a reset. She doesn’t get to “move on.” She doesn’t get to slither out the White House door and into a seven-figure lobbying job.

Her name is the blood-stained price tag on our national denial, and if we let her become just another news-cycle corpse, then we’re not restoring a Republic. We’re just writing its eulogy,

So yes: stop it at the ballot box, in the courts, in the streets where lawful protest is still possible, and in every institution that can throw sand in the gears of a lawless state.

But end it on the floor of a resurgent Congress and in courtrooms, with records and verdicts and disqualifications that outlive any one election. End it by making it unmistakably dangerous; not to oppose America, but to abuse it. End it by making the oath of office mean something again, even for the men with badges and the soft cowards with big titles.

And when that ending begins, when the fever breaks, we rebuild what blood-and-soil nationalism and modern authoritarianism tried to burn down: civic grace. An American identity defined not by who we hate, but by what we submit to: the law, the Constitution, and the stubborn idea that no man gets to be king because he’s loud, cruel, or popular.

Stopping is survival. Ending is justice.

And if we want to claim the inheritance of those ten generations before us, our better, and stronger angels are calling us to do both.