The Price of Legitimacy

When government becomes theater and citizens are the props, the only question left is why we keep buying tickets.

It takes a particular kind of government to gaslight you about a fire while standing in front of the flames with a gasoline can. Today’s White House “ANTIFA roundtable” was a pageant, a reality-TV set piece tuned to the Stephen Miller attention economy, where the goal isn’t governance but spectacle, not law but the performance of “law and order.” The cast list featured the usual chorus of aggrieved influencers and political appointees telling one another they are very brave, very persecuted, and very close to uncovering a sprawling left-wing terror hydra funded by NGOs, homeless-services nonprofits, and, naturally, the media. The villain, “ANTIFA,” was invoked like a magic spell that makes due process disappear and federal troops appear.

“It should be clear to all Americans that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat,” Trump intoned, before musing that “the mayor of Chicago and governor of Illinois should be jailed.”

“Everything we are doing is very lawful. What they are doing is not lawful,” he declared, even as he entertained a question about suspending habeas corpus to deal with so-called “insurrectionists.”

Pam Bondi chimed in: “ANTIFA is a domestic left-wing terrorist organization… This is not activism. It’s anarchy.”

And the president nodded along when one participant suggested designating ANTIFA as a foreign terrorist organization: “If you agree, I agree. Let’s get it done.”

The effect was surreal: officials and influencers speaking of neighbors, students, and critics as if they were al-Qaeda cells, while threatening to withhold back pay from federal workers who displease the president, “Most will get back pay… there are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of”, and promising that “whatever perch you sit in, it will be crushed.”

And then came the question about the No Kings rally. A reporter noted that the city of Austin was preparing to waive about $120,000 in fees so the event could go forward. Trump’s response wasn’t about democracy, free speech, or even the First Amendment. It was about punishment:

“I would love to do something about that. Bring a lawsuit… The best thing you can do is have honest elections because the elections are totally rigged in so many of these places… The biggest thing you can do is have honest elections… You need borders… You need honest media. You need honest elections and you have a great country.”

And just to drive the point home, he handed the grievance off to his personal lawyers in the room:

“If they’re waiving a fee… I guarantee they wouldn’t waive it if it was… a conservative rally. So maybe you can look into that, Pam. Todd, that sounds like one for Todd.”

This is the whole game in miniature: the protest is irrelevant, the grievance is the point, and the machinery of government is available to be pointed at whomever Trump thinks has slighted him. Even a city permit fee becomes evidence of treason, a loyalty test for attorneys general, and a justification for unleashing the Justice Department on a rally with the unforgivable audacity to say out loud what the Founders once wrote down: No Kings.

Enter the Grim Reaper.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen the rehearsal notes. Miller’s theory of the moment is simple: saturate the feed with lurid images and language, “insurrection,” “terror,” “burning cities”, until exhausted, low-information voters accept presidential fiat as the only adult in the room. Today’s script turned that dial to eleven. Judges who limit executive power were recast as insurgents. Governors and mayors who resist federalized deployments were framed as criminals. The president mused, again, about jailing them, dangled foreign trips for Middle East “peace,” and floated the idea of designating an amorphous domestic bogeyman as a foreign terrorist organization, because in this story, adjectives are just handcuffs waiting for a noun.

The discussion was a study in inversion. “Everything we are doing is very lawful,” the president insists, moments before suggesting the law should not apply to him. “We are following the money,” declares a self-styled investigator, moments before admitting the targets are more vibes than entities, no LLCs, no EINs, just masks and menace. A journalist recounts trauma and brain bleeds; the president praises her courage, then pivots to the stock market. Another asks about back pay for workers in a shutdown the administration engineered as a political cudgel; the president says “most” will get paid, except the ones who won’t, depending on whether they’ve displeased him. Habeas corpus even wanders into the chat like a stray cat: should we suspend it? No one says yes, but the thought hangs in the air like tear gas.

The real question in the middle of this shutdown isn’t just how long it drags on, but what, exactly, we’re funding. Do we want our tax dollars underwriting an autocracy, one that treats its own citizens as enemies of the state? If Democrats cave, they won’t just be ending a shutdown; they’ll be co-signing the transformation of governance into theater and theater into rule. Complicity dressed up as pragmatism.

Because that’s what this regime offers: governance as content, content as weapon. The goal is to blur every line, between protest and war, local policing and federal occupation, journalism and propaganda, criminal behavior and political identity. It’s not about solving problems but staging them, replaying them on loop until outrage itself becomes the currency of power. And if we spend our days arguing over whether Portland is a “bombed-out hellscape,” then Trump and his chorus have already won. We’ve been baited into debating the set design while the script rolls on.

The only questions worth asking are about legitimacy and money. Who gets to wield the state’s authority, and who keeps writing the checks for the spectacle? Everything else is just background noise in the show they want us to watch.

If Miller is scripting the show, Russ Vought is running props in the background, wielding the purse like a scythe. Trump himself posted the AI meme of Vought in a hood with a blade, and the man has been living up to the billing. Senator Mike Lee gushed that Vought had been “dreaming” of a shutdown “since puberty.”

That dream looks like a nightmare for everyone else. OMB draft memos floated denying back pay to federal workers, in open defiance of the law Congress already passed. Even Senate Republicans flinched. Thom Tillis admitted, “I’m not an attorney, but I think it’s pretty bad strategy to even say that sort of stuff.” John Thune sighed, “We don’t control what he’s going to do.” Susan Collins, not known for firebrand resistance, had to remind the administration the issue was already “settled.”

Trump, of course, doubled down: “For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.” A government paycheck isn’t a contract anymore, it’s a loyalty oath.

Here’s the political physics the White House keeps tripping over: Americans like the idea of shrinking “government” until it collides with their airport, their paycheck, their kid’s school, their park. That’s why Senate Republicans are already tut-tutting about back-pay threats and shuttered services, because when the “administrative state” meets your delayed flight and your furloughed neighbor, the romance dies. The longer Vought swings the scythe, the clearer the ownership becomes.

The No Kings movement is right to reject monarchy cosplay, but the work can’t stop at chantable slogans. Today’s roundtable proved once again that the regime has a theory of power. It is ugly and effective: redefine dissent as terrorism, redefine checks as “insurrection,” and feed the beast with made-for-TV moments until exhaustion does the rest. Our counter has to be equally clear: withdraw legitimacy, tighten the purse, and build the alternative in public.

What does refusing legitimacy look like in practice?

It means stopping the laundering of this government’s violence through bipartisan ink. If Congress funds agencies that are openly weaponized for propaganda raids, gassing reporters and zip-tying kids for B-roll, that money is complicity. The “forever shutdown” isn’t a tantrum; it’s the only blunt instrument left when the executive branch treats statutory limits as improv prompts and the Court keeps handing it longer leashes. Make Republicans pass their own reopen bill without Democratic cover. Make every closed park, every tower short-staffed, every paycheck delayed, every grounded flight, a Republican problem. If they want to run on state violence, let them own the costs in daylight.

It also means shifting the battlefield from spectacle to service. People will tolerate a lot of nonsense until it interferes with the ordinary dignity of their lives. The fastest way to puncture Miller’s narrative is to rub Vought’s cuts directly against lived experience: the Gateway Tunnel shelved because the White House needed a meme; delayed cancer trials because NIH grants turned into political hostages; a National Guard photo-op that doesn’t move a single kid through a school door safely but does make grandma miss her connecting flight. They can shout “ANTIFA” all day; you cannot get to grandma’s house without air traffic controllers.

And this is where carpe momentum meets its test. We’ve been saying the quiet part out loud: rallies are catharsis; platforms change outcomes. No Kings should be more than a weekend. It should be a governing theory with teeth. Not the Harvard-panel kind, the ward-level, union-hall, courthouse-step kind. Civilian control and real oversight of immigration enforcement. Data transparency with teeth so federal numbers can’t be massaged out of existence. Hard walls between propaganda and public service, contracts, inspectors general, clawbacks. Statutory guardrails on emergency powers that can’t be flipped into martial-law vibes every time cable producers need a chyron.

Most of all, it means building parallel resilience so people aren’t forced to choose between authoritarianism and collapse. Public banks that keep paychecks flowing when Washington tries to squeeze. Municipal broadband so information monopolies can’t throttle the truth. Community clinics and legal defense funds that make raids costlier and neighborhoods safer than a film crew’s jaundiced vision of “order.” These are not utopian projects; they are the anti-arson brigade. They deny the regime its favorite leverage, fear of chaos, by making everyday life work without kneeling to the strongman.

Today’s roundtable will cycle through the news with the usual choreography: cable clips, outrage posts, a ratings blip. The administration will declare victory over an “idea,” threaten more designations, boast about “peace” talks, and return to the shutdown trench with Vought’s scythe gleaming. Tomorrow they’ll do it again. That’s the point of the pageant: keep you rubbernecking while the purse is emptied and the law is drained of meaning.

Let’s not fool ourselves: the Trump regime does not lack vision. They know exactly what kind of government they want, centralized, punitive, spectacular, a state where power exists to punish enemies and reward loyalists. They are building it in real time, brick by authoritarian brick.

Unless we do the harder work of laying out, in precise terms, what we want government to be, we will lose this battle. Our task is both simpler and more demanding: stop funding the show. Describe what better government looks like, in boring, beautiful detail. Not slogans, not vibes, but policies and practices people can see, touch, and experience. Build pieces of it now so that “democracy” isn’t just a word on a bumper sticker, but a tangible alternative to the spectacle.

And tell the truth without euphemism: a government that gasses its critics for content has forfeited not just its legitimacy, but its right to our money and our consent.

Carpe Momentum! There is no time to waste.