This Space is Getting Hot
Lots of Red Lines Have Been Blown Through in the First 6 Months of Trump's Revenge Tour.
Six months into Trump 2.0 and we’re not just “back in the arena.” We’re in the blast furnace. The red lines that were supposed to guard American democracy—the ones the pundit class assured us “could never be crossed”—aren’t just crossed, they’re blown apart. The man is running his MAGA revenge tour, and the space around us is getting hotter every single week.
The blitzkrieg strategy: flood the zone, break the guardrails
Trump didn’t waste a single day. January 20th wasn’t about pageantry—it was about dropping a stack of executive orders like napalm. Birthright citizenship? Torched. Refugee admissions? Suspended. The civil service protections built up over decades? Blown up with the return of Schedule F. And, in case anyone missed the theme, he pardoned the people who tried to beat cops to death for him on January 6th.
Six months later, the signal is clear: the system doesn’t discipline Trump; Trump disciplines the system.
This is how you run a revenge tour. You move faster than the courts, faster than the press corps, faster than the opposition party that still thinks d’nile is a strategy. Bannon’s Flood the Zone strategy has been executed almost perfectly.
Media? Defunded.
Let’s talk about the media ecosystem. Not the Fox/MAGA media carnival, but the last shreds of public-interest infrastructure. In May, Trump signed the order to cut NPR and PBS off the federal teat, then followed with a rescissions bill that clawed back a billion dollars in already-appropriated funding. That’s not a budget choice. That’s ideological warfare. When the president of the United States decides that factual reporting and educational programming are the enemy, it’s because he’s building a disinformation bubble where only his propaganda gets oxygen.
(If you want to learn who will be running new public media-who is installing “Trump Youth” instruction in classrooms everywhere Republicans control curriculum Google Prager U. I’ll write on this sometime soon).
Your tax dollars at work!
The purge: DOJ, FBI, and the prosecutors
The Justice Department has been treated like Trump’s personal vendetta machine since Nazi Barbie took the oath in February. Entire divisions have been gutted. Career prosecutors have been shown the door. And now, the pièce de résistance: an attempt to literally prosecute the prosecutors.
Jack Smith. Letitia James. And yes, give it time, Fani Willis. Their crime? Trying to hold him accountable. Trump’s DOJ is trying to flip the script and put the people who investigated him in the dock. That isn’t just authoritarian—it’s banana republic cosplay with a federal seal on the podium.
The FBI hasn’t been spared either. Leadership posts have been cleaned out, loyalty oaths effectively reinstated, lie detectors completed, and the Bureau has been re-oriented toward Trump’s priorities: immigration raids and “anti-woke” investigations. It’s COINTELPRO rewritten for MAGA.
Climate policy? Extinguished.
Climate change—the existential threat of our century—is gone from the federal agenda. Funding stripped. Offices shuttered. Scientists reassigned, gagged, or quitting in despair. I can’t say this enough: THEY DEFUNDED THE SEVERE STORMS WEATHER LABS.
Trump has taken the flame-thrower not just to environmental regulation, but to the very idea that the federal government should care whether the planet cooks. He’s not rolling back; he’s salting the earth. It’s ExxonMobil’s dream and humanity’s nightmare.
Budget bombs and economic punishment
Trump’s first budget wasn’t a budget; it was a battering ram. It jammed through draconian cuts to social programs while shoveling money to enforcement, deportation, and military contractors. The big ugly bill turned into a wish list for Heritage Foundation ideologues who treat every poor kid’s lunch as waste and every ICE detention bed as an “investment.”
Then came the tariffs. Ten percent across the board, “reciprocal” tariffs of outlandish precents, layered on top, and adjustments and pauses coming so fast businesses can’t even update their spreadsheets. It’s a back-door national sales tax, one that hits American consumers and businesses while he brags about sticking it to foreigners. The economy is wobbling under the weight, but the point isn’t growth. The point is punishment.
Alligator Alcatraz and offshoring migrants
If Guantánamo Bay was a symbol of the post-9/11 security state, Trump’s offshore migrant detention scheme is the dystopian sequel. They’re literally talking about shipping asylum seekers to third countries, including El Salvador, and sticking them in camps that human rights groups are already calling “alligator Alcatraz.” That phrase isn’t hyperbole—it’s branding. The cruelty is the feature. Trump wants the optics of migrants penned in barbed-wire hellscapes to show his base that America belongs to them and them alone.
Red lines? Already gone.
The United States was supposed to have red lines. Don’t pardon your own coup mob. Don’t purge independent law enforcement. Don’t defund the media. Don’t prosecute the prosecutors. Don’t erase climate policy in the middle of planetary crisis. Don’t use the military to settle scores with governors or to control the capital like a satrapy. But here we are. Six months in, and every one of those lines has been crossed, sometimes twice.
The danger isn’t just that Trump has done all of this—it’s how quickly it’s been normalized. Every new outrage gets folded into the background noise. If the last presidency taught us anything, it’s that repetition is anesthesia. Shock becomes routine. And routine becomes precedent.
Why this space is hot
The metaphor matters. Space heats up because pressure builds. Trump’s project is to crank the heat until the guardrails buckle, until independent institutions boil away, until resistance collapses under exhaustion. That’s what a revenge tour looks like: not random chaos, but a deliberate strategy to make the public space unlivable for dissent and untouchable by accountability.
This isn’t about 2028, or even about Trump himself anymore. It’s about whether the United States is going to remain a democracy or devolve into a strongman state where political enemies are jailed, journalists silenced, facts criminalized, and elections manipulated. We’re not drifting there slowly. We’re sprinting.
The space ahead
Six months in, we’re past the “warning lights flashing” stage. We’re in the overheating stage. The courts are swamped. The press is cornered. Civil servants are being replaced with sycophants. Republican governors are sending armed national guard troops to D.C.
Trump runs over every red line with a tank.
The space is getting hot because the man behind the wheel intends to drive straight through the fire. And unless Americans grasp the scale and speed of what’s happening, there may not be much left to salvage by the time the engine blows.
Doc, I get it. The choir has heard the note, the Preacher has preached. Now what in the Holy Hell do we do??? I cannot read another 'this is it, folks' article without marching orders. Do we buy guns and ammo? Do we tear up paving bricks? Do we dig a bomb shelter in the backyard? Hell, tell us to start saving bottle caps and we will do it!!! But we can't just rally our way out of this and waiting is obviously an effing bad idea.
We used to wonder if "it" could happen here. Now we're wondering how bad "it" will be.