Brynn Tannehill on Civil War, Trump, and the Violence Ahead in 2024

Brad Onishi: What's up y'all? Welcome to another week here at Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco. Want to thank all of you who sent in messages and were just so kind about my interview on Terry Gross. It was a big thrill and something I never expected, but was happy to do it, and wish we didn't have to talk about Christian nationalism threatening our democracy. But as long as it is, I'm happy to spread the word and share anything that I know about it. So anyway, just want to thank all of you for your support on that front.

Today, I have an interview with somebody who I think is really good at laying out possible scenarios for the future. Somebody who is trained in military operations, has served overseas in our military, and that's Bryn Tannehill. Many of you will know Bryn from Twitter and other places, but Bryn is a leading trans voice when it comes to trans issues in the United States, but is also somebody who is a commentator on fascism and the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, has written a great book about that called American Fascism, and other works all over the place—Dame magazine, The New Republic and so on and so forth.

One of the things I wanted to say about this interview is that a couple years ago, I would have probably not been drawn to Bryn's work, because, by nature, I'm not a kind of alarmist person. I think as an academic, I'm drawn to, like, I don't know, measured and kind of more sober analysis, just because I think that's my training. And Bryn is really good at laying out, like, really doomsday scenarios that, in many cases, come true. And we talked a lot about that in terms of what's going to happen this year, if Trump wins, if Biden wins, if Trump goes to jail, what will happen with camps and the Insurrection Act.

I mean, this interview is really all about the future of the United States in the face of a set of elections that will be not only decisive, but will no doubt be difficult. This will be hard to get through, and that's kind of what we talked about. So anyway, I am now very much a fan of Bryn's work and drawn to it, and I think it's because the last 10 years have really showed me that we're in a place where things we did not think were possible are very much possible. So we talked all about that.

We have about 30 minutes of my discussion with Bryn, and then, if you're a subscriber, hang around, because her and I talked for about 15 more minutes about the future and what's going to happen. So if you're not a subscriber, that's a good time to do that so you can catch every bit of this interview. And if you are, stick around, because we've got a lot to talk about. Appreciate you all. Here's my interview with Bryn Tannehill.

Brad: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. As I said just now, I welcome an incredible guest, somebody who I've quoted on this show so many times, and I know that many of you listening will be very familiar with, and that is Bryn Tannehill. So first, let me say, Bryn, thanks for joining me.

Bryn Tannehill: Thanks for having me on, Brad. Really happy to be here.

Brad: It's fun. It's funny when I interview folks, sometimes I'm like jealous of the very fascinating and interesting lives they've led. You have one of those lives. You're a US Navy Academy graduate. You're an Air Force Institute of Technology graduate. You have degrees in computer science and operations. You served overseas for deployments in places across the Middle East and the North Atlantic and the Adriatic. You left active duty, and you've worked in defense research, but you've also just written everywhere—written for the Huffington Post, you've written for Dame magazine, for The New Republic, and you've written also three great books. One of those is American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy. And then there's two books that are so amazing in terms of what they offer people. One is Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans, and the other is My Child Told Me They're Trans. What Do I Do?

So just really, really amazing to have you on and really grateful that you're taking the time to do this. Let's start right here. Yesterday we got news that Jack Smith's case about immunity, and Trump's claim that he has absolute immunity and so on and so forth, will actually be heard by the Supreme Court—something that folks feared would happen. And we now know that hearing will happen in April, which means, according to many commentators and observers, that we're really either going to be right at the deadline for the November election, or we're going to be past it once all of this has been sorted out. Did you expect this? And I guess I want to know, from your perspective, as somebody who's an astute observer of such things, what does this mean to you?

Bryn: So you hit the main thing—it means we're not going to see a trial and a decision by the election, probably, which means that we're not going to have the deus ex machina of Trump becoming a convicted felon at a federal level right before the election, so he's ineligible, or that being the October surprise that prevents him from becoming president. Essentially, the courts are not going to save us from ourselves.

It also signals some interesting things. One, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision was written precisely to avoid SCOTUS taking it up. They did anyway. The fact that we even got four justices willing to consider the notion—and the way the grant of certiorari was written, you can read into it that essentially they are thinking that, well, maybe the President is immune from prosecution, as long as it's things that fall within their official duties as president while they're president, but not while they're not president anymore, which is extremely dangerous. And I'll give you the example here of why.

But what blows my mind, and there's a robust debate online on my Twitter feed, is: does the court really understand what it's done here? Because what they've done is they've either signed the death warrant for democracy, or they signed the death warrant for themselves and democracy. Because here's what's going to happen. Trump wants to be a dictator from day one. He is going to do anything he can to ensure that he dies in office of old age or whatever, because if he leaves, he's going to prison. And in order to do that, he's going to have to neutralize the Supreme Court so he can serve a third or fourth term.

He's also going to want to do a lot of things that Christian nationalists want him to do, and some of those things—even this Supreme Court would be like, oh yeah, you can't ban mosques in the United States, you can't use land mines on immigrants. There's probably lines they would want to cross. You can't be trans in public. You can't utter anything about trans people online. Everything about trans people is obscenity and pornographic. And so me taking my dog for a walk dressed like this is a pornographic act in public. You can't see—I'm wearing jeans and a sweater.

And what this comes down to is they're not going to like the fact that the Supreme Court is saying, "No, you can't run for a third term. No, you can't suppress freedom of speech. No, you can't just have all your enemies rounded up and put in prison." But what Trump has also talked about doing is he's going to weaponize the DOJ. He's going to replace everybody in the federal government with any kind of power, with cronies and lackeys hand-selected by ADF and Heritage Foundation via Project 2025. He's definitely going to clear out the military of anybody who's suspected of potentially being disloyal. And remember, the president has the right in the Constitution—all officers serve at the pleasure of the President.

And so it's not hard to envision a scenario where the Supreme Court says, "No, you can't do this," and the answer is going to come back as like, either one, "Okay, we're going to do it anyway, and you can't enforce it," because the Supreme Court has no power if the FBI and DOJ says—you can't see me giving the finger—but how many divisions does John... to paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions does John Roberts have? Which is basically, and if this continues to be a problem, then you simply use the Insurrection Act, which they said they're going to do. And under the Insurrection Act, you say, "Okay, you justices that voted against me, yeah, you're out. You are being black-holed. We will take you because you've committed treason. You are insurrectionists for going against the president. You are removed."

And this is what the Supreme Court fails to understand, is that the old rules are dead, that the guardrails of democracy are not going to hold this time. There are not enough institutions left. The Republican Party and Trump is absolutely dedicated to achieving permanent single-party power. And in order to do that, they're going to have to—and once they do, they're going to reorganize the nation under what they view with a Christian nationalist viewpoint. And trans people shouldn't exist. They're going to have camps. They're going to institute religion in schools. They're going to obliterate separation of church and state.

The type of Christianity that they're going to impose is going to be one that bans IVF, bans birth control, bans abortion, bans homosexuality, grants broad powers to people to discriminate on religious bases. Remember—let's not forget Ephesians 6:5, shall we?

Brad: I do. I also remember the Muslim ban. So I think we already know about the intentions.

Bryn: So my point here is that this was a very long way to say the Supreme Court may have just signed their own death warrants, because John Roberts, in the past, has made it clear—and the court, with all the things they've leapt into—that they want the court to be the most powerful institution of the three branches. And this sets them up that either they do exactly what Trump tells them, or they cease to be, and either way, they no longer have any power.

Brad: It reminds me of something JD Vance said on television recently, and George Stephanopoulos cut him off, but he basically said, yeah, if the Supreme Court hands down a decision the President doesn't like, the President can simply ignore that or do whatever he wants. And it was really priming, I think, the audience for everything you're saying, which I think is accurate. I also think this is one of those moments where, when people look at Orbán's Hungary, they wonder how democracy can work against itself in order to become a state that is undemocratic. Well, as you're saying, this might be one of those moments where the Supreme Court thinks it's acting in a way that is upholding the Constitution or whatever's going on in the brains of these justices, but it's one of those moments where it may be signing the death warrant of the power of the judicial branch and making us into an illiberal state in the process. Is that what I hear you saying?

Bryn: Yes. It gives Trump a better chance to win outright, and if he does, it is his intention, and the intention of the entire GOP, to end democracy in order to create the Christian nationalist state that they envision.

Brad: I think one of the things I've just really appreciated about your work is your ability to kind of forecast various scenarios—what does it look like if this happens? What does it look like if that happens? And you had a thread from back in January that really, I think for me, was very clarifying about the fact that no matter what happens here, 2024 is going to be a decisive year for this country, regardless of the outcomes of the elections and so on. So I want to just kind of play those out and see how you see them, given recent events, given these decisions that have come down, given the fact that the Supreme Court will hear the Trump case.

So let's say that Trump wins. You spend the least amount of time, I think, in the thread on this scenario, but you've already talked about it here for a couple minutes. But you know, when we're at New Year's Eve, December 31, 2024—what are we looking forward to in terms of two weeks, three weeks later, Trump being inaugurated, and the very first months of Trump 2.0?

Bryn: So what we're going to see on December 31 is we're going to see his cabinet taking shape, and we're going to realize these are a cabinet full of Christian nationalists. These are people who have no interest in democracy or taking care of any people but their own. This is going to be a nation that is going to be running according to the Mandate for Leadership by Project 2025.

We're going to start having a pretty good idea which people are going to be getting replaced within the federal government. We're going to see people within the administration, the people who are prospective appointees, starting to talk about what their plans are, and they're not going to really care to hide it very much. So now, they're still trying to hide just how horrible they are—with like, "Oh no, we support IVF, but we also support fetal personhood." Really? It's definitely compatible. See, I'm not a monster, really. But they're going to be a lot more forthright.

The first week of the Trump administration, it's going to be a massacre within the federal government. We're also going to see a flurry of executive orders. We're going to see lots and lots of anti-LGBT stuff. We're going to see bans on trans people in the military. We're also going to start seeing—we're going to know ahead of time that the incoming head of the FDA is going to ban any kind of medication for any purpose they don't like. So HRT for trans people is gone. Plan B is gone. IUDs are gone. Birth control is gone. Abortion is gone.

We're going to see the unitary executive theory getting kind of rammed down our throats. They're going to try and make executive orders go much further than they would have before, which is going to immediately get challenged in the court. And the court—this is quickly where the courts are going to get the message from the Trump administration: "Gee, it would be really, really awful if we had to take your kids into protective custody, wouldn't it, Mr. Roberts?" The lean-in on the courts—you can either remain a free man who agrees with us, or you don't. That's what I anticipate happening.

We're going to see top ranks of the military cleared out. It's going to be obvious very, very quickly that this is a true autocratic attempt. We're going to see protests. And it's my belief that if the protests don't succeed early on, they are going to take the military and they are going to crush it, because they are not going to have sufficient numbers to deal with it otherwise, as people understand that their autocratic attempt is in place.

Bryn: And what's also worth pointing out is, do you know how long the Weimar Republic survived after mustache guy became chancellor? Fifty-one days—between mustache guy becoming Reich Chancellor and the passage of the Enabling Acts which ended democracy. And my point is that I anticipate it taking about that long to secure permanent power, and that's what they're going for. They want to do it quick. They want to do it fast. They want to do it before they can get the antibodies up. They want it to happen so fast that by the time people realize what's happened, it's too late. There is nothing you can do.

I don't think that's the way it's going to play out, because this is the US. You have high levels of geographic political polarization. Rolling in troops from Texas into Los Angeles to start rounding up immigrants and Dreamers is not going to go over well. And by the way, the Supreme Court's just about to say that, yeah, absolutely, people have a constitutional right to fully automatic weaponry. It's 800 rounds a minute kind of stuff. It's bump stocks.

But the fact of the matter is that the United States has approximately 25 million AR-15s floating around, which is more than the 17 million personal firearms that the US manufactured in World War II. And that leaves out the other 420 million other assorted firearms. So they're anticipating that they're going to be able to basically come in hard and fast, wipe out democracy, establish control, and the public will be—they will use might to say, "We get to do anything we want."

I don't know that that happens, because the truth of the matter is that the rule of thumb is that to put down an insurgency, you need between one troop for every 50 to 100 people. That's probably at the lower end of that—one out of 50 for the US, because it's so well-armed—that if this does really turn into kind of a civil war and insurgency scenario, the US simply doesn't have enough people under arms, under classical counter-insurgency theory, to put it down.

Brad: One of the things that you've written recently is for Dame magazine. And I just want to slow down on the Insurrection Act and the military used against Americans. So I take your point—is it strategically feasible for Trump to use the military for a kind of full-scale insurgency across the United States, as you say, from Los Angeles to Portland all the way to places like Madison, Wisconsin or Minneapolis? Bring us down to the ground, as you do in your piece. Does that look like an American Tiananmen Square?

Bryn: That's my fear. And in order to do it, you're going to have to invoke the Insurrection Act, which Trump has said he's going to do. In order to have enough people to do all the roundups, you're going to have to mobilize the National Guard. You're going to probably have to bring in National Guard from other areas, because if you bring up the local California National Guard to put down protests in California with the intention of shooting people, they're less likely to pull the trigger—which ironically is how China did the Tiananmen Square massacre. They brought in troops from outside the Beijing province so that it wasn't shooting your own people, it was shooting people from another state that you never met, that you had less in common with culturally.

And Trump has indicated in the past that he admires Tiananmen Square. He likes the way dictators have handled it. He admires Xi and Kim Jong-un and Putin. And they have violently put down protesters and committed genocide even, with Uyghurs.

So there is going to be far more antibodies generated initially than I think Republicans are expecting, but they're also expecting that they can put it down. And if you end up with it being—Trump is of the mind—he's a bully, he's violent, petty and venal, I believe, based off of everything he said in the past—that he believes, and the fact that he said we should shoot protesters before, asked Esper, "Why can't we just shoot them or shoot them in the legs?" He wants protesters shot. He's the kind of person that believes, if we just kill a bunch of them, nobody will rise up again, that once there's a massacre and a bunch of people are dead, people go, "Oh, I don't want to die. I'm not going to protest anymore."

I think that might be a severe misapprehension of the way Americans function. You know, we still call it the Boston Massacre, and five people died, and that sparked the American Revolution.

And I also am not sure that if the federal government is doing something like saying we can ignore the Supreme Court, or we can put it to the side, that it's going to set a bad example for California. When California turns around and says, "Yeah, we're not arresting all the trans people. We're not banning HRT. We're not banning birth control. We're not banning abortion. You know, suck a nutcracker."

That's where the balkanization starts. Because what happens after that? If you've got troops crushing protesters, if you've got states saying, "No, we're out, we are not enforcing this, we are not going down this path. Make me"—that's the balkanization point.

Bryn: And I keep coming back to this, that there's really kind of, once Trump puts his hand on the Bible, there's only two paths left for the United States. One is fascist. It's absolutely fascist. We're talking camps. We're talking no more gay people, no more trans people, no more birth control, no more separation of church and state. It's a theocratic fascist state that looks like the worst impulses of Christian nationalists. Or we balkanize.

And if we balkanize, that one's actually potentially more violent, more damaging, because what people fail to understand frequently is that life in authoritarian dictatorships is mostly tolerable and boring. The United States economy will keep going even if there's no more LGBT people, even if most of the immigrants disappear. The US economy will be damaged, but it's still going to be semi-functional.

If we balkanize, then it looks like the collapse of the Soviet Union in terms of economic impact.

Brad: So then we're in a place—when you say balkanize, for folks at home, I think you know what you mean. We have a situation where we have California and Oregon and Washington, perhaps the western parts of those two latter states, joining in an alliance against whatever Trump kind of loyalists you have in places like Texas and Oklahoma and throughout the South. And then we have our Northeast—we have Massachusetts and perhaps some other states there that are Northeastern alliances sympathetic with the West Coast alliances and so on. So we have this, in essence, breakup of the United States as we know it, which, again, I'm not gonna lie, Bryn. I'm not a person who, four or five years ago, would have ever even listened to this sort of scenario and thought, "Yep, that's probably possible." And I'm just not built that way. My disposition is not one to think that's where we're going, and now I am. I'm there when I hear you talk, when I read your work, when I read others who have given us these scenarios, I'm very much like, yes.

I read and cover this stuff every day, and doing that work has convinced me that the scenarios you just laid out are very possible.

Brad: Let's turn to another scenario. Let's say Joe Biden wins. And there's been some things coming out about that. What happens with Mike Johnson in the House? What happens with a Republican strategy to prevent a Biden second term, at least in a peaceful way, at least in a way that it's supposed to happen?

Bryn: So what's going to happen is—let's back it up just a little bit. Let's say Biden wins, and it's fairly obvious that he won. It's going to be close no matter what. It's going to be a squeaker. We'll be lucky if it's as obvious as it was in 2020. But let's just say it is.

What's going to happen is, if Democrats win the House, Mike Johnson is going to refuse to seat the new Democratic representatives so that he retains control of the House. But his goal is on January 3, January 6—he is going to ensure that he retains a Republican majority in the House, whether by failing to swear people in, or swearing people in because he retained control. Either way, Republicans are going to have control.

At that point, he's going to get Republicans as a block to refuse to certify the election, claiming that there were irregularities, and then they throw that to a procedure which is in the Constitution, where each state gets one vote, and each state gets a vote based off of who the majority of their representatives are from. Well, right now, there are 26 states where most of their representatives are Republicans, 23 where most of them are Democrats, and one where it's tied, which is Pennsylvania.

At that point, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote, probably the Electoral College vote definitely, Trump—if Republicans stick together—Trump ends up with a second term. And this detonates it. There is a chance that blue states might go, "Well, give Trump a chance. He's duly elected. This is what democracy chose. And we're still trying to be institutionalists, because he won legitimately." Even if he didn't win the popular vote—or even he could win the popular vote, which would be much more likely that we go down the path of everybody just says, "Well, okay, it's fascism, but this is what we chose. So okay."

The balkanization scenario becomes a lot bigger if Mike Johnson uses some parliamentary—I'm gonna use baloney, you say whatever you want—to install Trump, even though the American people wanted Biden. At that point, the Supreme Court's going to say, "Well, yeah, you can do that. That's in the Constitution."

At that point, though, when Trump does put his hand on the Bible and goes the authoritarian route, the public in blue states is going to be even more: "No, this is illegitimate. No, this is wrong. No, this isn't—this is not what we voted for. This is not democratic." There's going to be a lot more political cover for blue states just to give the federal government the finger and say, "We're out. No, make me."

And I think Democratic politicians that do choose to go along with this will never be re-elected again, especially in the case where Biden wins but gets deposed. I think that they're going to be in deep trouble if they go down the—if Trump wins. But I don't think that it's going to matter anyway, because Republicans are simply—any states that fail to bend the knee properly, they're just going to send the military or the US Marshals or the FBI, decapitate the government, put in a Governor General. And again, that raises chance of balkanization.

But they're going to use—they will use every means available to get states to do what they're told, to do things that the states don't want to do, which includes all these nutso things that are extremely unpopular with the public, that are kind of the wet dreams of Christian nationalists.

The only way we end up with Biden as president is if he wins, and then you manage to peel off just enough Republicans to have him confirmed as president. Remember, two-thirds of Republicans in the House last time voted not to affirm the election. Most of the ones that voted to affirm the election are gone now. There's very, very few left who would say, "No, this is wrong. This is reality."

And I can tell you that there's going to be a tremendous amount of pressure on them. It's like, "Yeah, you can do this, and your family's never going to spend another day without finding white powder in their mailboxes or spent shell casings in the driveway. It's on you." Well, and that's what Republicans did say last time, is that they did feel threatened.

Brad: We saw that. We saw that in the Speaker of the House election, the rounds and rounds of voting for Speaker of the House after the McCarthy ouster. We saw Republicans reporting that they had been threatened, that there had been violence threatened against them and their family. So when you say that, I'm sure there's people listening like, "Are you kidding? That can't happen." But go back a couple months when McCarthy was out as Speaker—there were Republicans in the House literally saying, "Yes, I have been threatened. My family and I have been threatened with violence."

Bryn: So I think people would say, "Well, that sounds fantastic." Well, actually, it's already happened. I'm just saying what happened last time is probably going to happen again, given that the forces that made it happen last time are even stronger now.

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