Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Or something.

This — the court battle over the legality of leveraging the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to reshape global trade and commerce through a convoluted system of draconian taxes and bilateral “deals” — is maddening in the same way all litigation stemming from Trump’s second-term agenda is maddening.

We all know where these fights are likely to end up: Before the Supreme Court. And we all know what’s likely to happen once they get there: First, the conservative majority will stay any injunctions issued by lower courts, allowing the administration to pursue its agenda on an interim basis, and then when the can can’t be kicked any further, the Justices will rule in favor of Trump, blurring the line further between unitary executive theory and monocracy.

The inevitability of this rather unfortunate predicament — which, lest we should forget, is part and parcel of Mitch McConnell’s legacy — makes fatalism the best approach if you want to keep your sanity. I hate to put it that way because that makes it sound like I’ve given over the country to a would-be king but… well, what do you want from me? To peddle hope is very often to lie. And I don’t lie to you. So, “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The CliffsNotes version of the latest chapter in the legal fight around the tariffs goes like this. An appeals court agreed with the Court of International Trade that Trump can’t cite IEEPA to impose punishing trade taxes. As I put it in May, while covering the original ruling against the tariffs, “Court Says Felon Acted Illegally.”

That’s a joke, but there’s a lot in it. The fact that a convicted felon now runs the country, and that said convicted felon’s immune to prosecution for acts undertaken in his executive capacity on order from a high court with appellate jurisdiction over all the other courts, lends an air of farce to the whole process.

That the high court’s partially staffed by the felon’s appointees who, together with two other beholden jurists and one increasingly diffident chief justice, comprise a super-majority on the panel with the power to overturn rulings deemed unacceptable to the felonious executive, means proceedings like those which ostensibly invalidated the tariffs are a charade.

Anyone well-versed in the intricacies of the litigation against the administration — which in this case means anyone apprised of the specifics around when a president can and can’t invoke IEEPA to achieve a policy aim — is almost by definition smart enough to understand how self-referentially absurd this has become. How asinine it is to go through the motions pretending we aren’t apprised of how it’ll almost invariably turn out.

One way or another, Trump’s tariffs will remain in place. Just like Trump’s attempts to overhaul the Fed will probably succeed. Just like Trump’s determination to militarize America’s streets will go largely unchallenged. Just like his legally questionable immigration agenda will proceed mostly unchecked. And so on.

To be clear, I’m not prejudging the outcome of the tariff litigation, nor any other litigation for that matter. And I’m not suggesting SCOTUS will everywhere and always rule unequivocally in the Trump administration’s favor. Even if I were, I’m not an attorney, so who cares what I say?

Rather, I’m commenting on something about which I’m qualified to speak. Or so argue the political science degrees I paid far too much money to obtain: The democracy-autocracy spectrum.

Putting aside Trump’s penchant for Kim Dynasty-style displays of king-like authority, America’s not “falling to a dictator” as much as it’s democratically backsliding, admittedly at a much quicker pace than during Trump’s first term. Democratic backsliding is a continuum. There’s no bright line. No road marker that reads “You are now entering authoritarianism.” Typically, the populace doesn’t recognize what’s happened until it’s too late, if they realize it at all.

I’ve said this previously, but it becomes more relevant for the American experience every day: Although citizens in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Viktor Orban’s Hungary are well apprised of the extent to which they live under overbearing executives inclined to leverage the power of the state in unduly coercive and often capricious ways, they by and large don’t describe themselves as subjects in an lost-cause autocracy.

At the risk of speaking from afar on behalf of average Turks and Hungarians, they don’t lament their plight the same way a Belarusian might when speaking ill (under their breath) about Alexander Lukashenko, and they haven’t given over to the sort of hopeless inevitability that typifies political discourse in Russia, where to stand in credible opposition to Vladimir Putin is to run the very real risk of being murdered by the state.

Or maybe they have. Given over to a kind of hopeless inevitability, just without realizing it. And maybe we have in America too, likewise without realizing it. What else could I mean when I describe, as I did above, the “inevitability” of our predicament? And what is fatalism but a kind of hopelessness?

That’s the risk. Between the gradual character of transitional autocracy, the diluted nature of the threat (compared to, for example, Putin’s Russia or Lukashenko’s Belarus) and the humdrum imperatives of everyday life which keep most people too preoccupied to care about matters which don’t directly affect them, it’s all too easy to lose track of what’s actually going on.

When that happens — when we stop caring as long as we, ourselves, aren’t aversely impacted — it’s tantamount to passive acquiescence. That’s a death knell for democracy which is famously hard. Keeping a republic is difficult work. If everyone stops doing that work, the republic will fall, typically to some sort of authoritarianism.

What sort of authoritarianism varies, and I’ve long argued Trump’s affinity for cartoonish dictator stereotypes is a liability to the extent it makes explicit what’s better left tacit if you’re trying to establish autocracy where a democracy once thrived. Put as a question: Why wake people up to what’s going on when you can let them sleepwalk into your autocratic fantasy?

Sporadically, I receive mail addressed to two people I can only assume once owned a property which is now mine in semi-rural South Carolina. Typically, the correspondence is credit card offers and the like. Given the neighborhood, the two of them must’ve been doing fairly well for themselves, and assuming they had a mortgage, they were citizens. They have Hispanic names.

On Friday evening, after returning to the property from a brief sojourn to the island I called home from 2015 to 2023, I sorted through four days of accumulated physical mail. Towards the bottom of the stack was a letter addressed to a Hispanic name I didn’t recognize. The return address was a Department of Justice office. I opened it.

“ORDER OF THE IMMIGRATION JUDGE” read the bolded print a third of the way down the page. It was some manner of court document related to removal proceedings against someone who, long ago or otherwise, gave the address as theirs. “Jesus,” I said aloud, to no one.

I put it in the trash with the rest of the mail, cut up an apple and re-watched Blood Simple until my eyelids were heavy. Then went into the bedroom and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I went back into the kitchen, pulled the letter out of the trash and searched online for a DHS office to contact. I didn’t want to be complicit in anyone’s removal proceedings, but then again, I didn’t want ICE agents showing up on my property either.

Half an hour or so of clicking around government websites proved frustratingly futile. There was no readily determinable way to tell the government their fugitive’s probably been in the wind for quite some time. “Oh well, f-ck it,” I muttered, dropping the letter back in the trash and turning off the kitchen lights. “If they show up, they show up.”

As I strode back to bed, I glanced over at the built-in shelves around the fireplace in the great room, where Hume and Kant share space with an autographed Clipse vinyl and a framed picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posing in her iconic “Tax The Rich” dress from the 2021 Met Gala.

It was midnight. It was silent. I walked over, took AOC off the shelf, put her away in the cabinets under the shelves and went to bed.