Here Be Monsters

Supposedly, in late Medieval period charts of the Atlantic Ocean, mapmakers would illustrate pretty much everything west of the Azores with giant sea serpents and sometimes the phrase “Here be monsters.”

Today, we live in uncharted seas, as far as our Constitutional Republic (a form of indirect democracy) is concerned.

Our country’s history is stained with episodes, in which whole peoples’ rights, liberties and human dignity were violated for specious reasons. Our country has also shown a capacity to acknowledge and remediate many of those wrongs. The post -Civil War Reconstruction period—although it was snuffed out all too soon—showed promise of delivering the Declaration Of Independence’s spirit to those denied it for 250 years. Labor legislation during the Depression, and civil rights legislation following World War Two opened doors previously closed and locked to people born the wrong color or into the wrong economic strata. Concepts such as well fed, healthy, educated children, elderly citizens able to retire with a modicum of security, people able to receive decent health care, were understood to be good public policy by the majority of citizens and were cemented into law. “…[P]romote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” took on new meaning to more people.

And then we hit a pot hole.

A really big pothole.

Respectable arguments can be made when it comes to many social and economic programs passed during the New Deal and Great Society eras. Respectable in that the arguer can support or oppose programs for reasons that are neither base or cynical. Denying needed services that are supported by a majority of voters without providing alternatives, or overturning rights, by fiat or rushed partisan legislation, that are rooted in the Constitution and decades of jurisprudence and the principle of stare decisis (the decision stands), is not respectable. But here we are.

As of yesterday, the Senate voted 51-50¹ to pass their version of the “Big Beautiful Bill” and sent it back to the House, which is expected to pass it narrowly and mostly along party lines. If the House passes the Senate’s version, Medicaid will be slashed and millions of Americans who pay taxes, work to support families—many who voted for Trump and GOP Senators and Representatives who cast votes for the bill—will lose health care access. Rural hospitals, in particular, will close because their funding base will evaporate. Cutting Medicaid will also strain public health services, such as school vaccination programs—already imperiled by recent boneheaded decisions by the Department of Health and Human Services—will suffer and children and their families will be at risk of communicable diseases we have few defenses against; as is already happening with measles in Texas, across the southwest and now on the East Coast.

On top of cuts proposed in the “Big [Something] Bill,” Trump continues to “find savings” by violating the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which prohibits the President from refusing to spend funds Congress has appropriated for purposes specified by Congress. Dismantling Congressionally established and funded federal agencies by fiat (aka Executive Orders) violates the Impoundment Control Act as does withholding billions of dollars that are appropriated for school lunch programs and after-school and summer programs.

But wait, it gets worse.

Why do Trump and the MAGA wing of the GOP want to slash funds for programs that enjoy widespread support, even among their voter base? Trump wants to permanently extend the 2017 tax cuts—targeted primarily at corporations and wealthy taxpayers—that expire at the end of this year. The Congressional Budget Office estimates extending the 2017 tax cuts will add $4.6 trillion in deficits over the next decade. The Trump administration and the Congressional GOP (with a few exceptions) hope to see some reduction in the deficit figure by sacrificing Americans’ well being.

Trump is demanding Congress pass the bill by July 4th because the Department of Homeland Security has blown through its budget and is on the cusp of violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits the government from spending, or committing to spend, money not authorized or appropriated. Trump’s mass deportation drive has basically bankrupted the department. The “Big [Something] Bill” will ride to the rescue and then some. According to Heather Cox Richardson, yesterday in her Letters From An American Substack,

[T]here is at least one aspect of American life on which the bill is lavishing money. While the measure slashes public welfare programs, it pours $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement. The American Immigration Council broke out the numbers today: The Senate bill provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.

…

While the Senate considered the budget reconciliation bill today, President Donald J. Trump visited the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades designed to hold 5,000 undocumented immigrants. The facility will cost $450 million a year, which will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Florida attorney general who came up with the plan gave it the name “Alligator Alcatraz,” a cutesy name for tents filled with cages for undocumented immigrants.²

It gets even worse. Professor Cox notes Trump’s answer to question from a reporter during his visit to the Florida facility.

In answer to the question “How many more facilities like this do you feel that the country needs in order to enact your agenda of mass deportations?” Trump said today: “Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron's doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time.”³ (emphasis added)

Observing and reporting concerning similarities between the Trump Administration and the Third Reich is a cliche, which, by the way, doesn't invalidate the observation. It is often met with references to Godwin’s Law⁴ ⁵ or a declaration that Trump isn’t that bad. He isn’t Hitler.

But then, Hitler wasn't Hitler in the beginning. For the first two years (1932-1934) he was something of a joke, a tool of the German industrialists, a buffoon who said crazy shit that no one should take seriously, because the people who controlled him would never let him do crazy shit. Even after the Reichstag burned and he launched his anti-communist purge and ordered the first concentration camp built an hour’s drive from Munich, at Dachau, Germans who knew how such things worked, insisted Hitler was doing the industrialists’ and politicians’ bidding. They had him under control. Alles ist gut.

On June 30th, 1934, Hitler ordered the leadership of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), be executed, including his once-right hand man,Ernst Rohm who was accused of plotting a coup. Not one to waste a massacre, Hitler also ordered the executions of prominent Nazis and other German politicians he deemed untrustworthy. For good measure, he threw in a former Chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher and a Bavarian politician who help suppress Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. Eighty-five people were known to have been executed in what became known as The Night of Long Knives, thirty five had nothing to do with Rohm or the SA. Over the following weeks as many as 750 to 1,000 more were killed. More than 1,000 were packed off to Dachau and the satellite camps being built on the “Dachau Model.”

Dachau, and what the Nazis would call the Dachau System, is worth mention. The Dachau System was a network of camps designed to hold Communists, then Socialists, then the politically unreliable, then the “mentally deficient” and the physically disabled. Of course, the camps were always meant for those deemed undesirable in German society: homosexuals, gypsies, and most of all, Jews. Occupants were used as a labor force until they could work no longer, or were (in relatively rare cases) thought to have learned their lessons. The latter few were released, the former were worked to death or just killed.

Once Hitler ignited World War Two and his troops captured most of Europe, the Dachau System of labor camps wasn't enough. With new territories conquered and millions of Jews and other “untermensch” under the Nazi heel, new camps, using the Dachau model, but with different design criteria were needed. The new camps, such as Auschwitz, Belzek, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka—all built in conquered territories, so as not to offend German laws and sensibilities—would still function as labor camps but they would also implement murder on an industrial scale.

By the end, more than eleven million souls perished in those camps. Six million were killed for the crime of being Jews.

By the end Hitler was Hitler. It started with one camp, a buffoon, and Germans who were sure that “they”—the industrialists and politicians—had the buffoon under control. That Germany wasn’t that kind of country.

History is chock full of episodes, in which people were convinced that what happened to others wouldn’t happen to them. For those people, and any who follow that path, Maya Angelou offered advice, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Today, in The United States, we are sailing into uncharted seas. We have a President who seems intent on excluding Congress and the Judiciary—the checks and balance on his power—from any role beyond rubber stamping his decisions. His Congressional party is almost in lockstep and he is determined to keep it that way. While the lower federal courts try to keep Trump within Constitutional bounds, the Supreme Court shows a proclivity toward judicial innovation that would cause apoplexy in the old originalists⁶. Whether we like it or not, Donald Trump and his henchmen are leading the United States down the same path Netanyahu is taking Israel, Orban has taken Hungary, Erdogan has taken Turkey, Musharraf took Pakistan. It is up to us how far Trump takes the United States, and whether there be monsters at the end.

1. All Democrats and three Republicans voted against the bill, which passed when the Vice President cast the tie breaking vote,

2. Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, 1 July 2025

3. ibid

4. Godwin's Law, also known as Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, is an Internet adage stating that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Essentially, in any lengthy online debate, someone will eventually bring up Hitler or the Nazis, often as a way to try to discredit or shut down the other side. Mike Godwin, who formulated the law in 1990, intended it to highlight the tendency for online arguments to devolve into unproductive name-calling and the trivialization of the Holocaust. —Courtesy of Google’s AI Overview

5. Incidentally Mike Godwin has noted that comparisons to Hitler and Nazis, involving historical analysis or serious discussions about extremism, might be warranted. —Courtesy of Google’s AI Overview

6. Don’t get me started on Trump v. The United States and the Court’s bouquet to Trump (and middle finger to 245 years of jurisprudence and stare decisis).