Trump's America Is No Boiling Frog
The US president's authoritarian power grabs are coming so fast and furious the country is being flash frozen into fascism.
Over the weekend, in a posh neighborhood of Northwest Washington, DC, armed, unidentified, balaclava-clad agents of the state tackled, beat, and ostensibly kidnapped a man as onlooking brunch-goers ate avocado toast. Such is now a day in the life of Donald Trump’s America. The harrowing spectacle, caught on camera from multiple angles, feels intrinsically foreign. It reminds one of viral clips straight out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Aleksander Lukashenko’s Belarus, or (even more alien) Tony Gilroy’s ‘Andor.’ But, of course, the episode didn’t take place in a nation – or galaxy – far, far away; it happened here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The so-called “boiling frog” allegory has been a go-to for the American left for years. As the parable goes, if one puts a frog in nigh-scalding water, it will leap from the pot. If one, however, places the creature into lukewarm water and slowly increases the heat, it will not notice the danger even upon the brink of its peril. The debunked tale means to illustrate how small harms, increased ever so gradually they are effectively imperceptible, can doom any given institution or system or amphibian to a fate of being cooked – as the kids say.
The monstrous incident in our nation’s capital over the weekend made clear the US is no boiling frog.