Has the Trump Administration Crossed the Rubicon When Lawlessness Makes Lawful Transition Impossible?
It may have reached a point when its only option for avoiding accountability would be keeping Democrats out of power
Operation Metro Surge—the Trump administration’s official name for its invasion of the Minneapolis area by masked thugs from ICE, CBP, and DHS—has now claimed the lives of two Minnesotans. In the aftermath, a combination of large-scale peaceful protest, judicial oversight, and exceedingly bad political PR has persuaded Trump to partially downgrade the invasion. Some CBP officers are being removed from the city, along with Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander at large” notorious for brutality, political self-promotion, and lying to a judge. But this is not Trump surrendering—this is him making tactical adjustments to account for the optics.
All of this is bad enough. But what spells even greater danger is that the administration’s actions thus far might make it harder for it relinquish power—because doing so would mean facing not just accountability for its lawless actions but also retaliation by the very instruments of executive power it itself has created. In addition, the ideological extremists running Trump 2.0 may reckon that, once they give up power, they likely will not be able to return to advance their ideological agenda.
In short, Trump—advertently or inadvertently—might have boxed himself in. His second term has been worse than his first, but there are reasons to worry that, in terms of authoritarian consolidation, Year Two may be even worse than Year One.
Accountability’s Double-Edged Sword
Regular transfers of power—or, more precisely, the expectation of future transfers—play a critical role in constraining whoever is in office. For the president, the psychology is straightforward: “The ways I exercise power are also open to my successors, so I shouldn’t overstep too much.” This provides a natural incentive to avoid escalatory political arms races, and to employ restraint, dialogue, and compromise instead.
Currently, the Trump administration is doing the opposite. Trump has built ICE and CBP into a massive internal police force to carry out deportation crackdowns that are not just draconian but lawless. Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, documented 96 violations of court orders by ICE in just the first month of 2026 and threatened to hold the acting ICE director in contempt. Judge Schiltz warned that ICE has likely violated more court orders this month than some federal agencies have “in their entire existence.” But Trump keeps looking for ways to circumvent any further limits on his power.
DHS agencies are starting to replace the FBI in important ways, including investigating Pretti’s killing instead of the FBI—perhaps because Trump finds it easier to turn ICE into a paramilitary goon squad than to fully corrupt the FBI. That’s exactly the kind of escalation that recurring transfers of power are supposed to prevent. You don’t mobilize a goon squad to use lawless violence against your political opponents if you expect to hand power over to them.
To the extent that Trump is easing off of Minneapolis, it is purely performative and only shows that he is managing the optics while continuing to build his paramilitary apparatus. Recall that he eventually withdrew from Chicago and Los Angeles, too, only to then pivot to Minnesota. We have little reason to believe he won’t invade other cities imminently.
This is how the logic of accountability can work against democracy itself. Under normal conditions, the expectation of accountability keeps politicians from abusing power they don’t want to be held accountable for—or deploying power they don’t want opponents to wield. But at some point, the incentives flip: if you’ve gone too far, you simply can’t afford to hand power back. The perverse logic becomes: “I can’t face accountability for what I’ve already done, so I must go even further to ensure I never can be held accountable.”
Pretti’s killing may have brought us to that point. The masked agents clearly saw themselves as free from consequences, able to do whatever they please to whoever they target. Even with Bovino being sent back to California, the administration is fully backing Kristi Noem and has shown no interest in a thorough investigation. In fact, they’re trying to prevent state and local law enforcement from conducting their own investigations, including blocking the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from accessing the scene despite a judicial warrant.
The state-level accountability threat is precisely why this moves us closer to that incentive-flipping line. Trump enjoys incredibly broad personal immunity and can pardon federal crimes. As long as he keeps abuses within federal law, neither he nor his henchmen need to worry about accountability. They can commit abuses, obtain blanket pardons from Trump, and hand over the reins to the next Democratic administration without fearing being held accountable by the justice system. But Trump cannot pardon state crimes, and that changes the calculus.
While president, Trump can obstruct state investigations, intimidate local officials, and threaten federal funding. But he won’t always be president, and a future Democratic administration would presumably support state accountability efforts. Once state crimes are involved, the pardon power is no longer enough: continuing control of the White House becomes necessary to shield the administration and those doing its bidding.
Crossing the Rubicon
During Trump’s time in office, an astoundingly large number of his actions have been described as “crossing the Rubicon,” which in the ancient world represented a serious violation of Roman law. What gives the event its significance, however, is not the mere fact of its illegality. Nor was it a moment Rome couldn’t come back from. One can imagine Caesar crossing but being defeated, with Rome adopting reforms that strengthen the republic instead of becoming an empire.
The significance of crossing the Rubicon was that it forced Caesar to fully commit to a win-or-die course of action. After crossing, Caesar couldn’t say, “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just go back to Gaul and pretend this never happened.” Either he conquered or he died because by deploying his forces beyond the defined perimeter, he committed treason, a capital offense. There was no returning to the status quo ante.
That’s why calling most of Trump’s norm-violations a Rubicon crossing is inapt. Trump can politicize DOJ, let RFK Jr. wreak havoc on public health, and destroy longstanding alliances as much as he wants. While America will face the consequences for decades, none of those things lock Trump into any course of action. On any given morning, he can wake up and simply decide to do the opposite of whatever he’s doing now.
Before crossing the Rubicon, predicting whether Caesar would go through with it was primarily a matter of his psychology. After crossing, it became a matter of the situation’s internal logic. This is instructive for our current moment.
Pundits trying to figure out whether Trump will interfere with elections, run for a third term, or otherwise attempt to stay in power tend to focus on his psychology and rhetoric. We chafe when he muses publicly about dispensing with elections, or how he deserves another term because everyone’s been so unfair to him, or how sometimes you just need a dictator.
But there’s a clearer way to assess the risk than deciphering Trump’s mercurial pronouncements, namely, where perverse accountability incentives take hold. That’s the Rubicon.
If Trump believes he can retire peacefully to Mar-a-Lago, if Noem and Homan and Miller think they can slink back to lucrative Newsmax gigs or MAGA think tanks until the next GOP administration, then whether they try to hold power by foul means depends mostly on their desires and choices.
But if they think that instead of going to Newsmax they’d be facing Nuremberg-style trials for their crimes against humanity and possible prison time when they are out of power, then, just as Caesar couldn’t return to being a normal king, they won’t be able to return to normal civilian life.
This is something that Steve Bannon perfectly understands. This former Trump advisor warned a room full of conservatives recently that many of them could face jail time if Republicans lose the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election. “And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms, if we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison—myself included. They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said in reference to Democrats.
The MAGA Machine
During Trump’s first term as president, he had no shortage of pro-coup lackeys like John Eastman who were happy to generate preposterous justifications for Trump’s egregious actions. But it also had powerful people—Vice President Mike Pence, for example—who refused to go all the way.
Among the pro-coup members of that administration, none were really operating under the no-going-back internal logic of Rubicon-crossing. The least careful, like Rudy Giuliani, did face legal consequences. Eastman got disbarred. But most of them easily slunk back to various corners of MAGA, Inc. and waited for their moment to arrive again. They bet the American people would give them another chance, and that bet paid off in 2024.
Trump 2.0 looks very different. This time, Trump is surrounded by people whose ideological visions are incompatible with the basic democratic bargain: if you accept a loss in one election, you have the chance to win next time around. But these are people engaged in long-term state capture; having shown their hand to the American people, failure now means they may not get another chance.
This goes beyond legal accountability, but the incentive structure is the same. The accountability calculus is: Will my abuses land me in jail if we lose power? While the state-capture calculus is: Have we gone so far that, if we don’t finish the job, the opposition will block us from trying again?
Even the more normal-seeming figures, like Russell Vought, have been marinating in an apocalyptic, accelerationist view of American politics for years (remember the Flight 93 Election essay?). Ask yourself:
Will Vance be content as the one-term poster-in-chief (sorry! vice president) of an administration whose popularity is cratering faster than his own electoral prospects?
Will Stephen Miller accept the end of his nearly unchecked ability to enact his bilious white supremacist agenda?
Will Russell Vought, who has helped dismantle federal agencies and replace professional civil servants with regime loyalists, view handing this newly patrimonial-style executive branch to the hated left as anything other than a massive, and potentially final, defeat?
For people like Miller and Vought, the die is cast. They can no longer afford to bet on a second chance to destroy an independent civil service, turn ICE into a nationwide paramilitary force that serves as the president’s personal tool of violence, or turn America into a permanently whiter, more patriarchal, and much less free country. So they will likely counsel to Trump to do what it takes to ensure that MAGA Republicans retain power even if Trump personally has to retire.
None of this guarantees Trump and those around him will absolutely try to hold power. People don’t always recognize the internal logic of their actions or react rationally. But we’d be fools not to recognize that this moment is a deeply perilous one for our republic when, in its quest to avoid accountability, this administration no longer has an incentive to hand over the power it has seized to its political opponents by allowing the American people a fair voice and vote.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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All the "will theys?" are a
superfluous attachment to each of the well-reasoned and thorough options of a fascist regime hell bent on survival. They will indeed operate vociferously in all defensive scenarios mentioned, and in all possibilities beyond imagination, especially the imaginations of those of gentile and sophisticated liberal moral boundaries. People have been liberally informed of the atrocious mechanics of many fascists in history. This current bunch, I think, will exceed all others in grusome, savage rebuttal.
For this, like for so many other things that have unfolded at an accelerated pace in year one of this administration, there is a complete playbook and successful small-scale proof of concept for everyone to see, and almost sixteen years in the making: Viktor Orbán's Hungary.