It Was Worse Than You Think

We had a best-case scenario weekend and it was still terrible.

Members of the US Army and armoured vehicles move across the Memorial Bridge during the Army 250th Anniversary Parade in Washington, DC, on June 14, 2025. US President Donald Trump reveled in a long dreamt-of military parade on his 79th birthday Saturday, as demonstrators across the country branded him a dictator in the biggest protests since his return to power. (Photo by ANNABELLE GORDON/AFP via Getty Images)

1. As Good As It Gets

Here is a list of things that didn’t happen this weekend:

• Marine and National Guard units in Los Angeles did not escalate their operations.

• The military parade in Washington did not transform into a fascist spectacle.

• Protestors did not confront the military.

• The military did not fire on civilians.

• The No Kings protests did not turn violent.

I know what you’re thinking: America was America for 48 hours. Do you want a cookie?

But it’s worth acknowledging that this string of non-events represents something like the best-case scenario. If you had offered me that list last Friday, I would have taken it a New York minute.

This morning I felt myself exhaling in gratitude. It felt like victory; like hope.

And yet, when you look at the list of things that did happen, it’s horrifying.

• Marines briefly detained a U.S. citizen on American soil, in violation of Posse Comitatus.

• A man in Culpepper, Virginia intentionally drove his SUV into a crowd of peaceful protestors.

• In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox spent time warning protestors that they would be prosecuted if they broke the law and preparing the state’s National Guard for action.

  • But it wasn’t the protestors who were violent. A crowd of 10,000 people showed up to peacefully protest in Salt Lake City when a man charged into the crowd with a rifle.

  • One of the protestors, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, was killed. He was killed not by the man assaulting the protests, but by a member of a “peacekeeping team.”¹

• In Minnesota an evangelical Christian/Trump supporter posing as a police officer assassinated one Democratic politician and her husband and shot and injured another Democratic politician and his wife.

Here is how bad things are: We look at the last 48 hours and feel relief. But at any other point in American history, the events of this weekend would be understood as a sign that the country was falling apart.

This is the frog boiling in the pot. We are so deep into the decline of liberalism that warning signs feel like a reprieve.

But there’s more. And worse.