The method in Trump's madness

How the idea of a "dual state" helps explain America's slide into fascism

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

—Oscar R. Benavides

A few weeks back I republished a piece from last year in which I set out how I thought Trump’s creation of concentration camps—any sort of holding facility for people deemed as “illegals”—would play out.

To piss against the moon. From Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558)

My point was that such facilities create a post-judicial space in which “enemies of the state” can be dealt with without needing to go through all the usual legal protections of due process and a fair trial. I noted that “Hitler’s Germany may be the extreme case, but that extremity allows us to clearly see the outlines of how the process works and so considering that history will help us see what Trump has in store.”

The central point I was making was that the post-legal climate created inside the camps rapidly came to infect the political and social climate outside the camps. The network of concentration camps—not just the death camps in whi…