During the first Trump administration, Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote a prescient book called “On Tyranny” about how to fight authoritarianism, which seems particularly relevant now during the Trump restoration.
In his first week back in office, Trump is clearly trying to grab every bit of power he can, legally or otherwise, flooding the zone with one appalling executive order after another. I doubt if Snyder or anyone — including your humble columnist — can keep up with it all. Which is the point. It’s trans people one moment, migrants the next, and on and on.
And so I go back to Snyder, who offered 20 rules in his anti-authoritarian guidebook, the first of which is: “Do not obey in advance.” Or, we should amend that to say, as soon as Trump’s latest executive order is issued.
The reason I bring this up is because this is a book that Jared Polis needs to read, and right away. Polis is in danger of becoming the Democratic poster governor for going along with — and normalizing — Trump’s full-out assault on democracy. Actually, he might already be there.
Once upon a time — like, all the way back to the most recent presidential campaign — Polis was attacking Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy, among other similarly juicy takedowns. Back then, of course, he was speaking as a surrogate for first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris.
And now?
Now, unlike nearly every other Democratic leader, Polis unaccountably supports the dangerous RFK Jr., the nation’s foremost anti-vaxxer, as Trump’s nominee for Health secretary. Kennedy’s Senate hearings begin Wednesday. and, in advance, Caroline Kennedy has written key senators a letter describing her cousin, the infamous bear dumper, as a “predator.”
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Now, Polis attended the Trump inauguration as if it were just a normal inauguration for a normal president. And, along with that, he had the Colorado Capitol raise the flags on that day from their position at half staff in honor of the death of the most honorable Jimmy Carter. (By the way, Polis didn’t make the cut to sitting on the dais with the billionaires. Like the rest of the governors there, he was exiled to the overflow room, meaning he watched on TV like I did.)
Now, in his State of the State, Polis “welcomed” Trump’s help in deporting “dangerous criminals.” When the Colorado Sun later asked Polis to define “dangerous criminals,” he dodged the question. Instead, he said he wasn’t “supportive of … taking away the mom and dad and making an orphan of an American child with parents of an American child who’ve committed no crime.”
What he didn’t say was that deporting those undocumented migrants who have committed no crime was exactly what Trump — whose help he welcomes — promises to do. And what Polis doesn’t concede is that he’s helping Trump frame — as he’s done since that first trip down the golden escalator — undocumented immigrants as rapists and worse.
What Polis does say, what he wants everyone to know, is his view that Colorado is not a sanctuary state. There’s no legal definition, of course, for sanctuary state. And there’s no statute in the state code saying Colorado is a sanctuary state.
So, yes, Colorado, although it has laws prohibiting local and state law enforcement from helping ICE arrest migrants here simply because they crossed the border without documents, may not be technically a sanctuary state.
But what it is, is a welcoming state.
What it is, is one of only 11 states that offers even limited protection for undocumented migrants.
What it is, is a state that wasn’t bullied when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dropped tens of thousands of migrants in Denver, many with no idea where they were going or how they got there.
OK, Polis has said much of this before. But he’s definitely not saying it now. And I can’t help wondering why.
When asked by a TV station in Colorado Springs if we lived in a sanctuary state, Polis said it was not — “not in any way, shape or form.”
When 9News followed up on that report, Polis said again that Colorado was not a sanctuary state, but that he agreed with the notion that local law enforcement should not be co-opted by the federal government, but instead work on public safety in Colorado.
Here’s more of what Polis didn’t say:
This is a moral issue. This is a decency issue. This is not the kind of thing that Coloradans want — unless, of course, you’re a Colorado Republican. GOP legislators have introduced a bill requiring cities to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement or risk losing state grants.
In any case, the Trump raids have begun. And, yes, they are targeting violent criminals first and any “collateral” non-criminals they pick up along the way. Federal agents — from ICE, from DEA, from FBI — were in Chicago on Sunday, with Dr. Phil — yes, really — embedded with the feds, doing the play by play of arrests.
They were in New York City on Tuesday, with puppy killer, and now Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem as guest celebrity.
She was at a raid in the Bronx when agents arrested the gang member who was caught on video flashing a gun at the Aurora apartment building. The video became, of course, a big part of Trump’s war on migrant criminals, which he dubbed “Operation Aurora.”
A DEA raid in Adams County on gang members, many here without papers, didn’t feature any celebrities, meaning it must have been planned before Trump was in office.
But Polis must know this is just the start. How could he not know? Trump has said so himself, repeatedly. He has called for mass deportation of millions of migrants — a deportation campaign so massive that no one, he might say, would believe possible.
Trump is already primed for mass deportations. In his earlier term, when he promised mass deportations, too, he might have gotten bored with the idea. He was getting resistance in financing the border wall. (Darn those Mexicans.) And people didn’t seem to like him separating kids from their parents or storing those kids in cages.
Now, he has Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to keep the pressure on. And so Trump has tried to end birthright citizenship — which a federal judge has temporarily blocked. He has signed an order against the immigrant “invasion,” saying that those migrants here on temporary permits — like the pet-eaters in Springfield, Ohio, and more than a million others who have/had legal right to be in the country — are no longer here legally.
According to reports, American citizens, including Native Americans if you’re looking for irony, have been caught in the raids, raising fears — as if they shouldn’t have been on code red already — that racial profiling is part of the plan.
Now, as ace Sun reporter Jen Brown wrote Tuesday, the Department of Justice has put a “stop work order” on organizations around the country that provide legal services to undocumented migrants. That includes the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, the state’s largest such organization, which offers services to the 85% of those undocumented Coloradans who are fighting deportation without a lawyer.
It gets worse. As you’ve no doubt heard, Trump has ordered a freeze on federal funding that is so vague and yet so encompassing that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has joined a lawsuit to protest it — and a federal judge has already ruled that the freeze, which reports say could involve as much as $3 trillion, must end.
Weiser, who has announced he is running for governor when Polis is term limited in 2026, has made lawsuits against Trump’s unlawful orders seemingly a major part of his campaign.
This one is so outrageous that Polis had to issue his own statement opposing it: “Governing is about delivering real results for the people we serve, not sowing chaos. This indefinite pause in Congressionally appropriated federal funding hurts children and hardworking families, jeopardizes American jobs and businesses, harms hospitals and safety net health providers, threatens road and bridge repairs, and impacts countless other programs.”
Yes, it’s about sowing chaos and hurting children and health providers and the whole shebang. It’s not migrants. The news came out Tuesday that the Department of Education was investigating an all-gender bathroom at Denver’s East High. Of course, Trump has already signed an order to ban transgender troops in the military.
Don’t obey in advance. Don’t cave to Trump’s fast-moving assault on what he describes as “woke” ideology, which, in many cases, I describe as being American values.
Maybe it’s time to hear more of that — and less or Trump normalization — from the state’s governor.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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