Functional democracies like to assume their institutions are like solid parents. Then one day, those institutions turn out to be estranged relatives. 

To the world outside, the idea of US exceptionalism has fallen. But within the US, a conflict is simmering as a mercurial leader tries to redefine it. With all the arms of the government falling in line, one half believes the country has finally found the lone wolf who can set things right. The other half feels it does not recognise the country anymore. When Trump first referred to some countries as ‘shitholes’ many took offence. Today, most would consider it ironic. 

Each year, the Council of Foreign Relations in the US releases a report called the Preventive Priorities survey. It highlights regions of potential conflict in various parts of the world. The report has been keenly watching the domestic situation in the US, and was correct in its assessments of a number of situations of civil conflict since the first Trump presidency, predicting the political violence that led to the siege of the US Capitol in 2021. 

In this year’s report, it elevated the likelihood of domestic conflict in the US above the ratings for countries with contentious elections like Bangladesh and Myanmar, and geopolitical hotspots like the Taiwan Straits and the Sahel. Last year’s report had already predicted a moderate risk of civil conflict, this year, that estimation was upped to its highest level of both likelihood and impact. The Eurasia group puts US political violence as its number one threat for 2026, above Russia, China, or global water shortages, predicting violence will climb fueled by increasing threats against judges, election officials, and dissenting politicians alongside a growing perception of executive impunity and the pardoning of rule-breakers who fall on the side of the government.   

Social polarisation is also at one of the highest it has ever been. In January 2026, President Trump had an approval rating of 91 percent among Republicans and 5 percent among Democrats signaling an extraordinarily high level of disagreement on the direction of the country, much higher than levels seen by previous presidents.

Meanwhile the economic situation is not looking good either. JP Morgan and Bloomberg have both moved up their recession risks to high levels in 2026. There is plenty of speculation that the market is being artificially kept from an explosive crash by the valuation in tech, which is headed to a bubble burst. And two ominous indicators suggest the markets are preparing for this. First, there is the crashing US dollar alongside skyrocketing prices of gold, which suggests a widespread market sentiment that some further pains for the dollar are en route. Second, the US has seen a dramatic drop in the consumer confidence figures in the last month, historically a sure sign of coming economic woes. Poor consumer confidence results in people wanting to spend less, in turn causing the drop in retail profits and demand for services, declining stock prices, and hiring freezes.

Now if this is not the kind of evidence that moves you, turn to a bunch of astrologers who have calculated the position of the stars as predicting a major downfall for the US in 2026, at the levels of the 1861 civil war and World War 2. We haven’t even got to the havoc AI is likely to cause in the job market yet. 

The important question is not whether or not the US will get into an economic crisis. It has been through several in the last few decades alone. The real question is how the administration will react to this crisis. A critical hint lies in Trump’s repeated reference to protestors as insurrectionists. 

Why a ‘private army’ is the best bet

Dehumanising your opponents is a playbook tactic of populists, even ones that do face the press. But the term invokes an important administrative play that could be a game changer in the US. 

Earlier last month, Trump threatened to invoke the insurrection act and send in the military unilaterally into cities where serious protests were taking place. While for Indians, the deployment of military to keep civilians in line is not new, this is extremely rare in the US, and in modern history, almost exclusively done with the approval of the governor of the state where the military is about to be sent in. 

The last time it was invoked was during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, where troops were sent in to assist the beleaguered state police in the aftermath of the police brutality case involving Rodney King. The last few times the act was invoked without the consent of a state governor was in the 1960s, under the presidencies of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in these cases it was to act against a state that was actively undermining civil rights or racially targeting Black Americans. Invoking the insurrection act explicitly without a state’s consent is in effect sending in the military to discipline the state. In short, this is not a form of executive power that Americans take lightly.

But the threat is not being taken lightly by the political opposition. Several Democrats have explicitly made statements asking members of the military to defy orders that are not within the ambit of the constitution. In turn, the Trump administration is suing those politicians for sedition. Does that term ring a bell?

However, there is always the risk, even the smallest one, that there will be a Ceausescu-esque shock endgame in which one dissenter speaking up at the right time can throw off an authoritarian’s best laid plans. One’s best bet is a private army, or the closest to that one can build. 

Enter ICE.

ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and unlike Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) which does the work of policing at the border or airports, the ICE does the work of seeking out and apprehending people who have crossed into the US. There are elements of CBP’s work that may or may not include some form of aggression or antagonism since they are also involved in trade related activities, whereas ICE’s mandate is almost exclusively in two spaces – Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), and Homeland Security Investigations (HIS). In essence, the overwhelming share of what ICE does involves some form of aggressive action. Consequently, before taking on that work, one had best know what one is getting into.

Low threshold for entry, high pay

ICE is now the highest funded federal law-enforcement agency, by a massive margin. It has a budget that is more than two and a half times that of Hollywood’s favourite police force and the object of cheap plastic jackets in souvenir shops, the FBI. The ICE force of 22,000 employees earns roughly 30 to 50 per cent more than their equals in local law enforcement. It is also much easier to get a job at ICE – unlike most local law enforcement that typically expects an associate degree, and FBI which expects a bachelor’s degree, an ICE recruit needs to have just cleared high school. 

Also, unlike most other law enforcement, one needs to only be 18 to join the ICE, three years before the official age when one can drink a beer in the US. Importantly, the ICE also does not have a maximum age for entry into the force, which allows it to tap into a range of older Americans, many combat veterans into these positions. There is a specific programme called HERO which creates pathways for veterans to join the ICE.

About a third of all ICE agents are combat veterans, and a majority of those are in ERO, which is organised as tactical units, similar to what is used during wartime operations. Combat Veterans are six times more likely to be employed in ICE operations than in other professions in the US, much higher as a share than in the FBI, CBP or local law enforcement. Signing bonuses for ICE can be upwards of US$50,000, in addition to which, they get access to college loan forgiveness, something neither the FBI nor local law enforcement offers. ICE agents also have the lightest training load of any law enforcement, with just 8 weeks of training, an agent can be on the street with an automatic weapon. Even small police precincts typically expect at least 14 weeks. In the past, there was an expectation that ICE agents would have some Spanish language training, but that too has been waived. 

ICE is also militarised in an extremely important way – technologically. They are equipped with devices with facial and biometric scanning, the ability to create a ‘digital fence’ around a location and identify every mobile device that entered that area, and later track those devices back to the homes of the owners, as many protestors have found out the hard way. ICE uses Palantir’s AI technology to flag high priority individuals and neighborhoods based on patterns of movement and connection. It can bypass encryption to harvest messages from apps like WhatsApp and Signal, has a social media scanner and can track sentiment from mobile devices. In a nutshell, ICE defines for us the future of a digital security checkpoint.

In short, under Trump, ICE has become a source of fairly high paying work with a low threshold of entry, and a source of continuing combat operation style work for others. Layer this over the evidence that law and immigration enforcement work in the US is already a partisan activity that attracts more Whites and Republicans. Unlike the government bureaucrats who gave in to being fired with little more than throwing sandwiches in vengeance, the bear being poked here may have a different reaction. 

Brownshirts on American streets

By now, most news watchers have seen images of groups of masked ICE agents roaming the streets of Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. In Minneapolis, ICE agents outnumbered local police by a ratio of five to one. 

While there are murmurs of Trump’s numbers falling recently, it may have taken the clearly video-documented killings of two White protestors to move American public opinion, which till two weeks ago still showed remarkably high approval numbers for Trump. While for some, ICE agents are heroes, they are massively reviled by hordes of citizens in cities where they are deployed. There is systematic community organising to alert people through whistles that there is an ICE agent nearby, people follow ICE vehicles in their cars and honk at them, and in 2025, there was a doxxing incident putting out a list of ICE employees and their addresses. There are even Reddit lists where children of ICE agents can get off the trauma of their parents’ work. Even a growing number of Republicans have turned on ICE since the last wave of events in Minneapolis, explaining in part why the masks are needed. 

ICE have been compared to the Gestapo, but the much more appropriate comparison is to the Hitler SA (Sturmabteilung), also referred to as the Brownshirts, who were a loose group of unemployed men, disaffected veterans, and far right radicals who functioned as Hitler’s private army before he became Chancellor in 1933. They were street fighters, first attacking the socialists and Jews, and any political opposition or dissent to the Nazis. The SA acted with impunity, certain that they would either be absolved of wrongdoing because of the fear they struck in the minds of people they attacked, but more importantly, because they were assured protection by their leader. Hitler pardoned members of the SA sentenced to death for the murder of communists, and was able to justify it because the work of dehumanising them was already done. 

Similarly, as soon as the Nazis seized power, they issued an auxiliary police decree which incorporated the SA (by the SA/SS) thugs into the state, giving them formal recognition as a parallel police force. Soon enough, the Brownshirts became a more powerful force than local police who were undermined by government orders from interfering with any activities undertaken by them. And finally, Hitler suspended civil liberties through the Reichstag Fire Decree (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) which allowed the suspension of civil liberties including habeas corpus, privacy, and freedom of assembly. It also allowed the SA to take people into protective custody, in a manner that would have otherwise been considered kidnapping due to the lack of the arrested person’s rights, but was now protected by law by dubbing the arrested person an enemy. And finally, all of this was aided by a purge of the justice system of anyone who could block these orders. For the Brownshirts, their continued relevance in society, their access to power all depended on Hitler staying in power.

There are certain forms of authoritarianism that populism enables, and two matter particularly with regard to ICE. 

The first is institutional capture. A good authoritarian will install people in the state institutions that can stop their control on power, the three most important are in the judiciary, the security apparatus, and the bureaucracy. DOGE already gutted the bureaucracy, and the Supreme Court is a solid Republican institution now. 

The potential of a real tinderbox

A look at ICE content online shows that they have gone rogue influencer, showing off aggressive arrests of people. Were it not for the absolutely stunning murder of Alex Pretti, disarmed, on the floor under the weight of several ICE agents, and still shot several times, a lot more Americans would still be celebrating Trump’s private army.

Now the Democrats have rallied around ‘Defund ICE’ as a key call to action, but herein is the potential of a real tinderbox. ICE agents will depend significantly on Trump and his corner to ensure the safety and continuity of their professions. Trump has already proven, through action, that he will go to bat for the armed MAGA fringe – the Jan 6 insurrectionists were pardoned and turned into national heroes, even though police died in that attack. A surprisingly high number of those, estimated at up to 50,000 people at that rally, were military veterans, as would emerge in the trials that followed. Since taking office, Trump has also stopped federal investigations into White supremacist domestic terror groups while at the same time diluting the effort involved in becoming a terrorist by using the term to refer to a range of everyday citizens who show up at any protest. 

This conversation may have been irrelevant had the Jan 6 insurrection succeeded. In December 2020, liberals in the US found themselves in awe of a man who they had actively hated on till that point – Bill Barr. Barr, Trump’s attorney general, publicly debunked claims of widespread electoral fraud and resigned from his position rather than subvert the vote. In the weeks that followed, the entire team that served under Barr threatened mass resignation. Various White House officials blocked his executive orders. And the refusal by the Georgia secretary of state to call Trump the winner all undercut any chances Trump had to overturn the election results. The last straw was Vice President Mike Pence refusing to block the certification of Biden’s victory, even as the mob outside was screaming ‘hang Mike Pence’ outside the US Capitol. 

The only group that remained steadfast in their support for Trump was the mob outside.

Despite the Jan 6 insurrection, there was a peaceful transfer of power. But those that defied him were wrong in thinking Trump was done in US politics. Trump’s first term taught everyone who crossed him, and by extension the rest of the world, that he is among the few, even in the dirty game of politics, who knows how to see vengeance through. There is no punishment big or small for his detractors – from jail sentences, political oblivion, and getting sued for billions, to losing one’s Global Entry card, the equivalent of Digiyatra privileges, as Chris Krebs, Trump’s director of cybersecurity would find out the hard way. 

All who played any role in undermining his power would see first-hand what came after. Trump also took further a very important lesson about running a tight authoritarian ship – transforming institutions and filling them with ideological, or better still, personal loyalists. He took the first, and most transformative step in his first tenure by tilting the Supreme Court heavily to the right.

So what are the chances Pam Bondi and JD Vance will do what Barr and Pence did when squeezed between the truth and the tyrant? If there was another armed attack on the US capitol like Jan 6, 2021, what would that look like? 

This is the existential question for the United States. What will happen if Trump’s Republican party loses an election? 

If the Democrats win the US House back in November, it would be the biggest curb on Trump’s power since his second presidency started. 

The United States is staring down a monetary crisis, international opprobrium, cities in varying states of panic, and every sign that a financial meltdown is around the corner. People don’t want to visit here – tourism from foreign nations has nosedived, international student enrollments have already dropped dramatically and will get worse with the revocation of several thousand visas by the Trump administration. This will almost certainly cripple, if not entirely reorganise the entire higher education system, in line with a playbook authoritarian tactic of systematically targeting the intelligentsia.

Despite a disorganised opposition often in cahoots with funding interests that extend the current state of affairs, the current trajectory will almost certainly see a vote against the Republican party, which for all practical purposes, is Trump’s party. If that does happen, there is little doubt that it will be someone’s job to dramatically scale back, if not gently disarm ICE.

And if nobody will take on that exciting job, it may be someone else’s job to chronicle the end of the American experiment with democracy.

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