Trump’s Second Term, told from the edge of the law

Imagine waking up in a country where the law feels solid—contracts enforced, courts open, rights mostly intact—yet somewhere just offstage, a second legal universe is spreading.

In one universe, you’re fine.

In the other, you’re fair game.

That’s the core of the “dual state” idea a German lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel developed while watching the Nazis rise: a normative state for most people, and a prerogative state for those the government decides don’t really count.

My essay argues that in Trump’s second term, America is drifting into its own version of that split reality. The entry point? Undocumented immigrants.

They’re the first pushed into a harsher zone—raids, detention, fast‑tracked deportations. But the boundary doesn’t stay put. It creeps.

A suburban mom like Renée Good is shot by ICE after getting in the way. Protesters are harassed. Universities and law firms get the message to stay out of it. Each step isn’t just punishment; it’s a warning.

Over all of this hovers a president who prefers edicts to laws: firing a Federal Reserve governor by social post, daring the courts to stop him, testing how far executive power will bend.

Congress mostly watches. The Supreme Court sometimes blinks, sometimes nods. And the rest of us are left to guess which universe we’re actually living in.

My long‑form piece traces how this “dual state” is being built in real time—through immigration policy, legal theory, and a series of small, shrewd choices about whom to target when.

It’s not a thought experiment. It’s a map of where we are heading if we treat these stories as disconnected outrages instead of pieces of the same design.

Perhaps writing this is more of me trying to understand how a democracy erodes while most people still feel “normal,” in America.

More on this by February 1st.