The day after Trump subjected the nation to his deranged birthday party spectacle of violence, the New York Times dropped new reporting that sheds light on how the MAGA government internally contemplated radical steps that would have potentially ended the American Republic.

The reporting, crucially, provides us with an opportunity to take stock and reflect on three broader questions that determine our understanding of this regime and the state of American democracy:

1) The timeline: When, exactly, did the Trumpists come closest to instituting despotism – and why did they ultimately fail to implement and/or decided against taking the extreme steps they were debating?

2) Internal dynamics and fault lines: What does the reporting tell us about the different factions within the MAGA government, the exact fault lines between them, and the role of Trump himself in the decision-making process?

3) The future of MAGA: What are the implications of this internal strive for what comes after Trump? In particular, what are we learning about JD Vance as Truimp’s designated successor – a man whose worldview seems to be shaped entirely by extremist ideology and conspiracism.

The spring of 2025 emerges as the key inflection point: Had Trump actually suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without authorization from Congress, it would have been a potentially lethal blow to the American Republic as an experiment in democratic self-government.

But he did not. A key pattern:

The first of several times the regime pushed the country right up to the edge of the kind of authoritarian escalation that would have taken America across the line into full-blown autocratic territory… but then failed and/or proved unwilling to actually go there.

Among all these inflection points, the ultimately aborted push to suspend habeas corpus last spring stands out to me as particularly dangerous and significant because at that moment, the Trump regime was overall in a much stronger position than at any point since.

Not that it was really needed, but we now possess even more direct evidence that there are powerful people inside this government who are jumping on every chance they get to push for the imposition of despotism. And those people aren’t going anywhere.

Miller, Vance, and the many extremists in this government will continue to look for opportunities to end the Republic. Yet overall, the regime is in a much weaker position to succeed than last spring, when they contemplated suspending habeas corpus and effectively ending the Republic.