Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
In another pivotal moment, the Supreme Court decided Wednesday to take up former president Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. This development, arriving as we edge closer to the 2024 presidential election, fuels further delays and injects a new level of uncertainty, casting a shadow over the electoral landscape. It’s increasingly perceived as a strategic maneuver by Trump to entangle legal proceedings with the electoral timeline, complicating the discourse and deepening the national polarization ahead of a critical election. The scenario is one glimpse into the broader threat of Trump’s 2024 candidacy.
On Monday, Just Security published The American Autocracy Threat Tracker, a new public resource that meticulously catalogs the plans, promises and propositions being developed by Trump and his circle. The tracker amalgamates data from media outlets, resources such as Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook, and direct information from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Noteworthy is its inclusion of data from Trump’s campaign website and Truth Social – as well as an always-updating searchable data set of all of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
This tracker is more than a repository; it’s a call for critical engagement, starting with its initial chapters that paint a vision of the beginning of Trump’s potential second term, marked by authoritarian pledges to serve as a “ dictator on day one ” to enforce his plans to “close the borders” and “drill, drill, drill.” It equips citizens and organizations with a unified framework for dissecting the realities of the Republican frontrunner’s campaign narratives, fostering a necessary national dialogue.
Amidst this backdrop, a January 2024 survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and YouGov produced a startling finding: a significant portion of respondents showed a perplexing openness to Trump’s authoritarian undertones. This result contrasted sharply with a broader aversion to dictatorship revealed in a separate Economist and YouGov poll from December 2023, potentially indicating a nuanced, though troubling, interpretation of “temporary autocracy.” Such findings continually underscore an alarming dissonance in public sentiment towards the foundational principles of American democracy.
The discourse on democracy’s relevance in contemporary America is reaching an inflection point. Recent polls, including a longitudinal survey by The Democracy Fund, indicate a waning commitment to democratic norms among Americans, a sentiment further corroborated by Danielle Allen’s insights published last week in The Washington Post. Allen’s analysis reveals a generational divergence in the valuation of democracy, posing a stark challenge: The sustainability of democracy hinges on the people’s desire for it.
In my tenure with the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, my underlying quest has been to identify a unifying thread that could weave together the diverse strands of the healthy democracy ecosystem. Our mission is to enhance and amplify the work of those working in civic education, engagement, electoral reform, social cohesion and trusted information. It is intuitive that these spheres of practice enhance one another and are all vital to a healthy society and the institutions that serve it.
However, the collective insight and power of the ecosystem can only coalesce into a movement with at least one specific, shared goal. We must continue focusing on a wide range of work areas to repair our country's social and political infrastructure. Still, it's also essential that we consider our work aligned with the goal of a constitutional democracy supermajority. That means a supermajority of citizens agreeing, as Allen puts it, on “the basic rules of the game.” Inside the bounds of those rules we will disagree, but hopefully we can disagree better within the stability of those boundaries.
The path forward demands more than passive endorsement; it calls for active defense and promotion of core democratic values, including “constitutionalism, the rule of law, inclusivity, nonviolence, and respect for the electoral process”. It is not just possible but imperative for us to rise to this challenge, fostering a culture of dialogue and advocacy that strengthens, rather than erodes, the bedrock of our democratic republic.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.