"After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? ( Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)"
"Or, as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it to me, the Overton window is moving so far, so quickly, that the more apt way to understand Trump's strategy is: "Fuck the Overton window." Bannon continued: "He's driving deep. Remember, our strategy-I say it every day-is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven't met any resistance.""
Donald Trump's second term employs a maximalist strategy that incrementally stretches and then breaks democratic norms. The approach normalizes erosion of rights—targeting due process for immigrants, encouraging citizens to ostracize speech, and punishing journalists reporting inconvenient facts. The tactic relies on slowly shifting acceptable boundaries so that extreme actions become commonplace, analogous to a boiling-frog effect. Rapid expansion of the Overton window renders previously unacceptable measures politically feasible. The strategy advances until concrete resistance arises, and current political forces have produced insufficient checks to halt the push.
Read at The Atlantic
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