The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.

I mean - have they?

Alarmists thought that the Trump Administration would be out here banning abortion right and left, clamping down with the Comstock Act and running roughshod over access to reproductive health...and that hasn't really happened.

Similarly, we were concerned that the Administration would simply ignore any court orders they disliked, and declare themselves the final arbiters of what the law meant. And that hasn't happened either. When they ultimately get cornered with an unambiguous court order that they can't pretend to comply with, they fold (bye bye Habba and Halligan). And even though they like to play the appellate "let's wait until the decision is final" game, they actually have ended up not appealing a lot of the cases they lose at the lower levels.

We also were concerned that the Administration would just ignore Congressional appropriations and willfully violate the Impoundment Act. And they haven't done that, and they've folded on that issue.

We haven't seen Trump leave NATO, abandon aid for Ukraine, or invade Greenland (or Panama). Concerns about Trump cutting Medicare and/or Social Security didn't materialize.

And, of course, TACO. Another of Trump's superpowers is that he's able to try ten things, have eight work out the way he wants and get blasted on the other two, but then just backpedal on the two and pocket the eight wins. He has zero caution on this stuff, and he forces people to actually fight back or he'll just do what he wants. But when people do resist, then he knows where the real lines are. Not the lines that people say are lines, but the real lines. And he generally doesn't cross those real lines.

Heck, even with this latest provocation over the Fulton County voting records, he didn't just call out the military and seize the documents. His Administration went to court, got a warrant from a judge, and served the warrant.

I do not in any way want to suggest that the Administration hasn't done objectively bad things, and hasn't trampled over a massive number of 'guardrails' and principles of good government or "not engaged in graft and corruption." But they have operated within the universe of "doing stuff that doesn't completely break the country," which means we should take predictions that they will do stuff that will completely break the country with a bit of a grain of salt.