The paralyzing intel report that obliterated my peace of mind

Have you ever woken in the morning steeped in a sense of nonspecific dread? It’s undefined, and even though you have no idea what it’s about, it’s palpable. You recognize that it’s just a feeling, not a fact, yet the heaviness presses. You scan the night’s memories for a bad dream… nothing in jackboots chased you through a field, the mean girls didn’t take your coat.

With dreams coming up empty, you look around. Did your psyche manage to bury something horrific, just to give you the mercy of sleep? Did yesterday bring a terminal illness diagnosis? An IRS audit?

No. And yet.

That foreboding sense, ominous and ill-defined, persists.

Writing days don’t always go as planned

That’s how I woke up one day last week: Marinating in apprehension worthy of a straightjacket. It was a planned writing day, my favorite, and I had it all laid out: coffee, then pickleball, then up to the rooftop sofa to write under a tattered pergola. The morning dreads smashed that.

Scanning for the source of what woke me up scared for the world, I remembered. Of course. It was something I stupidly read before bed the night before. It was a deep dive on Trump’s total dismantling of U.S. counterintelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Trump has systematically removed U.S. counterterrorism and counterintelligence assets, the professionals tracking communications and operations of adversarial governments and terrorist cells planning bombs, manipulating U.S. politics, and sowing dangerous division, and reassigned them instead to monitor Trump’s domestic political adversaries.

Trump gutted foreign risk monitoring functions under the DOJ, the FBI, and DHS, while deliberately elevating terrorism risks those divisions were created to track. The threat environment from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba is now at an all-time high, and we have almost no detection system in place.

Given the decimation of U.S. counterintelligence and counterterrorism agencies, it’s hard to avoid concluding that Trump wants to trigger another 9/11. For an administration deliberately accelerating climate change as fires and storms rage, deliberately cutting access to life-saving therapies while spreading contagious disease, and deliberately wrecking peace-keeping alliances while starting wars, it tracks that Trump would deliberately foment a terrorist attack. He’s been threatening to declare a national emergency, cancel elections, and invade democratic-run states; a massive terrorist attack on U.S. soil would give the perfect cover for all three.

The daunting road ahead

Seeing how we got to this point, an oligarchs’ coup by any other name, isn’t hard. It’s fairly linear, starting with Reagan’s trickle down fraud that only helped the rich, moving through Republicans’ removal of accuracy requirements in the news, and landing on Citizens United in 2010. Compared to that clarity, the map to get back is byzantine.

I fear too many Americans are tuning out, that Steve Bannon’s s--- on the wall strategy is working. Too many still don’t realize that our divide is not between right and left, but between the top 1% and everyone else. Trump’s oligarchs, now in control of the media, are keeping the nation enmeshed in orchestrated culture wars so that they can eliminate regulations and tax obligations, building unprecedented wealth for themselves in the process.

It hurts to admit that I’m having a challenge of faith- faith that the 91 million voters who stayed home in 2024, even after seeing J6, will vote this time. If Trump’s attack on the U.S. capital, complete with a noose for the Vice President, didn’t move people to vote, what the hell will?

Eckhardt Tolle talks about a ‘pain body,’ a negative emotion that spreads itself to other hosts like a contagion. I don’t want to facilitate the transfer or increase of negativity by writing about it. But, despite my best efforts, the immense sadness lingers. It feels like grief, not just for my country, not just for people now suffering a lack of food and healthcare under this moron, not just for immiserated people all over the world for whom America was a beacon of hope, now extinguished. But it’s also the loss of my own foundational assumption: all my life I’d always assumed that enough Americans recognized the rarity of what we had, the basics of why our constitution says what it says, that we’d never allow anyone to seriously threaten our system.

But now, watching the oligarchs’ spawn, a corrupt idiot who rules by Fox News headlines, succeed in destroying the democratic rule of law, I’m not so sure.

One week later

Outside of legal work, I haven’t written anything since that anxiety-ridden morning. It was clearly time to look away for a week or two. Touch grass, read fluffy stuff, play more pickleball. Life threatens to change in an instant, and if Trump declares a midterm-seizing emergency, enabled by a Supreme Court clearly in on the coup, things could happen very quickly. Me or not me, those jackboots are already chasing.

Most Americans know what’s happening, but the Sinclair/Fox News cohort—35% or so— is not only oblivious to Trump’s criminality and incompetence, they are likely to stay that way. Right wing media will make sure they keep voting against their own interests until there’s nothing left, including civil liberties.

What needs to be done to save democracy is straightforward, but how to do it, not so much. Getting money out of politics, returning accuracy to the news, and balancing a corrupt Supreme Court face such a high wall of opposition I’m not sure we can scale it. Corporate wrongdoers and the uber rich are profiting so wildly from those structural flaws—which is why they built them—I’m not sure anything short of a civil war will pry their fingers off them.

And so, instead of snark, insights, or legal analysis, all I can offer readers today is naked honesty: I fear for my country. On a good day, I see the risks as surmountable. Today is not a good day.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.