When does enough become enough? When does indignity pile up so high that we rise up in sustained opposition? Is it enough when the rule of law is an anachronism, and convicted, violent insurrectionists and other lawbreakers are freed while Trump distorts the Alien Enemies Act to disappear over two hundred Venezuelan immigrants, at least a third of whom have no criminal record yet remain captives in an El Salvadoran gulag without due process? How does that compare to illegally transferring Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child sex trafficker and predator, to a minimum-security country club prison?

Is it enough when Trump’s former personal attorney and Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, encourages Department of Justice lawyers to ignore court orders related to the deportations of those same Venezuelan immigrants and to ignore any other judicial orders that undermine Trump’s agenda, yet is confirmed as a life-long appointee to the United States Court of Appeals?

Is it enough when the capitulation of news and media organizations to Trump’s demands and the defunding of the Public Broadcasting System (i.e., National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System) is another benchmark of an end to the freedom of the press?

Will enough be enough when the streets of LA, Chicago, New York, and Burlington are permanently patrolled by ICE agents, the National Guard, and the Marines; when daily we witness the illegal incarceration of immigrants we know, who are valued members of our community and held in high esteem? Or when soldiers are deployed to quell protest?

Will enough be enough when adults and children we love suffer malnutrition due to cuts in federal food assistance? When they can’t obtain life-saving vaccinations and medications or become deathly ill but can’t get health care due to cuts in Medicaid? Or when a family member or relative dies from a heart attack because their local hospital has closed and the nearest one is hours away?

Will enough be enough when the next hurricane, tornado, wildfire, and/or flood wreaks havoc in Texas, Utah, California, Oklahoma, or Addison County and FEMA no longer has the resources or perhaps doesn’t even exist to aid families in rebuilding their lives?

Will enough be enough when Trump’s tariffs, tax and other economic policies, in combination with the demise of the rule of law and the falsification of economic data, undermine the credibility of and faith in our financial system, and that in turn causes a recession, or worse, a depression, further exacerbating inequities between the wealthy and everyone else? Will enough be enough when you no longer have the money to feed your children, heat your home, pay your mortgage, or put gas in your car; or when you lose your life savings and become homeless?

Will enough be enough when there are no longer law firms or lawyers who are willing to protect the Constitutional rights of student protestors and our LGBTQIA+ community? When Trump’s attacks on judges like James Boasberg and his accusations of treason against Barack Obama results in grave harm or death to them and/or their family members?

Will enough be enough when Trump continues to issue Executive Orders and spreads boldfaced lies that rewrite history as he’s already done, coercing the Smithsonian to remove references to his two impeachments or most recently, when he fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after that agency delivered the truth about the worst non-Covid three-month jobs numbers since 2010?

Will enough be enough when on the anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act Trump urges “red” states like Texas to enact racial gerrymandering and voter suppression in an attempt to unfairly skew the 2026 mid-term House and Senate elections in favor of Trump loyalists? Or when those elections are suspended, rigged in some way, or Republicans claim that their opponents’ victories are fraudulent?

Will enough be enough when the incompetence of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, and Kash Patel, Director of the FBI, enable or prove incapable of preventing a catastrophic foreign or domestic cyber-attack on our energy grid?

I’m not sure to what extent or for how long we can endure Trump’s and his administration’s penchant for fascism or their incompetence before we lose our democracy; or before our individual and collective outrage reaches a boiling point that causes us to act to preserve our freedom. Some of us will choose to hide, some of us will flee, others will choose to fight.

Ron Rubin

Middlebury