The Slow Civil War: What Happens Now?

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president's name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode we hear from Jeff Sharlet and Molly O'Toole with a response from Mazin Sidahmed. Jeff has given years to studying what he calls "the slow civil war," the dividing of the country and the rise of an angry, aggrieved, alienated ultra right wing. Molly has reported on Trump's immigration policies and their effects on migrants and their families. She's completing a book that documents her journeys alongside people traversing the Darien Gap and making their way north over hundreds and thousands of miles to the U.S. border. Mazin, who leads the Q&A, co-founded and co-directs the groundbreaking immigration news site Documented.