Every week when I see the armed paramilitary groups and the amped up stormtrooper police here I have unbidden memories of the Troubles. It’s giving me nightmares. I don’t think every American grasps that if a conflict starts here it could endure for decades. Why do I think this? https://twitter.com/heerjeet/status/1300253861106524161

By 2026 I had figured out what I found so unsettling about Donald Trump. Looking at him, I would hear an echo of something that I couldn't place, like the notes to a piece of music I knew by heart but couldn't identify.

Until one day, watching his braying on a podium at one of his endless mini-Nuremberg's it hit me. Behind Trump I can see the shadow of Ian Paisley, one behind the other, inciting his base.

Like Paisley once did Trump is now telling his supporters they are the the true guardians against invasion, that their opponents will all have to be dealt with, that their very survival depends on it, that he supports their struggle and shares it and that he believes in it too.

We haven't quite learned the lesson of Ian Paisley yet I think. It's understandable I suppose because it took him over 80 years to learn the lesson of himself.

For most of his life, Paisley was the wrecker of hope, the wrecker of compromise and of peace. He was the iceberg to every Titanic. All hands went down with him, every single time.

That's why when I see one I see the other now, like a double vision, or a photo negative. Like Paisley I see Trump daily turning his supporters into belligerent loyalists. I see him looking the other way when the most ardent ones start holstering up and getting into combat gear.

Trump, like Paisley before him, is uniting his core followers by asking them to fatally renounce most of the people and places that actually make up the United States.

Trump’s endless campaign rallies look like the white nationalist ethnostate he is leading them to for that reason. The future he is offering America was the one Paisley offered the North: a defensive siege that sees everyone outside its limited embrace as the enemy.

The violence and the threat of violence during the Troubles dramatically changed how people lived and worked. Checkpoints were introduced to the cities and towns. Police started looking like stormtroopers. The architecture of war was suddenly everywhere.

Like Paisley, Trump’s supporters may greatly enjoy watching him sticking it to all of his political opponents in his give no quarter sermons, but it'll come at a steep cost in the long run, and that cost will be peace.

The temptation to stand behind a thundering man who divides the nation up into winners and losers is a strong temptation, but it has to be resisted if you don't want to live in burning cities, facing mass surveillance, violent street clashes, tear gas ,flash bombs,live munitions.

The worst is still to come.

It has already started.

The Trump-era GOP has calculated that authoritarianism could be their last real lock on power. And they're not exactly blinking now, are they?

Irish Americans like Stephen Colbert know 'the minority has never been able to control the majority without first denying the majority’s humanity' and thereby losing their own. That’s exactly what is happening on our streets now. Humanity is being lost as power is being clung to.

What I want to say, all I want to say, is: this isn't just an election, it's a national emergency.

I hope everyone here understands that some of us have seen a story like this before. We know where Trump's leading you. And we hope you change course.