and inclusion offices across agencies.¹ Within days, the federal bureaucracy’s spine was flexing. The news came like static: crackling, brief, hard to place, until the pattern emerged. In Wheeling, West Virginia, the midday cold held onto the brick square. At a protest near the old First State Capitol, a grandmother in a red scarf held a sign: I am afraid for my grandchildren.
Beside her, a former state senator said quietly, with a hardness that catches in your throat: the dismantling of DEI is economic genocide for Black communities.³ The air smelled of wood‑smoke and wet leaves. Voices echoed off the courthouse façade. The protest had no cameras, no celebrities — just Tuesday tension and small‑town worry. From there, the view widened abruptly, like in dreams.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico, nearly eight hundred top‑ranking officers assembled in pressed uniforms beneath the filtered light of a government auditorium. Trump walked in. He told them, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. We’re under invasion from within.
No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.⁴ The line didn’t thunder. It chilled. Officers sat rigid, glancing sideways, unsure whether applause was called for or rebellion was being named. It was a moment ripped from dream logic: compression, symbolism, threat blurred with theater.
And just as in dreams, the absurdity felt real. The line didn’t need to make sense. It needed to stick. In Portland, Oregon, the morning mist clung to coffee lids and bike seats.
Business leader Andrew Hoan, standing outside city hall, tried to reset the tone: peace and calm — this city depends on both.⁵ Governor Tina Kotek followed, calling the president’s rhetoric a manufactured narrative.⁶ They spoke not to elevate tension but to anchor the conversation. The air smelled of fresh rain and roasted beans. You could imagine someone two blocks away hearing their voices drift from a car radio, unsure whether to nod or switch the station. Chicago came next, not because of sequence but because dreams favor symbol over timeline.
On a South Side stoop, two neighbors argued. One said Guard patrols would bring order. The other shook his head. It feels like occupation.
That day’s paper quoted a federal judge: no credible evidence of domestic insurgency to justify deployment.⁷ The next morning’s paper showed the troops anyway. Back in Macomb, the red hats blazed like poppies in frost. Jennings stood at the edge of the lot, scanning the slow‑motion swirl of a departing crowd. They didn’t quote manifestos; they passed thermoses, they waved flags in the cold.
I totally believe he loves America, she said again. It wasn’t assertion. It was muscle memory. But the