“Getting the Hell out of here” is on my mind these days. I live in a deep-blue part of New Jersey, no more than a couple of miles from one of those liberal universities that give Redhats hives. But if I go just a mile further out in either direction, I will find myself in MAGA country. The “Let’s Go Brandon” banners still flutter, even now, from flagpoles, and the Trump signs, often flanked by Marine Corps and Gadsden Battle Flags, have even become more aggressive, and are often scrawled in an angry hand.

To be honest, it’s a bit much, and every time I pass by in my car or on my bike, I am reminded that America is not my little collegiate blue dot in New Jersey – not even New Jersey is. This is a hostile land in the grips of a neo-totalitarian revolution which values domination, aggression, and brutality above all else.

Moreover, the United States has become, in a few short weeks, the sworn enemy of Canada, the country of my birth, and President Donald Trump is eager to annex or absorb it as the 51st State by any means: with economic pressure or even military force.

I doubt that it will come to an actual shooting war. The realities of 21st century geopolitics militate against that. Besides, an invasion of Canada would be deeply unpopular, even in the MAGA heartland. It would have virtually no support in the northern states along the US-Canada border (at least those with any population density to speak of), creating a domestic situation recalling the War of 1812, when New York and the New England states would have nothing to do with a war against their best trading partners and convened the Hartford Convention to consider seceding from the Union.

Such a war would be unwinnable in any real sense; one can hardly imagine Canadians becoming docile, let alone eager, US citizens after the tanks rolled across Queen’s Park, Parliament Hill, and Tsawwassen Beach. I am sure President Trump’s military advisors have mentioned this. They might even have whispered the words “Vietnam” and “Afghanistan” in his ear.

I am a historian by training. Ours is not a profession given to optimism; we know better than most just what atrocities humans are capable of. So, I am generally inclined to a generalized pessimism. Yet, the possibility of a war between the US and Canada seems remote. The economic prostration of Canada and our reduction to an impotent vassal of the American Empire (think: Pueto Rico with nominal independence) through more peaceful means, like overwhelming election interference (think: truckers) seems far, far more likely. And that would be bad enough, but I believe it can and might be accomplished without “boots on the ground.”

Having said that, President Trump is just the kind of leader who will gladly ignore common sense, military logic, history and the advice of experts like his generals. He has already shown an inclination to do this with trade and economic policy. Rather, he prefers to mount his perceived adversaries – and let’s not kid ourselves, he regards Canada, as a whole, an adversary, if not an insult – and dry-hump them into submission. He’s just the guy to give the order and, as this week’s text message scandal demonstrated so clearly, his Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth is just stupid and craven enough to obey without comment.

The whole MAGA movement is based on little more than hostility and aggression. It really has no other policies than retribution and destruction. The senior members of the MAGA regime, whether they are official or just along for the ride (with chainsaw in hand), seem to be motivated by little more than getting back at the smart kid who wouldn’t let them cheat off their exam papers in high school, the women who wouldn’t go out with them, and the rules, mores, and social standards that would not bend to the superiority – racial, religious, gender – they imagine they possess.

Hesgeth is spoiling for a fight to fulfill his Game of Thrones meets Storm of Steel masculinist fantasies, and he has the ink to prove it. Little Marco Rubio has carried a chip on his shoulder ever since he sweated like the nerdy kid in high school gym class responding to the State of the Union in 2016; he knows he has to prove himself to the bullies (like Hesgeth) before they pound him after class. And President Trump? He’s the big bully, as he demonstrated so well in that Oval Office confrontation with Volodymyr Zelensky while Vice President Vance pitched in as his cackling sidekick.

So, I’m not convinced, after all, that a military action against Canada, until a few weeks ago the United States’ closest ally, is so farfetched. Stupid, shortsighted, and likely to fail, perhaps, but not beyond the realm of possibility. And that gives me the willies.

Even without the threat of war, I feel deeply vulnerable here in the United States. I don’t know if I will be “disappeared” by DHS agents as Rumeyza Ozturk was at Tufts University last week or arrested, detained, and maybe tortured upon reentering the US after my trip to Canada this summer. Will I be denounced? A student upset at my politics threatened to do so this week. Do I still have the legal protections of my Green Card? What happens if the MAGA regime declares me an “Enemy Alien?” There are any number of things that can happen just short of war, and war is also possible.

This is something that my partner and I talk about almost every day. Before she left on an overseas business trip a couple of weeks ago, she expressed her concern that I would might not be home, maybe spirited to a black site, when she returned. She was serious, and I can’t blame her.

Our lives have been overwhelmed with these “what ifs,” and I find myself recalling the generation of German Jewish and left-wing writers and intellectuals who tried to read the tea leaves of 1933-1939 in order to know when it would be the “right time” to flee. And I cannot get the image of Walter Benjamin lying dead in his bed at the Spanish border in 1940 out of my mind… The last European.

The truth is that we would have fled the United States long ago – we have been talking about it since 2016 – if it had been possible. But picking up and leaving is not a simple matter; we have jobs here, lives and social connections, and these are not easily dropped. And how would we support ourselves in Canada, especially as it sinks into a Trump-inflicted recession?

Rather, like my intellectual heroes of the 1930s – Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Toller, Erich Fromm – we are reading the tea leaves and making contingency plans to “book it” at a moment’s notice if we have to. We’re getting the vet paperwork for our cat, so we don’t get held-up at the border… I am planning to invest in a trailer- hitch for my car… We’re talking seriously with friends in Toronto, Ottawa, and my hometown of Montreal about the possibility of putting us up, perhaps for an extended period … We’re checking the job postings every day.

And the nest-egg that we have been putting away for the downpayment on a house has become our escape fund; not enough to live on, but maybe enough to cushion our fall should we have to leave in the middle of the night. It is a surreal situation, and I feel as if my life at this moment should be shot in black and white, with a red filter and the aperture closed to f22, like in an Orson Welles movie.

I tell myself that, at some level, this is all just absurd, and maybe it is. But the frightening thing is that it is all at least possible, and I am always checking for the exits because I really don’t know if, or when, I might have to book it.