Novelists have always had a fascination with “what if” plots. There are a half-dozen popular novels based on the premise of the South winning the Civil War. Stephen King wrote a novel about someone traveling through time to prevent the JFK assassination.

There are also two dystopian novels based on an authoritarian take-over of American democracy by populist leaders. Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Could Happen Here” is a thinly-veiled fictional exploration of America’s descent into a dictatorship under a Huey Long regime. The other, Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America” imagines an America where “America First” isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for President in 1936 and quickly aligns the U.S. with Nazi Germany.

Both books tell the story from the point of view of a regular citizen. In the former, it’s a publisher of a small Vermont newspaper. In the latter, it’s told through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy living in New Jersey.

The choice of these kinds of protagonists allow the author to tell the story of the decline of American democracy through the small, incremental changes they begin to see around them.

I believe there is another American “what if” story materializing before our eyes. As it was in the Lewis and Roth novels, the changes begin quietly, without much cause for alarm, affecting a relative few. No one is frightened by distant thunder.

Last week, Reuters’ reported that the Trump administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation. That would include at least 20 Ukrainian refugee families who have made their homes here in the Golden Triangle. One day, they are here. The next they are gone. And suddenly, what is happening is not an abstraction, but something that is happening to people we know.

This is the latest development in a seismic shift in U.S. diplomacy orchestrated by Trump, whose affinity for Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin seems to know no bounds. Trump has falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war, tried to undermine President Zelensky’s legitimacy, sought to strong-arm Ukraine into a controversial minerals sharing deal and froze military aid and intelligence support in a bid to force Ukraine into making concessions to Russia. Meanwhile at the U.N., the United States joined Russia and Belarus as the only nation’s voting against a resolution that said Russia started the war with Ukraine.

America’s pivot to a pro-Russian foreign policy isn’t Trump’s doing alone, though. Across the federal government, we are witnessing a coordinated Republican effort to realign American foreign policy away from the world’s longtime democracies and toward gangster regimes like Putin’s.

But for this to succeed, Trump must change Americans’ opinion of Russia and there are plenty of Republican leaders who are willing to whitewash Putin’s brutality for political gain. Trump’s frontal assault began in earnest this week when he joined Speaker Mike Johnson in calling for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalenksky’s resignation. Calling for regime change against an American ally is a hugely destabilizing move, made even worse by a Republican media blitz intended to portray Zelensky not as the victim of unprovoked Russian aggression but as a dictator and aggressor.

Republicans aren’t seeking peace. They are seeking surrender.

I was born in 1959. Russia and the Soviet Union have been America’s enemy my entire life. To see that change so abruptly does seem like something out of a novel.

Party of Lincoln? Heck, the Republicans aren’t even the Party of Ronald Reagan.

Until now, these massive shifts in policy have been something we’ve only read about.

Soon, we may very well see it in our own neighborhoods among the small group of refugees we had embraced, but are now considered enemies of America. They will simply disappear. God only knows what will become of them or what will become of our national conscience, for that matter.

Yes, it could happen here.

And, yes there is a plot against America.

We are seeing it in real time.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].