How, exactly, do people think this all ends? What’s the actual off-ramp here?

Take, for example, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, along with the layers of officials underneath them in the State Department and military chain of command obeying their orders. Assuming a future where political control flips, whether through elections or the eventual collapse of leadership, what will they do at that moment?

The underlying premise I assume a lot of Americans casually accept is that power will just transfer cleanly, and that’s that. But if we’re talking about individuals facing serious legal exposure, i.e., criminal investigations, potential indictments, charges of treason, and even the possibility of being expelled to The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity, then we’re no longer in the realm of polite and peaceful transitions of power. Instead, we’re talking about individuals facing severe personal risk, reputational and financial ruin, and potential prison time or worse.

So, do these individuals in that position, essentially backed into a corner, just step aside and trust the system to let them off the hook even though they are guilty as sin? Or no? And if so, do they try to negotiate protection or immunity? Do they leave public life entirely and try to stay out of reach of prosecutors, perhaps by fleeing the country? Or do they rely on personal loyalty within what remains of the regime in a myriad of agencies and institutions to shield them long enough that consequences never materialize, including through violence if necessary?

That’s also before getting to the assumption doing the most invisible work here: that a “flip” in political leadership actually means the system underneath it flips too. That the same agencies, departments, and enforcement bodies that may have been hollowed out, restructured, or simply packed top to bottom with Trump loyalists suddenly all just fall in line with new political leadership without hesitation or friction. That people whose positions, careers, or protection were tied directly to the previous criminal power structure just calmly accept replacement, new directives, or the inevitable criminal and civil investigations into their own conduct.

None of that will be automatic. It requires compliance across entire chains of command. It also assumes that orders from new political leadership are actually carried out, not ignored, slow-walked, reinterpreted, or undermined from within. It assumes that institutional loyalty to the Constitution or the law outweighs personal loyalty, fear, or self-preservation across thousands of decision points.

If that assumption doesn’t hold, if even parts of the current fascist machinery resist, stall, or even fracture, then the idea of a clean transition starts to look less like a given and more like a best-case scenario Americans are hoping for rather than something just guaranteed to happen.

I can’t help but conclude that the speed of Project 2025 was for this point precisely. The architects of all of this weren’t just aiming for quick policy wins; they were moving fast to gut and repopulate the administrative state, along with key layers of law enforcement and the military chain of command, before any meaningful resistance could organize, and in preparation for a flip in political leadership they know will happen that they can then just sideline and ignore.

Elections can come and go. But if the underlying machinery is staffed end to end with loyalists, then a formal transfer of political power doesn’t necessarily translate into real governmental control. New political leadership can issue orders all day long, and it won’t matter if the people responsible for actually carrying them out decide to just flat-out refuse.

If control over key institutions by this regime outlasts control over elected office, then the idea that elections alone will reset the system looks to be a lot more fragile than Americans want to admit, and I’m not sure if they are quite ready to confront what that means.