Trump's favorite form of oppression is as old as America — but much more dangerous now

At 3:07 in the morning the pounding started.

Not a knock or a doorbell: it was the kind of impact meant to wake the neighbors and erase any doubt that resistance would be pointless.

Within seconds armed men were inside the house, shouting orders, refusing questions. No explanation, no warrant presented, no charges read. Just urgency, intimidation, and removal.

The people taken that night would eventually learn something chilling: under the legal theory being used, what happened to them wasn’t considered a violation of their rights at all.

It was 1773 in Boston.

That idea is not new to America. In fact, it’s exactly the governing method that pushed the colonies into revolution.

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence weren’t reacting to isolated abuses. They were reacting to a system, one designed to make resistance legally impossible while violence remained technically lawful.

Every clause they listed, every amendment that followed in the Bill of Rights, was aimed at preventing that same mechanism from ever taking hold here again.

To see why, look at what Thomas Jefferson wrote, in The Declaration of Independence:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …
“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws...
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
“For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: …
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …
“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” [emphasis added]

It’s also why the Framers of the Constitution added the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to our Constitution, which include:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. …
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” [emphasis added]

Individually, each of the following modern incidents can be argued about. People debate the details, the legality, the motives.

But our nation’s Founders feared something else entirely: not separate abuses, but a governing structure where each action reinforces the next until law itself stops restraining power.

That’s the pattern our Founders were trying to outlaw. And it’s the pattern that explains why courts keep ruling against these actions by the Trump regime, yet they continue anyway.

Consider where we are today.

• Trump’s masked, “absolutely immune” fascist goons are kicking in doors and smashing car windows and violently seizing people without judicial warrants in open violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the highest law of the land.
• They’re building massive databases of people they consider “domestic terrorists,” surveilling protestors and, most recently, demanding that social media sites turn over to them the identities of people who post anti-Trump and anti-ICE messages.
• They’re visiting the homes of people who’ve attended protests to intimidate them.
• Their Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are tweaking social media algorithms to amplify pro-Trump, pro-ICE messagesand shadow-banning those opposing them. Other Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are buying up major news sites and spinning the news and opinion they publish to normalize all this.
• At the same time, Trump, the 13 Epstein-class-billionaires in his cabinet, and the 150+ Epstein-class-billionaires who supported his ascent to power are grifting billions out of our economy while gutting healthcare, education, housing assistance, green energy, and any other programs that might support a middle class and a clean environment.

Most Americans are reluctant to say that America is now a fascist country, hoping that the next election will bring Democrats into power and constrain Trump and his lickspittles.

The senior-most leaders of Canada and Europe, however, think we’ve passed the point of no return. And they’re acting on that belief.

As Dean Blundell notes:

“Ottawa plans to increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP over the next decade. That would mark the largest sustained defence build-up since the Second World War. Not 2 percent. Not incremental NATO compliance. Five percent … This is not a procurement tweak. This is Canada reverse-engineering decades of structural reliance on the American military industrial complex.”

Similar sentiments and actions were echoed at the Munich Security Conference this past week.

The final report from the Conference says of America:

“More than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction…” Trump and Vance are “demolition men,” and even when compared to Putin are “the most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions.”
Trump’s policies “will pave the way for a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not the wider mass of people who have placed their hopes in disruptive change.”

Outside of optimistic Democrats in the United States, it seems nobody in the world — and particularly Canada and Europe — thinks the United States will back away from becoming a violent police state. They believe the alliance between Trump, Epstein-class-billionaires, and Putin has won and America has permanently changed.

After all, as Reuters reported last week:

“Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.
“The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal.”

The biggest growth industry in America right now is building concentration camps to hold people who have never faced a judge or jury — in open violation of our Constitution and the Bill or Rights — and never been charged with or convicted of any criminal statute.

Europeans, who’ve seen this movie before, don’t believe for a second that within a year or two those camps will be limited to brown-skinned immigrants. They expect that people like you and me will soon be in them as well.

After all, Trump right now is trying to put eight members of Congress, a state judge, the form FBI and CIA directors, New York’s Attorney General, his own former National Security Advisor, his Federal Reserve Chairman, a Fed Governor, New Jersey’s former governor, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, and reporter Don Lemon in prison.

Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both former allies of Trump who’ve called him out, have recently tweeted that they are not suicidal, just like opposition leaders in Russia used to do in the early days. Even Republicans are realizing that Trump’s role model is Vladimir Putin.

As alarmed democracy advocates around the world point out, the list of people Trump wants in prison or dead seems to grow daily: he’s actually trying, right now — in a very real way that our media seems to be largely ignoring — to put each one of those people into an actual prison. Just like Hitler did, Mussolini did, Pinochet did, Putin did, Erdoğon did, Xi did, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, as Republicans are trying to pass a law that would prevent at least 20 million people, mostly married women and low-income Americans, from voting this November and in 2028, the nation’s top law enforcement official, Kristi Noem, just this weekend told a group of reporters that Republicans are doing it because:

“When it gets to election day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Most Americans still assume elections alone will decide whether this stops, but our allies abroad — who’ve seen this movie before in their own countries in their grandparents’ lifetimes — appear far less certain. They’re acting as if the United States has entered a phase nations rarely reverse once fully established.

Our best hope now is that America’s Founders anticipated this very possibility.

They understood that a government could learn to operate in a way where individual actions seem debatable but the overall direction becomes irreversible. That’s why they embedded one final safeguard, not in the ballot box, but in a structural limit on power itself.

Almost nobody talks about it anymore.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that safeguard and why, once a government crosses a particular threshold, winning elections no longer automatically restores the system that existed before.

Because if we’re already past that line, like the Prime Minister of Canada and the leaders of Europe were saying out loud last week in Munich, the question Americans are arguing about right now is not the one that will actually determine what happens next.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.