A clear trail of clues betrays Trump's ultimate plot

Will the 2028 election even happen, or are we watching the slow-motion rehearsal for its cancellation? Every signal from Trump’s orbit points to a deliberate strategy to turn fear, chaos, and manufactured crisis into political weapons.

History tells us how these stories end. From John Adams jailing his critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Richard Nixon’s troops gunning down students at Kent State to crackdowns by Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, authoritarians have always wrapped repression in the language of patriotism.

Today, with talk of “domestic enemies,” “rapid reaction forces,” and “nuclear demonstrations,” the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it.

Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries’ people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?

Back in 1964, Americans were worried that Barry Goldwater — with all his anti-communist rhetoric — might start a nuclear war with the USSR. Lyndon Johnson exploited that with his famous “Daisy” advertisement, where a little girl plucked petals off a flower as the countdown to a nuclear bomb sounded in the background. In the end, over video of a nuclear bomb going off, Johnson’s voice said:

“These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the darkness. We must love each other, or we must die.”

The ad ended with “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” It only ran once, but had such an impact that it turned the election and kept Johnson in office.

When I was a child we had “duck and cover” under our desks in elementary school, and lived in fear of nuclear war. My dad seriously considered building a fallout shelter in our basement; his concern wasn’t outside the mainstream.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president, people called him “Ronnie Ray Gun” because he was widely seen as the trigger-happy cowboy who might start the next world war. He reminded us of characters in the Dr. Strangelove movie.

Many folks also worried that both Goldwater and Reagan might use the intelligence and military services of America to go after their “socialist” enemies in America. Those old enough to remember can tell you how, on May 1, 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” and added, as The New York Times noted at the time:

“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Three days later, on May 4, 1970, Reagan got his bloodbath at Kent State University when 28 National Guard soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on an estimated 3,000 student protestors.

Over a mere 13 seconds, nearly 70 shots were fired. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed, and nine others were wounded. Schroeder was shot in the back, as were several of those injured.

Trump, it appears, intends to out-Goldwater and out-Reagan both of those two old cold warriors and take us fully into Putin-style leadership territory.

The top two headlines on Drudge Report on Thursday were: “TRUMP ORDERS NUKE TESTS and HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB” with a graphic reminiscent of Slim Pickens.

They were followed by six subheads:

Pentagon readying thousands of ‘reaction forces’ as DOMESTIC missions widen...
Troops across country being trained for civil unrest...
Top White House Officials Moving Onto Military Bases...
The Don Swaps Decorated Admiral With 33-Year-Old DOGE staffer...
DOD can’t say who it killed in military strikes against ‘drug smugglers’...
Dems excluded from briefing...

Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he’s ordering his military to prepare for demonstration explosions of American nuclear weapons. (“Tests” is an euphemism; there’s no doubt our bombs work just fine. Exploding them is more appropriately called a “threat.”)

Later in the day we learned that he’s ordered all 50 state national guards to prepare “rapid reaction forces,” not to fight a foreign enemy but to turn their tanks, drones, and automatic weapons of war on Americans who dissent from Trump’s coming crackdowns on “the enemy within.”

I’ve written before about how in 1798 Federalist President Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts — precursors to the Insurrection Act that came a decade later — to shut down the nation’s roughly 20 Jefferson-aligned Democratic newspapers and imprison anybody who spoke out against him (including Newark’s town drunk, Luther Baldwin).

When Jefferson became president in 1801 he let most of Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts expire, but today Trump appears hell-bent on reviving and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 that replaced them.

It appears that Trump’s plan to either sabotage or completely suspend the election of 2028 (with 2026 as a testing ground) is straightforward, a play in three acts.

First, he’s having his ICE and CPB people engage in as provocative behavior as possible, trying to produce a violent response from the citizens of Chicago or any other city where they can pull it off.

The apparent reason for this and his many lies about cities in flames and chaos is because he wants an excuse to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, and either lock down or suspend altogether for the duration of the “emergency” the next presidential elections in 2028.

Steve Bannon is already claiming Trump will be president in 2029; Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have both specifically referenced this possibility.

And it appears the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court may be planning to help him out with his project of using the military to end democracy in America. There’s now a debate about whether the phrase “regular forces” in the law Trump’s using to deploy troops includes ICE, local/state police, federal police agencies like the FBI, or military forces. The Court has asked for further arguments from both sides on the issue, with filings completed by Nov. 10th.

Second, once Trump’s thugs have stirred up enough opposition in the streets of one or more major cities to justify it, he’ll then drop the hammer with troops in a way that may well make Kent State look like a high school play.

The resulting violence and chaos will give him the excuse he needs to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, something he has repeatedly referenced in the past few months.

Third, with the authority of the Supreme Court and the Insurrection Act behind him, he’ll suspend the elections “until the present emergency subsides” and essentially declare himself king for life.

And now he’s ordered his so-called Department of War to begin testing nuclear weapons. He’s not only trying to lock down America and turn us into a dictatorship, but he clearly has serious plans to use the threat of nuclear war to further solidify his hold over America; presidents during or on the edge of a time of war have extraordinary emergency powers.

Just ask the descendants of Eugene V. Debs, who President Woodrow Wilson threw into prison for opposing World War I (then called “the Great War”) and who then ran for president from his jail cell.

The question then becomes: “Who will he choose as America’s allies?”

Will it be Europe, Ukraine, Australia, and the democracies of Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea)? Or will it be the authoritarian and nearly-authoritarian regimes of China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Russia, and Israel?

Is Trump leading America into a new Allies vs Axis conflict where the “allies” are the countries run by authoritarians who praise and fund him and his family? If so, is there any doubt he’ll replicate their domestic strategies for political repression and holding power? He’s already echoing Putin’s rhetoric about the “lying press” and “the enemy within.”

Is there any part of Trump‘s behavior that we’ve seen in the last decade that causes us to think he might join with France or Ukraine instead of with Putin or Xi, if given the chance? Just ask Volodymir Zelenskyy or Taiwan’s people about that.

Adding a final touch, Trump announced this week that he’s ordering the National Guard to create “Quick Reaction Forces” in all 50 states specifically to deal with domestic unrest.

He apparently wants a dozen violent Kent State-type events that he can use as an excuse to militarize the entire country, and a shocking number of elected Republicans and rightwing media celebrities are explicitly cheering on such an authoritarian crackdown.

California Gov. Newsom is telling anybody who will listen that the 2028 presidential election will be a “Putin [style] election” if Democrats don’t “stand up” and fight back now to block Trump’s plans to militarize the country and declare an insurrection.

“I’ll tell you what,” Newsom told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in an interview Wednesday, “we won’t have a country. We won’t have an election that’s fair and free if we don’t stand up, we won’t. There will not be a fair and free election — it’ll be a Putin election.”

Trump appears well aware of his weakness, his collapsing poll numbers, and the precipice the American economy is teetering at the edge of. He sees the same disaster coming in next week’s elections — and its presaging the GOP’s 2028 losses — just as clearly as the rest of us do.

And it appears that he has a plan to deal with it, a plan that takes John Adams’ imprisoning newspaper editors, Nixon’s Kent State massacre, and LBJ’s Vietnam War up to such Putin-like levels of intimidation, repression, and violence that the 2028 elections are at risk.

If we let him.

Trump isn't the gravest threat to our democracy — it's something even less human

Some data points for your consideration:

  • Last Saturday in Chicago’s affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Donald Trump’s secret, masked police violently pulled a 67‑year‑old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding.
  • Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime.
  • An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths.
  • While more than 75 percent of Americans trusted the news 50 years ago, today that number is a mere 28 percent, with only 8 percent of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets.

These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

It’s called the algorithm, and if we’re to survive as a republic it must be regulated the same way we regulate anything else that produces addictive, compulsive behavior that twists and distorts people’s lives.

Possibly the greatest threat to humanity at this moment is the algorithm.

It can twist and wreck people’s minds and lives — tear apart families and destroy countries — in a way that can be more rapid and more powerful than heroin, cocaine, or fentanyl. And yet it is completely unregulated.

An algorithm is a software program/system that inserts itself between humans as we attempt to communicate with each other. It decides which communications are important and which are not, which communications will be shared and which will not, what we will see or learn and what we will not.

As a result, in a nation where 48 percent of citizens get much or most of their news from social media, the algorithms driving social media sites ultimately decide which direction society will move as a result of the shared information they encourage or suppress across society.

When you log onto social media and read your “feed,” you’re not seeing (in most cases) what was most recently posted by the people you “follow.” While some of that’s there, the algorithm also feeds you other posts it thinks you’ll like based on your past behavior, so as to increase your “engagement,” aka the amount of time you spend on the site and thus the number of advertisements you will view.

As a result, your attention is continually tweaked, led, and fine-tuned to reflect the goal of the algorithm’s programmers. Click on a post about voting, for example, and the algorithm then leads you to election denial, from there to climate denial, from there to Qanon.

Next stop, radicalization or paralysis. But at least you stayed along for the ride and viewed a lot of ads in the process.

Algorithms used in social media are not tuned for what is best for society. They don’t follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions, and political systems.

They don’t ask themselves, “Is this true?” or “Will this information help or hurt this individual or humanity?”

Instead, the algorithms’ main purpose is to make more money for the billionaires who own the social media platforms.

If telling you that, as Trump recently said, climate change “may affect us in 300 years” makes for more engagement (and more profit for the social media site) than does telling the truth about fossil fuels, it will get pushed into more and more minds.

No matter that such lies literally threaten human society short-term and possibly the survival of the human race long-term.

As Jaron Lanier told the Guardian:

“People survive by passing information between themselves. We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”

Those of a certain age or students of the advertising business may remember when Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders set off a panic across America in the 1960s, claiming that movies and TV shows were inserting micro-bursts of advertisements that flew below the radar of consciousness but nevertheless changed behavior.

The classic example was popcorn flashing on movie screens with the words “Buy Now!” It provoked a panic in Congress and multiple attempts at legislation to outlaw it before the practice was debunked as ineffective.

But algorithms are far from ineffective. They’re arguably one of the most powerful forces on the planet today.

The premise of several books, most famously Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is that the collection of massive amounts of data about each of us — then massaged and used by “automated” algorithms to increase our engagement — is actually a high-tech form of old fashioned but extremely effective thought control.

She argues that these companies are “intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes. New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify human behavior at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behavior modification.” (Emphasis hers.)

She notes that “only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order.” Today, however, “the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed” to meet the financial goals of those engaging in surveillance capitalism.

This is such a powerful system for modifying our perspectives and behaviors, she argues, that it intervenes in or interferes with our “elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future.” (Emphasis hers.)

Social media companies have claimed that their algorithms are intellectual properties, inventions, and trade secrets, all things that fall under the rubric of laws designed to advance and protect intellectual property and commerce.

In my book The Hidden History of Big Brother: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy, I argue that algorithms should be open-source and thus publicly available for examination.

The reason so many algorithms are so toxic is because they are fine-tuned or adjusted to maximize engagement to benefit advertisers, who then pay the social media company, with little or no consideration for their impact on individuals or society.

Even more insidious, a billionaire social media company owner with a political agenda can program his algorithm to promote a particular politician, point of view, or a story that might help or destroy a politician or political party. Or even destroy a nation’s citizens’ faith in their government, media, or in democracy itself.

One way to get this under control is to require social media companies to ditch the algorithm and its associated advertising revenue model, and work instead on a subscription model with a modest fee.

Nigel Peacock and I saw this at work for the nearly two decades that we ran over 20 forums on CompuServe back in the 1980s and ’90s. Everybody there paid a membership fee to CompuServe and there was no advertising, so we had no incentive to try to manipulate their experience beyond normal moderation. There was no algorithm driving the show.

Replacing secret algorithms with subscriptions — or requiring they be publicly available in plain English so everybody can see how they’re being manipulated — would reduce the amount of screen time and the level of “screen addiction” so many people experience.

There’s an absolute consensus among both social scientists, psychologists, and political scientists that reducing algorithm-driven screen addiction would be a good thing for both individual mental health and the cohesion and health of our society.

But lacking a change in business model, the unique power social media holds to change behavior for good or ill — from Twitter spreading the Arab Spring, to Facebook provoking a mass slaughter in Myanmar, to both helping Russia elect Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 — cries out for regulation, transparency, or, preferably, both.

Three years ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Yvette Clarke, (D-NY) introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, which would do just that.

“Too often, Big Tech’s algorithms put profits before people, from negatively impacting young people’s mental health, to discriminating against people based on race, ethnicity, or gender, and everything in between,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), a co-sponsor of the legislation.

“It is long past time,” she added, “for the American public and policymakers to get a look under the hood and see how these algorithms are being used and what next steps need to be taken to protect consumers.”

And — let’s not forget — to protect our democracy, our nation, and our planet.

The morbidly rich people who own our social media, focused more on adding more billions to their money bins than the consequences of their algorithms, don’t seem particularly concerned about these issues. Instead, they appear to be intentionally tweaking their algorithms to promote content that agrees with their political views and economic interests (although we can’t be sure because they keep them secret).

But it’s a safe bet that without the “enraging effect” of algorithmic amplification of outrage and hate, Donald Trump would never have become president, most Americans wouldn’t support brutal ICE tactics out of fear of brown people, and we wouldn’t today live in a nation where one in five households have stopped speaking with each other because of politics.

Right now, the Trump administration and Republican politicians don’t want to touch this subject because they believe Zuckerberg, Musk, and others who control the algorithms are using them to the GOP’s advantage.

But that sword can cut both ways, when public outrage reaches the point where it’s more profitable for the tech billionaires to promote anger against those in power than those currently on the outside.

It’s way past time to end the algorithmic manipulation of the American mind.

Pass it along (because the algorithm probably won’t).

These key defections show Trump is losing his grip

Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump.

What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?

In 1999, I was working in a remote part of rural Russia for a German-based international relief agency; building housing and trying to teach peasant agricultural methods to people who’d only ever known massive, collective factory farms. I was staying in the home of a family of four with two young children. Dad was Russian and Mom — her name was Olga — was from East Germany, although she’d grown up watching West German TV.

The night before the first open and fair election in Russia’s entire history, we were watching Russian TV news and eating dinner in the midst of a huge snowstorm when a wild-eyed fellow came on the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with a kaleidoscope of extreme emotions. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again.

He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary with a solemn expression. Olga suddenly broke out in laughter, although her husband’s face was serious, if not confused.

“What’s that about?” I asked Olga. (My German is pretty good, but not my Russian.)

“Vladimir Zhirinovsky [the extreme right-wing candidate],” she said in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election. The news lady is wondering where he’ll get all the turkeys.”

“People fall for that?” I said.

She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever. Ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe. And he doesn’t really care what he promises; if he gets elected he’ll do whatever he pleases.”

Donald Trump seems to be bringing Zhirinovsky’s political strategy to America.

He made a simple, straightforward deal with his supporters. It included elected Republicans and his base voters, and was elegant in its simplicity.

He promised that he’d make life miserable for Blacks, Hispanics, women, queer people, academics, and people living in big cities. The deal was first offered when he came down the infamous escalator in 2015, and repeated in rally after rally, campaign commercial after campaign commercial, for the past decade.

He also promised to make life better for his white male base, saying he’d “end inflation on day one,” “make America affordable again,” “slash energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months,” “unleash American energy,” and “get prices down” on “groceries, cars, everything.”

In exchange, he asked them to let him steal as much as he could from the public treasury, get away with past and present crimes, ignore his marital infidelities, and look away from his associations with his Miss Teen USA Pageant and Jeffrey Epstein.

His loyal followers did their part. They ignored his payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy bunny, his bragging about sexually assaulting women, his adjudication as a rapist, his 34 convictions for stealing the 2016 presidential election by fraud, his hustling made-in-China campaign swag, even the hundreds of millions he and his third wife made selling nearly worthless digital tokens.

Loyal preachers and even business leaders groveled before him, basking in the glow of his base’s love. Apple’s Tim Cook embarrassed himself and his company by slobbering over Trump as he handed him a chunk of 24 karat gold. Thirteen billionaires in his cabinet simpered when the cameras came on, repeatedly and pathetically reassuring Donald of his brilliance and nobility.

House Speaker Mike Johnson engineered a coverup of Trump’s association with Epstein, and Republicans averted their eyes as Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from a real prison to a Club Fed where she lives in an unlocked dormitory and can entertain herself with tennis and puppy training.

They disregarded his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his placing his own personal lawyers in charge of justice in America, and his subsequent weaponization of the Justice Department against their own former lifelong Republican peers.

Now they’re defending his defilement of the White House, his depraved sons taking billions from foreign governments, and his betrayal of Ukraine in his never-ending deference to Vladimir Putin.

Republican politicians who for years warned about “jackbooted thugs” as they waved “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are suddenly fine with masked secret police openly and brutally beating American citizens as they build a massive network of concentration camps across the country.

It’s been a good run and a great grift. But scams like this — even well-engineered ones with the power of a corrupted government behind them — usually don’t last.

Richard Nixon went down in flames, and his attorney general went to prison. Warren Harding’s health was destroyed, many biographers claim, by his association with Teapot Dome. Bill Clinton lost his law license and was impeached for his lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Now, it appears, it’s Trump’s turn to pay the price for his cozenage. Although all but a small handful of elected Republicans don’t yet seem to realize it, Trump is losing his grip.

Four Republicans in the House are demanding to know the details of his association with child rapists. Five Republican senators yesterday voted to block his illegal and unconstitutional tariffs against Brazil.

Several Republican senators have voiced concerns about his illegal murder of “drug traffickers” in the Caribbean. The public is aghast at his destruction of the historic “people’s” White House.

His approval in every category is underwater. Seven million or more people poured into the streets two weeks ago to defy him. His ICE and CPB thugs are pursued by citizens with whistles and apps to identify their locations.

Instead of fixing inflation, his tariffs have caused it to take off again. Instead of increasing employment, jobs are increasingly hard to find.

Instead of making groceries and housing more affordable, Trump’s policies have made things worse.

Instead of cutting energy prices, his killing off Biden’s green energy projects in exchange for fossil fuel campaign money is jacking electricity prices sky-high nationwide.

About the only thing holding up so far is the stock market, and most of that is being driven by an AI boom (which may be a bubble) that started under Biden — 21 states are in or near full-blown recession now as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

Republican politicians openly worry about the 2026 elections as they desperately try to rig them with outrageous and transparently corrupt gerrymanders and widespread voter suppression, mostly by voter roll purges in Red states.

Meanwhile, America’s allies around the world are recoiling from Trump’s embrace of Putin and Netanyahu, his betrayal of Ukraine, and his saber-rattling against Venezuela. His misguided tariff policies have devastated our relations with our nearest neighbors and traditional partners, while China and Russia play him for a sucker.

Most importantly, the racist, homophobic, misogynistic base Trump made his original deal with — the deal that put him into office twice — is turning away from him, disillusioned.

His “get the brown people” deportation scheme is wreaking havoc with the economy, devastating farmers and low-wage industries, and causing even the most hateful racists to admit he’s shooting America in the foot.

The LA Times, owned by a Trump-humping billionaire, is even pointing out that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and podcasters like Andrew Schultz have “caught the scent of blood in the water” and are turning against him.

Even MAGA Republicans in the US Senate turned against Trump’s most recent nominee, Paul Ingrassia, because of his pro-Nazi postings.

How long can Trump hold things together?

That’ll mostly depend on what happens with the larger economy. If prices continue to rise, employment stays paralyzed, and Republicans do nothing about healthcare and housing costs, there’ll be a huge reckoning in November, 2026.

Similarly, if the media continues to desert him over corruption and foreign policy, and even deals like Don Jr.’s with Fox’s primetime host Laura Ingraham fail to hang onto network loyalty, his fall could be spectacular. No matter how many networks David Ellison buys, he and Rupert/Lachlan Murdoch won’t be able to cover up the wreckage.

America is not Russia or Hungary. Both were ruled by dictators for millennia while we’ve practiced democracy for 250 years. Most of us believe in it. We want it to continue.

Sophocles famously said, “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” Trump thought he could invert that, but three thousand years of history taught us that the truth generally triumphs over lies and corruption.

It’s just a matter of time.

Trump's sinister buddies have proven protest alone won't crush him — here's what will

Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he’s aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I’ll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker.

We’re living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we’ve already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where “competitive authoritarianism” lives.

That’s the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation’s systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We’re more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.

In the United States today, it’s impossible to ignore how much of that template was laid out by Viktor Orbán to the Heritage Foundation, which embedded core strategies of his authoritarian rule over Hungary into Project 2025, and is now being executed step-by-step by Trump and his lickspittles.

And with ICE making warrantless arrests while brutalizing and now spying on protesters with Stingrays and Pegasus, Putin’s FSB’s secret police are also providing a model for Trump.

We often comfort ourselves with the idea that elections alone guarantee democracy, but the fact is that democratic institutions can be hollowed out from within even as ballots are still being cast.

In Hungary, under Orbán, elections exist, but the playing field is so tilted using tools like gerrymandering that the opposition never has a fair chance, the media was captured by Orbán-aligned oligarchs, and both the courts and the legislature were packed to the point where they lost their autonomy.

That Hungarian model is now being mirrored in America. Project 2025’s blueprint doesn’t call for an overt single‐party take-over; rather it tweaks the administrative levers, centralizes power, bypasses checks and balances, staffs courts, commissions and agencies with loyalists, undermines election administration, and deploys state power to punish dissent while preserving the appearance of normalcy.

Where are we on the spectrum? Much further than many pundits will admit.

We now have elected and Trump-appointed officials who openly defy precedent, judicial rulings, and the rule of law; we have partisan weaponization of powerful institutions capable of punishing dissenters, ranging from the DOJ to the FBI and the IRS; we have dark-money networks influencing everything from policy to courts with the blessing of a corrupt Supreme Court; and we have billionaire capture of most of our media, producing widespread disinformation and naked attacks on the very idea of truth.

That is less a democracy and more a system of “managed competition,” where electoral outcomes are shaped in advance, not determined by a fair contest. In short, the clock is running fast toward a complete loss of democracy, the “autocratic breakthrough” I’ve written about before.

And while millions of Americans show up for protests — which matters — protests alone are nowhere near enough.

In effect, while protesters may feel emboldened and signal a national discontent, in the absence of durable organization, leadership, and strategy the protests are easily absorbed, marginalized, or rendered irrelevant by Trump’s fascist forces and billionaire supporters once the streets are empty again.

This is precisely the gap the Trump-Orbán-Putin model exploits. At the same time the marches are occurring, the foundation of the GOP’s up-and-coming fascist autocracy is being built: the staffing of key agencies, the rewriting of rules under emergency or administrative power, the gerrymandering and court packing, the stealth takeover of local precincts and state and county election commissions.

We must be careful that the dazzle of street energy doesn’t blind us to the quiet but decisive work of tearing down the institutional foundations of authoritarian rule that Trump, the GOP, and their morbidly rich backers are quickly laying. If we’re to stop America’s slide toward fascism we must face that stark reality.

The details underlying Project 2025 echo Hungary’s path with startling specificity. In that country a small, wealthy clique around Orbán orchestrated the capture of media, courts, electoral oversight bodies, and the constitution itself, which they then re-wrote (as Republicans are planning to do to ours when they get control of just a few more states).

Orbán changed campaign finance rules, muzzled the press, and built a client state reliant on personal loyalty rather than democratic accountability. Want a government contract? Toss some money Orbán’s way, or at his family, or to his closest cronies. Want a pardon? Ditto. An exception to rules, laws, or even taxes? Ditto again.

In the U.S. we see an analogous thinning of institutional independence, combined with the same type of cult of personality that always characterizes autocratic strongman governments. Trump’s openly expressed contempt for civil service norms, his threats to independent agencies, Republicans’ ideological staffing of courts all were cloned from the Hungarian template.

And while the U.S. remains superficially democratic — voting still happens — the basis of open, free, fair, competitive elections is under vigorous assault by “tech bros” and other billionaires who openly disdain democracy itself.

Trump announced last week that he’s sending “election monitors” to California and New Jersey — even though these are entirely state and not federal contests — presumably to intimidate both voters and election officials around the balloting happening in those states next week.

Red states are gerrymandering to prevent Democrats from ever again controlling the House of Representatives. As I lay out in The Last American President, voter purges and ballot challenges knocked over 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off the rolls or prevented the ballots they cast from being counted in 2024, giving Trump and the GOP the White House and Congress.

So what must Democrats — and unaffiliated/independent democracy advocates — do?

We have to go beyond showing up in the streets and writing outraged posts on social media (although both do help). Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light.

We need leadership and institutions capable of organizing, strategizing, and executing on multiple fronts: precincts, courts, local elections, media ecosystems, and state regulatory agencies. Protest without public faces and follow-through is like fireworks: beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.

Our challenge is both structural and strategic, and, lacking hundreds of morbidly rich billionaires funding us like Trump has, we’re already way behind.

It’s not enough to oppose; we must propose, build, and defend. Like Bernie Sanders is constantly pointing out, we must fight for reforms that fortify democracy: enforce campaign finance transparency, build public horror of concentrated media and money power, demand independent courts, safeguard election administration from partisan capture, and work to guarantee that our vote is harder to take away than our guns.

We must train a generation of leaders who don’t just show up for the “march” but stay for the precinct meeting, the town hall, the election board challenge. We must invest in institutions — particularly the DNC — that outlast ephemeral flare-ups of outrage and build resilient and genuinely progressive democratic infrastructure.

This is, after all, a progressive populist moment, as the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City and crowds showing up for Bernie and AOC’s Anti-Oligarchy Tour show. We just have to join it fully and ride its power.

Here’s the plain truth: any movement that wants democracy to prevail must realize that its job is just beginning when the banners are raised and the cameras roll. The billionaire-funded rightwing movement bent on authoritarianism has its candidates, its loyalists, its media echo-chamber, and its policy train.

This moment demands no less. We can no longer simply debate about policy or personality; we’re in a contest of governance models, of democratic vs authoritarian futures. James Carville recently told Jen Psaki that, “You aren’t scared enough yet!” Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the entire Democratic Party need to hear that message and act now. Along with the rest of us.

The longer we leave the field uncontested, the more power we hand to those with a blueprint. The window is narrowing, and the Hungarian/Russian lesson is clear: when the opposition wins the street but not the state, democracy loses.

All of us who believe in a republic of citizens — not subjects — must work to build not just rallies but infrastructure, not just energy but strategy, not just slogans but institutions.

Join progressive organizations and get inside the Democratic Party. Bring energy, enthusiasm, and passion. If you’re inclined and capable, run for office yourself.

The hour is urgent. The stakes are existential.

All these corrupt schemes and payments point to something deeply alarming about our future

When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. The Trump family’s grift is teaching America’s elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, and it’s already distorting our economy.

When I was working for an international relief agency in the early 1980s, I went to Uganda during the war and famine that began when Tanzanian troops invaded to throw out Idi Amin. To get there, I had to pay a $50 bribe to the Ugandan official at their embassy in Nairobi to get my visa.

When I was leaving through the half-destroyed Entebbe airport, three soldiers pointed their automatic weapons at my face and demanded “half” of whatever money I had left before letting me through to the boarding area.

In Haiti, a cabinet-level official tried to solicit a $15,000 bribe from me in exchange for our agency getting permission to operate there (I turned it down). In a remote part of Mexico on a business trip, a police officer drove me off the road to demand $100 or else I’d “spend the night in jail.”

They were all quick, unforgettable lessons in how corruption works: when it becomes the default operating system of a country, it drains not only cash and makes it tough for honest businesspeople to earn a living, but — far more importantly — destroys democracy itself.

That same poison is now spreading here.

The corruption of Donald Trump and his children — the open solicitation of bribes disguised as “investments,” the jet plane, the crypto windfalls, the foreign hotel projects and “licensing fees,” the “donations” and “gifts” that appear tied to pardons, tariffs or regulatory relief — have begun to teach America’s morbidly rich and business leaders that access to our government is now a purchasable commodity.

Remember:

Once that expectation of corruption takes hold, it reshapes an entire economy. It tells corporations, billionaires, and foreign governments alike that the fastest way to win contracts or avoid tariffs and other regulations isn’t through innovation or competition but through flattery, payment, or tribute to Donald, his wife, or his children.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s role models of Russia and Hungary.

In Russia, researchers estimate roughly 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s entire GDP vanishes each year into the pockets of Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs, and loyal politicians; some analysts put it even higher, approaching a quarter of the economy when you include the broader shadow sector.

In Hungary, corruption is smaller in absolute size but just as corrosive: public contracts are routinely overpriced by 20 percent or more, and a fifth of companies operate not on market principles but on loyalty to Viktor Orbán. The result is predictable: stagnant productivity, collapsing services, and a hollowed-out middle class as the Orbán family becomes fabulously rich.

Corruption functions like a tax, but one that never funds schools or bridges. It rewards obedience and punishes competence. Once leaders and their families start selling favors, the smart business move isn’t to innovate but to curry favor; the fastest path to profit is proximity to power.

Small businesses get crushed because they can’t afford the “entry fee.” Big ones stagnate because every decision runs through political connections. Ordinary people watch their roads crumble, their wages flatten, and their faith in fairness evaporate. The economy quietly re-optimizes itself around bribery instead of merit, and everyone — except the oligarchs — pays.

That’s where America is today. Trump has already normalized the spectacle of CEOs and foreign leaders making pilgrimages to the White House or Mar-a-Lago with million-dollar checks or lavish gifts. His family’s private ventures, from crypto to foreign hotels to golf resorts, are magnets for anyone seeking goodwill from the man with the power to sign their contracts or reduce their tariffs.

And with five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized unlimited political bribery of themselves and politicians through Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, and Citizens United v. FEC, there’s barely a law left to stop it.

We’ve seen this movie before. In every kleptocracy, every dictatorship throughout history, the leader’s personal enrichment becomes national policy. Regulators are neutered, watchdogs are fired, and the press is bullied into silence through lawsuits, regulation, and oligarchic purchase.

Then come the strong-arm tactics: the intimidation of lawyers, journalists, and opponents under the guise of “law and order.” It’s what Putin did when Alexei Navalny exposed Gazprom’s graft and paid with his life; it’s what Orbán did when he had critics of his corruption prosecuted and bankrupted.

And now, here, attorneys defending protesters are being detained at airports while Trump suspends enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so he, his billionaire buddies, and his family members can profit from foreign deals.

Corruption doesn’t just rot morality; it wrecks economies. When a nation’s leadership is for sale, domestic and foreign corporations start bidding instead of building.

Economists call it “state capture”: private interests rewriting the rules for their own benefit. Studies from the IMF and World Bank show that captured states lose growth, investment, and trust, while inequality soars. In Russia’s case, that loss adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. In Hungary’s, GDP per capita has fallen far behind its once-equal neighbors.

The same dynamic is taking shape here as tax breaks, tariffs, and deregulation are auctioned off to the highest bidders.

For most Americans, this translates into worse schools, fewer jobs, and higher prices. Every time a corporation pays a bribe to secure a contract, it folds that “cost of doing business” into what you and I pay at the store or in taxes. Every time a billionaire buys a loophole or a pardon, the rest of us pick up the tab.

Meanwhile, the honest business owner who refuses to play along loses bids, the worker loses bargaining power, and democracy itself loses credibility. The economy becomes a closed club, guarded by money, loyalty, and fear.

Recovering from this kind of rot isn’t easy, but history shows it can be done.

Countries that have clawed their way back from systemic corruption did it by prosecuting openly corrupt leaders while making the sale of influence difficult and dangerous: forcing transparency in contracts, requiring officials to divest from private holdings, empowering independent prosecutors, protecting whistleblowers, and putting every government transaction online where citizens can see it.

The sunlight approach works because it raises the cost of corruption higher than its payoff.

That’s the crossroads we face now. We can follow Russia and Hungary down the path where 15 to 20 percent of national wealth disappears into private hands each year, or we can defend the idea that government exists to serve the public, not enrich the Trump dynasty.

If we fail, America will cease to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. We’ll become a market; one where laws, tariffs, and justice are just products to be bought and sold by those with the closest access to Trump or his family members.

I’ve seen what that world looks like up close, staring down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at Entebbe Airport. The stakes aren’t abstract. Corruption is the moment when fear replaces fairness, when power replaces principle, and when Americans become “customers” of their own government instead of citizens.

If we let Trump and his circle finish that transformation, America won’t just resemble Putin’s Russia, it will have become just another tinpot dictatorship with a fabulously rich “royal” entourage and a vast class of the struggling, working poor who can’t afford to spiff the First Family.

Thanks to one man, Trump has successfully mounted a coup

“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty: The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
—James Madison, Federalist 47

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (emphasis Jefferson’s)
— Thomas Jefferson, commentary on Federalist 48

Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint.

He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked.

If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

That historical reality notwithstanding, “King” Donald has decided, all by himself, to demolish a large chunk of The People’s White House and replace it with a replica of Vladimir Putin’s Winter Palace’s Grand Throne Room so he can entertain billionaires with large, high-dollar fundraisers at the taxpayers’ expense without having to travel all the way to Mar-a-Largo.

He didn’t bother to get permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, nor did he submit plans for what people are now calling the “Epstein Ballroom” to the National Capital Planning Commission as any other historic building in D.C. would do. Loopholes in the law apparently allowed him to do this, however, because previous generations of lawmakers never imagined a president would be so insane as to one day demolish parts of the White House without consulting Congress or the people, so they saw no need to forbid it.

Which leaves only Congress as the single agency that could have thwarted Trump’s imperial plans. As any Constitutional scholar will tell you — as would Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson or Father of the Constitution James Madison — that’s at the foundation of their job.

Congress is supposed to have oversight over the president, to constrain him with laws, budgets, and hearings, and keep his behavior within the law. Like they did when Richard Nixon was bugging the Democratic National Committee, or when Bill Clinton tried covering up his affair, or George W. Bush engaged in illegal torture after lying us into two wars.

They should be demanding answers about Trump’s lawless “murders” (quoting Colombia’s president) of people in the Caribbean, his imposing tariffs in violation of Article I of the Constitution, or his ICE agency’s brutality and illegal warantless arrests.

But to do that — even to have prevented his unilateral tearing down part of the White House — the House of Representatives would have to convene oversight hearings and create such a public uproar that Trump would back down, and there’s a real possibility that could have happened, particularly as Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Thomas Massey (R-KY) are starting to stand up to Trump.

The only problem is that Congress is on vacation. Apparently because Trump ordered it: we all know that if he wanted the House open, it would be open today.

Johnson has shut down the House by sending everybody home and then dragging out the recess. The growing concern is that he’s doing this at Trump’s demand in order to eliminate congressional oversight and thus enhance his now-near-dictatorial power.

Johnson has kept the chamber in indefinite recess during a government shutdown — the first Speaker in history to do so — while refusing to hold even pro forma sessions, seat a duly elected member (Adelita Grijalva, of Arizona), or allow continuing resolutions to reach the floor.

This is against the law — the supreme law — of the land. There is no joint resolution with the Senate allowing for a recess longer than three days, nor has the Senate passed such a standalone resolution. Article I, §5, cl.4 of the Constitution reads:

“Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”

Congress didn’t even suspend its functioning for weeks like this during the Civil War or WWII; it’s literally never happened before.

So why would Johnson take this unprecedented step? What’s the emergency that’s greater than the War of 1812, WWI, 9/11, or any other crisis?

One possible answer is that it’s all about increasing Trump’s power as potentate, so he can do whatever he wants — like demolishing part of the White House — with no criticism or examination, no hearings or testimony, no experts or historians, from the House of Representatives.

By halting committee work, freezing discharge petitions through this naked (and unconstitutional) calendar manipulation, and withholding any date for Congress to reconvene, Johnson — obviously fulfilling Trump’s demand — has placed the entire legislative branch into a political form of suspended animation.

Why does Trump want this? Why does he care about the House of Representatives enough to put Mike Johnson in this difficult, illegal situation? This threat to Johnson’s legacy as Speaker?

The House, which only “exists” as a functional body when formally in session (normal or pro forma), has been rendered incapable of introducing bills, issuing subpoenas, or performing any oversight whatsoever of the executive branch, from Trump to Stephen Miller to Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or anybody else.

And even if the Senate were to step in and “legalize” Johnson’s recess, his dragging it out this long or longer would still have the same impact on weakening what’s left of our democracy and handing more and more uncountable power to Trump.

What Johnson has pulled off is a “procedural” coup: he (with Trump) now controls whether Congress exists at all. His keeping the House in recess concentrates extraordinary power in the Speaker’s office and, by extension, in Trump, whose directives Johnson slavishly follows.

With the calendar erased and committees paralyzed, transparency and accountability over the executive and judicial branches has disappeared; the public can’t track missed votes, can’t demand action, and federal agencies like Vought’s CBO and Noem’s ICE can operate entirely unchecked.

Border Czar Tom Homan suddenly has no oversight. Whatsoever. Ditto for Bondi, Noem, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Patel, Miller, etc.

They can do whatever they damn well please, particularly since they appear to believe they’ll get pardoned if they get caught breaking the law.

Furthermore, the longer this paralysis continues, the more it normalizes an unbalanced government in which the president acts without legislative restraint.

If this continues, or Johnson falls into a pattern of repeatedly recessing Congress whenever Trump requires him to, Trump might as well declare himself king.

Without the House, even the Senate can’t act in a meaningful way; the Constitution requires that all legislation involving money — including any laws or resolutions that may tie Trump’s hands (since virtually all actions must be paid for) — must originate in the House. (Article 7, Clause 1: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…”)

Without ever proclaiming it out loud, Mike Johnson has accomplished what open insurrection never could: the methodical, bureaucratic nullification of Congress itself, eliminating its ability to perform oversight over Trump.

All without even a peep or notice from the mainstream press, who are instead fixated on the government shutdown, seemingly thinking it’s the same thing as, or part of, the House recess.

If Johnson doesn’t back down, or if he does temporarily but this becomes a regular thing, our republic will have been really and truly turned into a kingdom — complete with a massive new throne room — before our very eyes.

This appalling Trump coverup cannot last forever — and may end sooner than he thinks

When Emmett Till’s mother lifted the veil from her son’s mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning.

The same courage is needed now.

Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein.

She says the FBI — and, presumably, Director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.

She says the Department of Justice — and, presumably, AG Pam Bondi (who turned a blind eye to Epstein’s crimes during the eight years she was Florida’s Attorney General while he was raping children under her nose) — knows the names of those men.

The only ones kept in the dark are the American people.

Wallace’s words should set the country on fire:

“Yes, I know who the names are. Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”

Yet the files remain sealed, and the truth sits buried under bullshit excuses about “ongoing investigations” and “legal process” that are obviously designed to protect one person: Donald Trump. Was he also raping children? Was the Miss Teen USA Pageant he owned back then also part of Epstein’s network, feeding teenage girls to predators?

Is that what House Speaker Mike Johnson is working so hard to cover up? Are they haunted by the Newsweek headline: “Epstein Victim Was Contestant in Donald Trump’s Teen Beauty Pageant”? Is that why Johnson is refusing to swear Adelita Grijalva into office?

Most recently we’ve been treated to the naked lies Patel and Bondi are apparently telling (or shrouding with legalese) about not having “Epstein’s list” at all, something both of them previously claimed existed. Did it simply vanish? Did they destroy it, after Bondi told the press that it was “sitting on my desk right now” back in February?

Virginia Giuffre fought to expose Epstein’s network of predators who were, and still are, protected both by their great wealth and the status that can confer and, now, by the Republican Party itself. Her courage cost her her life, and her death leaves behind both a tragedy and a moral demand.

Her story is not gossip. It’s unambiguous testimony about how men in power like Donald Trump shield themselves from justice. It’s the record of an old boy system that would rather bury the victims than confront the abusers.

Every institution involved in this cover-up is rotting from within. The Republican-controlled House and Senate. Trump’s Department of Justice. His toady-controlled FBI.

We’ve seen this sickness before.

The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests for decades. George W. Bush’s administration lied about torture and murder.

Corporations selling tobacco, asbestos, fossil fuels, and opioids hid reports on their deadly products and hired corrupt “scientists” and paid off mostly-Republican politicians to help them continue killing Americans and our planet for billions in profits. Trump’s administration even tried to bring back asbestos.

There’s not a family in America that wasn’t touched by this criminality and these men’s lies: the asbestos industry’s executives’ coverups killed my father, and the tobacco industry’s executives’ coverups killed my younger brother Stanley.

The formula never changes. When uncomfortable truths threaten people who hold great wealth and power, they use that power to hide the truth. The result is always the same: a deep moral infection that spreads — and often kills — until the public rises up to clean it out.

The Epstein case is not about one man. It’s about a culture of privilege that believes laws are for the poor and justice is for the powerless.

If a large group of men are named in the files as abusers of children, and if the FBI and DOJ know who they are as Virginia Giuffre alleges, then every day of silence is a crime against humanity.

Every Trump administration official who stays quiet is an accomplice. Every Republican representative or senator who hides behind “procedure” and cowers in fear of Trump joins the conspiracy.

America cannot heal by hiding its wounds. Just as Emmett Till’s mother forced the nation to look at the face of violent racism, we must now look at the faces of those men Trump and Epstein traveled with who used children as sex objects and hid behind the power their great wealth conferred.

It may be painful to see, but the truth is always painful before it’s redemptive. The cover-up must end. The files must be released. The names must be spoken.

Those who raped and trafficked children with Epstein — including Trump, if the evidence points in that direction — must face public exposure and legal punishment. They should not hold office, sit on boards, or enjoy the comforts of respectability. They should face justice.

And those who know and remain silent must be held to account as well. We can’t have one standard for the powerful and another for everyone else. A democracy that protects predators because they’re rich or politically powerful is no democracy at all.

The FBI, the Department of Justice, Republicans in Congress, and every public servant with knowledge of these crimes must decide which side of history they stand on. If they choose secrecy, they stand with the abusers. If they choose truth, they stand with the victims and with the conscience of the nation. There is no middle ground.

This is not about revenge. It’s about cleansing the moral fabric of our country. Evil thrives in silence. It feeds on secrecy. When sunlight hits corruption, it dies. The moment those names are made public, the reckoning begins. That’s how justice starts.

Let the people see what’s been done. Let them see who did it. Let them see the truth that Trump and those around him have tried so hard to bury.

Emmett Till’s mother showed us what courage looks like. Now that same courage is needed again. Until the truth is out, until the names are spoken, until justice is real, the stain will remain on us all.

Every new Trump outrage weakens us — but this obscenity could be worst of all

Donald Trump is now trying to extract a quarter-billion dollars from the American treasury — our tax dollars — to compensate himself for the troubles he faced when the U.S. Department of Justice belatedly tried to hold him to account for criminally stealing classified documents, trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and his explicit, public outreach to Vladimir Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public that helped him win the 2016 election.

The decision about whether to give him the $230 million will largely fall to Pam Bondi and the DOJ she heads, assuming no Republicans in Congress dare challenge him. The obscenity of his former private attorney — who looked the other way for eight years in Florida when she was Attorney General there and Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were up to their dirty deeds — ratifying this demand is astonishing.

But, like his tearing down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his Mar-a-Lago-style “ballroom” in defiance of the laws giving authority over the White House to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Trump’s defiance of the law and simple decency is another symptom of this gilded age that 44 years of Reaganomics has brought us to. (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the White House’s East Colonnade; that’s how obscene Trump’s wrecking crew’s actions are.)

The period from 1933 to 1981 saw an explosion of government activity designed to benefit average working class Americans. Democrats pushed into law — in every case over the loud objections of Republicans — the programs that quite literally created the first widespread American middle class in the 1950s.

They included Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour week, workplace and product safety protections, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, free quality public education, protections for the environment, banking and insurance industry regulation, public health programs that almost doubled the average American lifespan, high progressive taxation on great wealth, and numerous others.

In the 44 years since Reagan’s inauguration, there hasn’t been a single major program passed through Congress that doesn’t benefit giant corporations or the morbidly rich (or both) more than average people. Even Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation plan from the 1980s to enrich the private, for-profit insurance industry at government expense.

Instead, neoliberal free trade, tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations, along with an evisceration of dozens of protective programs and regulations, have led us into a second gilded age.

We’ve shifted, gradually at first but rapidly over the past decade, from being a democratic republic into a full-blown oligarchy, a system of governance and economics where all major decisions are made by and for the interest of the very wealthy — the oligarchs — with little consideration of the needs of working class and poor people.

Oligarchy, critically, is always a transitional form of government that rarely stands for more than two generations. The reason is simple to understand: when people figure out how badly they’re being screwed by the oligarchs, they rebel.

Facing that rebellion, the oligarchs have two choices.

First, they can do what American oligarchs did in the early 1930s during the Republican Great Depression and give in to the people, allowing things that will grow the middle class like the long list above. After their plot to assassinate FDR failed in 1934, they retreated to their business offices and contented themselves with simply making money for the next 47 years, leaving politics to the politicians.

Alternatively, the oligarchs and their bought-and-paid-for politicians can crush the rebellion with what President Grover Cleveland referred to (during the gilded age of the 1880s) as their “iron heel,” by criminalizing dissent, gerrymandering and voter suppression, control of the media, and imprisoning the rebellions’ leaders.

Trump and his toadies, particularly the ideologues like “Pee Wee German” Miller and “ICE Barbie” Noem, have chosen that latter path. They’re actively moving to turn America into a fascist state, complete with masked secret police and hundreds of brutal concentration camps for those they determine to be “illegals.”

They’re starting with Hispanics, but have made clear in both word and deed that, like in every country that’s followed this path to fascism in the past, their political opponents will be next. Miller is already referring to voters who’ve registered as Democrats as members of a “domestic extremist organization.”

Thus, America stands at a turning point.

Will we succeed in pushing back against Trump’s naked corruption and theft from the American people? Will we restore the rule of law, the tradition of checks-and-balances, of three co-equal branches of government, and rule by the people?

Or will Trump and his lickspittles (including on the Supreme Court) turn America into a tinpot dictatorship with the head guy making off with billions from the public purse while punishing anybody who tries to hold him accountable?

To a large extend, the answer to those questions lies with us.

If we remain fully engaged, lean hard on our elected officials (particularly Republicans), and demand accountability, there’s considerable hope, as I noted yesterday. The number to call your member of Congress is 202-224-3121.

On the other hand, if we retreat back into work and family, ignore the news, and stop showing up to protest and demand our democracy back, America’s extraordinary experiment in self-governance will die as Trump — the thief in the ballroom — continues to rip off the American people and enrich himself and those around him while building his police state.

Tag, we’re it!

Trump only has one way of keeping control — and it's already starting to fail

Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he’s the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don’t believe it.

The reason he’s rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he’s so extraordinarily weak.

  • It’s why he’s breaking laws left and right, from laws against bribery to the Hatch Act to Posse Comitatus.
  • It’s why he’s trying to provoke a military confrontation with Venezuela, the same as Reagan did with Grenada two days after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.
  • It’s why he’s trying to distract us from the Epstein Files and the reality that a third of America’s states are in or nearly in recession.
  • It’s why every time a report comes out about inflation continuing to spike, unaffordable housing, or job growth stalling out, he comes up with some new outrageous shiny object to dangle in front of the media.

Trump, in fact, is pretty much unique among both modern and historic figures who rode elective office to power and then turned their nations into dictatorships. None were as weak as Trump is today when they succeeded in consolidating enough power to eliminate their challengers and lock down the populace. All had a massively larger base. Consider:

Putin: Came to power just a few years after the Soviet Union had collapsed and in the rubble of the nearly incoherent presidency of the severely alcoholic President Boris Yeltsin. When he became acting president in 1999 amid war in Chechnya and economic recovery, his approval rating vaulted from 31 percent to 80 percent in three months. He sustained 80–88 percent support between 2003–2008, with popular acclaim for restoring order and boosting wages and pensions. Even during controversial wars, his approval reflected genuine public trust, peaking at 86–88 percent following the 2008 war with Georgia and 89 percent after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Orbán: His early political career was marked by charisma and reformist credentials. In 1998, at 35, he became Hungary’s youngest prime minister after leading Fidesz — a progressive student movement — to victory. His personal popularity was rooted in perceptions of competence, patriotism, and authenticity amid widespread post-Soviet disillusionment. Even critics acknowledged his ability to project “a modern conservative vision” that appealed to broad swaths of Hungarian society. I’ve written about how I was in Budapest the summer of 1989 when, as a 26-year-old former “student leader,” he gave his first major speech, cementing his then-liberal reformist credentials, eventually catapulting him into power.
Hitler: Germany was in shambles from World War I and the punishing demands of the Treaty of Versailles when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933. A bit over a year later, an Aug 19, 1934 referendum on merging the positions of president and chancellor into a single office with him holding it produced an 89.9 percent “Yes” vote. He built the Autobahn, started Volkswagen, and rebuilt the country from the ashes of the war. Under his massive public works and social welfare programs, unemployment fell sharply after 1933 via public works/rearmament from ~34 percent in January 1933 to ~14 percent by January 1936.
Mussolini: In Italy, Mussolini consolidated mass support through national restoration and charisma, rather than coercion. His Fascist Party drew broad appeal by promising to end postwar chaos and “restore Italian greatness.” Mussolini’s personal image — “manly,” “decisive,” and virile — was widely hailed in the Italian media. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which reconciled Italy with the Catholic Church, skyrocketed his legitimacy among Catholics and conservatives, cementing a decade of popularity across classes. Even the American public, as contemporaneous accounts noted, admired Mussolini’s “efficiency” (“making the trains run on time”) and national modernization during the 1920s.

Looking at our own hemisphere, Fujimori succeeded in destroying democracy in Peru and Bukele did the same in El Salvador, but both solved major crises that gave them over 80 percent approval ratings across their nations when they seized that kind of power.

In Peru, as political scientist Jonathan Schlefer writes for Politico, inflation was so bad that a tube of toothpaste cost as much as a house had five years earlier, while El Salvador was both poor and overwhelmed by gangs that had seized control of most of the country.

By contrast, Trump’s approval rating is consistently low, even though he keeps lying about it as he claims a broad mandate. He didn’t even break 50 percent of the popular vote in 2024, and lost the popular vote in 2016.

As of Oct. 20, 2025, 44.2 percent approved and 52.1 percent disapproved of his presidency, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin. The RealClearPolitics average gives him around 45 percent, while Gallup finds 40 percent, making him one of the least popular U.S. presidents at this stage in all of our history.

His economic approval has sunk to 34 percent, with 62 percent disapproving of his behavior amid inflation and federal shutdown unrest. Unlike his predecessors or authoritarians in other countries that lost their democracies, his base remains intense but small; there’s no evidence of majoritarian enthusiasm existing outside of his core partisan bloc.

The few Republicans willing to defy him and speak up about Trump’s unpopularity (and that of his policies) are often blunt and even see their own popularity increase because of their resistance.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, told Semafor Trump‘s economic policies are ruining America and his popularity:

“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House [of Representatives] if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”

So, how does Trump hold onto power and the loyalty of Republican politicians?

Fear, it turns out, is the cement that’s holding the GOP together under Trump.

His indictment of lifelong Republican James Comey and his pardon of criminal grifter George Santos were unambiguous messages to every Republican politician in the nation. He was saying, in effect

“Stay with me and keep licking my boots and I’ll keep you safe even if you commit horrible crimes; cross me and I’ll destroy you.”

So far, it’s working. But as Schlefer points out in Politico, wannabe strong men like Trump only succeed in destroying democracy in wealthy nations about one in four times. Most often, as we recently saw in South Korea and Brazil, they fail and then suffer the consequences; both former presidents are now in prison.

For Trump and the people who are either excusing or actively participating in his corruption and naked crimes, holding onto power almost exclusively by fear is a dangerous game.

As John Adams noted in 1776:

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion… that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”

But politicians like Trump (and his lickspittles) eventually find themselves trapped by the very fear they’ve used to paralyze their party members into compliance or silence. As Winston Churchill famously said:

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”

This is why Trump, as noted above, is building such a massive police and military presence, along with constructing hundreds of new concentration camps across America.

It’s why he had to fire the commission that oversees the White House before taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It’s why he’s desperately trying to pack courts and government agencies with toadies who worship or fear him; he knows he only has a short window before the country truly fights back against his strongman attempts to turn America into a third world tinpot dictatorship with a “royal” family that’s corruptly made billions off their brief moment in power.

Fearful men always lean on violence and the threat of violence because eventually the spell of the fear they’re trying to cast across the nation is broken.

We saw it in the American Revolution, when 57 men defied the terror King George III had imposed here when they signed their names — producing an instant death sentence from the British crown — to the Declaration that ended, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

When enough people stand up against state terrorism to hit a critical mass (3.5 percent of the population, according to political scientist Erica Chenoweth), others quickly join them. The turnout for the No Kings marches suggest we’re close to that.

Evangelist Billy Graham (who, were he still alive, would certainly be horrified by his corrupt son’s behavior) reminded us:

“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”

So, take heart. The No Kings marches proved both Trump’s widespread unpopularity and the fearlessness of an American public echoing over two centuries of our nation standing up to tinpot despots and wannabe dictators.

We Americans have never tolerated a king or a dictator, and we’re not about to start now.

These radical steps are essential now — or Trump will crush any resistance

The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets, explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.

But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.

Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.

The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about SDS, the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.

Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’s success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.

As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.

When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.

Donald Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.

Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.

But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly DEI) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.

Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.

Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.

The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.

That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.

The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements were powered by organizations like the SCLC, SNCC, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.

Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.

Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.

It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The rightwing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.

For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.

They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.

And it paid off.

When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.

While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority rightwing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.

Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.

Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.

Money is speech, the Court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.

The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.

This is not a conspiracy theory: it’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.

The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.

If democracy is to survive, Democrats — and small-d democrats— must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.

Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and — most important — get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.

The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.

Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible — the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement — has gotten us off to a great start.

The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the off-season, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.

Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.

We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.

Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.

These are not slogans: they’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.

And none of this will succeed longterm without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.

Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.

As Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Addams, King, Chavez, Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.

The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.

The No Kings Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.

The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.

Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.

The No Kings Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.

If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.

Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.

That is the revolution worth marching for.

Trump is preparing a coup — the evidence is clear if you know where to look

Is the U.S. military already in the early stages of a Trump-led coup against our Constitution?

Inside the Pentagon, loyalty is being elevated above law as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly removes senior military lawyers, the very officials meant to uphold legality and restraint, and replaces them with loyalists.

The purge has also happened to senior military leadership. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, which has overseen the strikes against boats off the coast of Venezuela, is stepping down.

While Adm. Holsey has not said why he’s leaving, it may well be a continuation of the troubling trend of purges of highly qualified senior military officials who may have been inclined to restrain Trump’s illegal and fascistic impulses.

The recent purge of military attorneys, in particular, isn’t routine bureaucracy; it’s the deliberate dismantling of the safeguards that prevent America’s armed forces from becoming a political weapon against America’s citizens and democracy.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of what’s happening right now inside the Pentagon.

At the Washington Post, David Ignatius asks why the military has not spoken out against Trump’s attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela and what I characterize as his unconstitutional deployments of troops against American civilians. Ignatius answers his own question in the article’s second paragraph:

“One chilling answer is that the Trump team has gutted the JAGs — judge advocate generals — who are supposed to advise commanders on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Without these independent military lawyers backing them up, commanders have no recourse other than to comply or resign.”

Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs, are the institutional safeguard against unlawful orders: they advise commanders on rules of engagement, the Geneva Conventions, and the limits of presidential authority.

When an administration starts purging them, we’re not looking at a routine personnel shuffle. We’re seeing the careful dismantling of the guardrails that prevent America’s military from being weaponized against the American people.

This purge began with Hegseth’s February firing of the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. He claimed they simply weren’t “well suited” to provide recommendations on lawful orders. But no criminal charges were alleged, no ethics complaints cited; he simply removed them wholesale.

The message is clear: loyalty trumps legal judgment. Just like in Third World dictatorships. Just like in Putin’s Russia, which increasingly appears to be Donald Trump‘s role model.

Once the old guard was removed, Hegseth quietly moved to remake the JAG corps itself. According to reporting in the Guardian, his office is pushing an overhaul to retrain military lawyers in ways that give commanders more leeway and produce more permissive legal advice.

His personal — not military — lawyer who defended him against sexual abuse allegations, Tim Parlatore, has been involved in this process, wielding influence over how rules of engagement are interpreted and how internal discipline is handled.

At the same time, the Secretary has transformed Pentagon press controls. This week, the Washington Post exposed how Hegseth used Parlatore to help draft sweeping restrictions on journalist access and movement within the Department of Defense.

Under the new rules, similar to the way the Kremlin operates, reporters are required to sign pledges stating they won’t gather or use unauthorized material (even unclassified), or risk losing their Pentagon credentials if they stray. The policy also limits reporter mobility within the Pentagon and curtails direct contact with military personnel unless escorted.

The reaction was swift. Dozens of media organizations — Reuters, the Times, the Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, the Atlantic — refused to sign Hegseth’s pledge, citing constitutional concerns and the chilling effects of such controls. Only the far-right One America News agreed. Meanwhile, the Pentagon Press Association declined to sign and warned that these rules constitute “a disturbing situation” intended to limit leaks and suppress accountability.

Put these moves together and a frightening pattern emerges: purge independent legal advisers who might say “no,” and gag the press before the damage can be exposed. Combine that with increasingly aggressive, unilateral action by the military abroad, and you have the outlines of a strategy for bypassing democratic oversight.

A Trump-forced coup, in other words.

Wednesday, the U.S. Navy again struck what Trump claims was a drug-trafficking vessel off Venezuela, reportedly killing six people. There was no clear congressional authorization, and the legal justification remains opaque. When you remove internal legal dissent and public scrutiny, the threshold to use force becomes dangerously low.

The domestic implications are equally chilling. Trump has publicly said that he wants to use U.S. cities as training grounds for troops, and openly declared he would fire any general who fails to show total loyalty.

A wannabe dictator can’t deploy troops into American neighborhoods if he still has JAGs saying “that’s not legal,” or a press corps reporting on where they go. First he has to make sure there are no internal brakes and no public witnesses. That’s how coups are built.

Defenders will argue this is about “efficiency,” about correcting an overly cautious JAG culture, or about closing leaks. But that’s clearly a lie: real reform would emphasize transparent standards, not loyalty tests.

If the JAG corps must be reformed, it should be done by independent committees, not by one political operator calling shots. If press controls must be tightened for security, those rules should be public, constrained by constitutional guardrails, and open to judicial review, not enforced behind closed doors.

Make no mistake: this is not abstract. JAG officers are a bulwark against unlawful war, war crimes, and misuse of force at home. Silencing and replacing them is not the act of a healthy republic: it’s the early work of authoritarian takeover.

Combine that with gag orders and the purge of senior military leadership that might resist Trump’s illegal moves, and we’re watching the architecture of strongman autocracy being assembled piece by piece.

A military coup doesn’t typically happen in one dramatic moment, even though it appears that way when it reaches a climax. It begins through personnel decisions, institutional erosion, secrecy, and incremental normalization of power. The moment the legal counsel corps stops buffering against rash orders, the moment the press is muzzled, the path darkens.

We’re closer to that moment than many — including across our media — realize or are willing to acknowledge.

So the question now is whether there are still Republicans in Congress who will demand hearings, whether military leaders will raise alarms, and whether citizens will recognize the stakes.

Saturday's “No Kings Day” wasn’t just a slogan. It was a literal call to defend the republic. The time to act is before the tanks roll, not after.

Because what’s happening right now may not look like a coup to the average American, but it is unmistakably the preparation for one.

With these texts of Nazi hate, Republicans have shown us their true selves​

Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.

In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.

One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber … Great, I love Hitler.”

Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”

These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.

If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.

And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in ICE detention centers across the United States. Seven out of 10 have never been convicted of a crime.

Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.

This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.

And Americans, by and large, are looking away.

History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.

But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.

At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”

By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.

That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”

And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “ detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at Brown people?

They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.

They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.

They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”

But what this really is — and what we must call it without hesitation — is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.

This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.

When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.

If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.

History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.

We like to tell ourselves “it can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.

Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.

And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.

The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.

We must not make the same mistake.

JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”

As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:

The leaders were in their twenties and thirties and held political jobs, including:
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, U.S. Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.

To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.

Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.

The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.

That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.

There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.

America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.

Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.

The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.

So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.

Show up this Saturday for No Kings Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”

This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.

Chaos in one city shows what all of Trump's America may soon become

On Tuesday, here in Chicago, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers.

The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.

This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.

The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.

And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?

Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy, dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media. Strip away the slogans and the tweets and you can see the same architecture: oligarchy instead of democracy, hierarchy instead of pluralism, the rule of the white wealthy few over the many.

This isn’t nostalgia for Dixie so much as a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead.

That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.

Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.

Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.

The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.

The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.

The Confederacy was also defined by its propaganda. By the mid-1850s, virtually every anti-slavery or pro-democracy newspaper in the South had been shut down. Writers and publishers were imprisoned, hanged, or fled north to survive. What passed for “news” was propaganda controlled by morbidly rich elites.

Today, billionaire-owned Fox “News” and a constellation of billionaire-funded right-wing outlets play the same role, drowning out dissent and feeding a steady diet of disinformation to keep people angry and loyal. The very idea of objective truth has disintegrated in Republican-adjacent spaces as propaganda replaces journalism.

Another parallel is the fascist ideal of a mythic past. The Confederacy glorified a “golden age” of white rule and slave labor. When defeat came, the Lost Cause mythology grew up to claim victimhood and sanctify the old order. Trumpism and today’s GOP use the same trick. They conjure visions of an imagined past when “real Americans” controlled everything, erasing the ugly realities while promising “a return to greatness” if only people will give them absolute power.

The Confederacy’s legal system was never neutral. It protected the rich and powerful, treating enslaved people and poor whites as expendable, and punishing any who resisted. Today’s Republican project is similarly defined by a two-tier justice system. Elites like Tom Homan who back the movement are shielded, while dissenters and critics like James Comey are punished.

Judges and even military lawyers are now carefully chosen for loyalty, not fairness, ensuring the law remains a weapon for the GOP to use rather than an instrument of justice. Authoritarian capture of the military and judiciary today mirrors the way slave states stacked courts to defend slavery and property rights over liberty.

The Confederacy was also sustained by religious fundamentalism. Pastors preached that slavery was God’s will, and dissenters were driven out of the churches. In our time, white Christian nationalism functions the same way, sanctifying hierarchy and obedience while insisting — based on lies about the Founders — that religion must dictate law. The goal is not faith but control, and theology is being twisted into a tool for political power.

The Confederacy used culture war censorship to keep people ignorant. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed, abolitionist literature was banned, and abolitionist or pro-democracy speakers risked their lives if they crossed into the South. Today’s book bans and restrictions on curriculum are the modern equivalent. History is rewritten, ideas are suppressed, and young people are denied a full education to make sure they grow up docile and misinformed.

Violence has always been the enforcer of these systems. The Confederacy depended on slave patrols, irregular militias, and paramilitary terror to keep people in line. Reconstruction was undone by Klan terror and mob violence. Today’s GOP movement relies on heavily armed militias including ICE, groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and vigilante intimidation at polls and protests. The parallels are unmistakable: raw political power backed by the threat of force.

There is also the matter of dynastic families. The old South’s leadership was concentrated among interrelated planter aristocrats who controlled politics for generations. In modern America, political dynasties and billionaire networks serve the same role. Power is concentrated within circles of interlocking families and interests who use money, media, and influence to entrench their rule.

Regional economic hostage-taking was another weapon of the Confederacy. By controlling cotton exports and key resources, Southern elites tried to force concessions from the North and from Britain. Today, Republican leaders use their grip on energy, agriculture, and shipping industries in much the same way, holding national policy hostage to their own demands. Blue parts of the nation are told to bend or else face disruption in fuel, food, or logistics, and other nations’ leaders must publicly kiss Trump’s ass and give his children billions to avoid punishing tariffs.

The Confederacy also merged state power with its ruling economic class. Planters not only owned the land and the labor but controlled local courts, militias, and legislatures. Today, corporate monopolies and billionaire oligarchs have similarly captured our federal government and legislatures in the former Confederate states. The state becomes an extension of private wealth, fusing corporate and political power into a single apparatus of control.

Even in foreign policy, the parallels hold. The Confederacy was isolationist abroad, seeking recognition only to preserve its oligarchic order, but inwardly it was aggressive, unleashing violence on its own people. Trumpism follows the same pattern. International alliances are abandoned, democratic norms abroad are derided, while at home the state turns its power inward against dissenters and marginalized groups.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better and freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked.

The danger is not simply that Trump may win an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws. The danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and refined by generations of oligarchs, is becoming normalized across the Red states and increasingly in the federal government.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be. America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

The question today is whether we still have the clarity and courage to defeat it again, not with cannons and bayonets, but with ballots, organizing, and a renewed commitment to the democratic ideals that Confederates then and now have always hated and feared the most.

See you on No Kings Day!

This Trump lackey's ridiculous promos actually point to the fall of American law

Airport managers need to wake up fast. With only a handful of exceptions, people running airports across America are risking serious fines and being barred from government work for up to five years by broadcasting political messaging on behalf of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

Federal law — the Hatch Act — makes it a crime, punishable by fines and loss of current and future employment, to use government facilities or taxpayer money for partisan political purposes. Yet Noem, who has earned her national reputation as a puppy-killer and by cosplaying “tough cop” with her alleged boyfriend (they’re both married to other people), has pushed out a video to airports across the country blaming Democrats for the current shutdown.

This isn’t just a violation of federal law; it’s also a bald-faced lie.

Republicans today control the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted to end the shutdown, he could do so this afternoon.

All it would take is the same maneuver Republicans have used repeatedly: a Senate rules change allowing passage of their Continuing Resolution to keep the government open, using only 50 votes plus the Vice President.

We’ve seen it before. Betsy DeVos only became Secretary of Education because Mike Pence broke a 50–50 tie in the Senate. Jeff Sessions squeaked through 52–47 as Attorney General. Rex Tillerson and Tom Price were confirmed with slim margins. And when it came to the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell killed the filibuster to ram through Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Democrats, by contrast, failed when they tried to change the rules to pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights acts. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin sided with Republicans to preserve the filibuster, betraying the public interest.

So let’s be clear: this shutdown is not a matter of Senate procedure. Republicans have the power to end it today. They’re choosing not to because they want to strip health care from millions while protecting their $4 trillion tax cut for billionaires.

The 1939 Hatch Act, upheld by the Supreme Court in CSC v. Letter Carriers, outlaws the practice of federal officials converting government facilities into campaign machines. Its penalties are real: removal from service, debarment, suspensions, reprimands, and fines.

Some airport managers understand this, which is why several are refusing to air Noem’s message.

As of today, at least seven airports have declined to run the video at TSA checkpoints, citing policies and laws that prohibit political messaging in publicly funded facilities. Portland International Airport management informed the local ABC News affiliate:

“We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging.”

The Washington Post reports that Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Portland have all also said no, with at least two explicitly pointing to the Hatch Act as the reason.

By distributing this video, Noem has implicated not just herself but also airport managers nationwide, most of whom are now breaking federal law by broadcasting it. They face personal liability, including fines and disbarment from government work.

That they’ve gone along with Noem reflects how normalized lawbreaking has become in today’s Republican politics led by a 34-times-convicted felon and alleged rapist.

The lie about the shutdown itself compounds the crime. Citizens in a democracy must be able to trust their government to tell the truth about who is responsible for policy decisions and why they’re done. When those in power use public money to gaslight the public, accountability collapses. That is exactly why the Hatch Act exists.

There is precedent for enforcement of the Act even at the highest levels. The Office of Special Counsel recommended Kellyanne Conway be fired for repeated Hatch Act violations. Trump ignored it. He also ignored the law when his administration used the White House for the Republican National Convention and when he and Elon Musk went out front of it to hustle Teslas.

Republicans have apparently learned that if they break the law and face no consequences, the law effectively ceases to exist.

If Democrats are serious about defending both the rule of law and what’s left of America’s democracy, they must insist on prosecutions. That means removal from office for Noem, claims against the propagandists who produced and distributed the video, and charges against airport managers who continue broadcasting it. Anything less signals that the Hatch Act — and the rest of American law that could restrain Trump and his lickspittles — is a dead letter.

This is not a partisan point. Imagine if a Democratic administration produced a video blaming Republicans for a shutdown, then forced airports to broadcast it. Republicans would be demanding prosecutions, and rightly so. The law must apply equally or it means nothing at all.

Noem needs to stop lying. She needs to stop breaking the law. And Democrats need to stop pretending this is “politics as usual.” It is not. These are crimes designed to shift blame for a shutdown that is entirely the responsibility of the Republican Party, which could end it tomorrow with 51 votes in the Senate.

If there is no accountability now, America will slide further toward a future where propaganda is pumped through every government-owned screen and speaker. That is what has happened in Russia and Hungary, where public spaces are saturated with partisan messaging and independent voices silenced.

The Hatch Act was written to prevent that fate here. It must be enforced — with indictments, prosecutions, and disbarment — before it’s too late.

This sinister truth lies behind Trump's campaign of ICE brutality

For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.

Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.

Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.

Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.

I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.

This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?

There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.

From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.

Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.

This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.

When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.

Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.

German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.

Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled more than 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.

It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.

Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.

But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.

When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”

But it never ends with “them.”

Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.

ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.

Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.

But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.

For a reason.

Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:

“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)

Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.

To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.

This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.

Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.

“Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say ‘Democrat Party,’ with an emphasis on the ‘rat’.”

It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Governor Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US Senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.

If you think Democrats — including registered Democratic voters — aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”

The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.

And if we ever get used to it, God help America.

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