U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media on board Air Force One on the way to Miami, Florida, U.S., April 12, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
If you’re not a criminal, you shouldn’t fear government. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson often pointed out, government should fear you.
This is the foundation of the American experiment, that our system of government was created, as the Declaration of Independence says, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
And, yet, today increasing numbers of Americans are afraid of their government, or at least afraid of the people who now run it.
Our news media are terrified of being sued or otherwise harassed by Trump, so much so that two of our three big TV networks have paid him millions in what was essentially protection money.
CBS just put a rightwinger with ties to the GOP as their ombudsman, and NBC is on the verge of spinning off MSNBC, which is increasingly problematic for the network as it regularly draws Trump’s ire.
Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate are so cowed by Trump’s primary threats and the hundreds of millions in political dollars he controls that they’re desperately engaging in a coverup of his alleged participation in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.
Writers I know on Substack and elsewhere are watching their words carefully to avoid provoking rightwing ire and the death threats it often brings, at the same time a series of very-well-funded rightwing media empires are growing.
Armed men in civilian clothes with masks on their faces are snatching people off the street and disappearing them, now with the blessing of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court; it’s often impossible to distinguish them from gang members trying to kidnap people for torture or ransom.
People of faith and goodwill are fleeing social media sites ever since their billionaire owners opened the sites up to Nazis and tweaked their secret algorithms to favor hate, fear, and the hard right while suppressing voices of compassion or advocates for democracy here or abroad.
Government workers live in terror that some old tweet or message board posting might be discovered that will cost them their jobs. Some, like Lisa Cook, were just doing their jobs when Trump’s toadies decided to scan everything they’d ever done and find the one checkbox they shouldn’t have clicked that can be used to discredit and then destroy them.
Former government employees and elected officials — from John Brennan and Miles Taylor to James Comey — are wiping out their retirement savings to pay for lawyers because our government has targeted them for Trump’s “retribution.”
Protestors objecting to the militarization of our nation’s cities are arrested for “conspiracy” and charged with crimes that could send them to prison for years or even decades. People who volunteer to help out with voting operations find themselves doxed and vilified on national rightwing media and have to go into hiding, the peace and normalcy of their lives shattered.
Captains of industry, CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, trek to the White House to bow and scrape in front of His Orangeness, and cabinet meetings have turned into a bad caricature of Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor’s New Clothes fable. We watch, yelling at the TV, “Tell him he’s naked!” but to no avail; they can’t stop slobbering over him like terrified victims being held at knifepoint by a serial killer.
None of this is normal in a democracy; all of these are signs of a creeping dictatorship taking over our nation. It’s particularly not normal in America: we’re the country that invented citizens rising up against an oppressive government. When the South abandoned democracy in the 1850s, and when Europe lost its democracies in the 1930s, we went to war and shed blood and treasure to defend the right to dissent.
And what’s particularly ironic is that the very same people who’ve been loudly warning us about the day coming when the government becomes oppressive and tyrannical — from the John Birch folks to militia members — are now in the vanguard of authoritarianism advocacy. If it wasn’t so tragic — and dangerous — it’d be funny.
Our Attorney General is apparently leading the Epstein coverup, our Secretary of State cheerleads murdering civilians on the high seas, our Treasury Secretary is reportedly provoking fistfights, our Energy and EPA chiefs deny climate change and push more fossil fuel pollution, FEMA is being gutted, Social Security has been crippled, Medicare is about to start pre-clearance of payments in six states, millions will soon be thrown off Medicaid, aid to student borrowers is gone, and food support to needy Americans is being pulled along with food and medicine for millions around the world.
All being done so the morbidly rich (like our billionaire president and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) could get another $4 trillion tax gift, paid for by the rest of us as our schools are gutted and our children fail.
And it’s not just America that Trump, MAGA, and the GOP are destroying on the altar of bowing to the very rich: Everything Vladimir Putin wants, he gets. As Trump discards America’s allies, Xi Jinping is picking them up, and country after country around the world is abandoning democracy for the siren song of big-money-driven autocracy.
Tariffs, which historically have been the careful, surgical tools of trade policy wielded by Congress since the days of George Washington, are being used as blunt cudgels to beat foreign countries into giving cash, jumbo jets, and Trump Tower opportunities to America’s parasitic ruling family.
Even our Supreme Court has fallen to big money corruption, allowing Trump to do anything he wants — no matter how criminal or anti-democratic — without any pushback or consequences. A billionaire-funded think tank is writing our domestic policy, while Putin and Netanyahu appear to be running our foreign policy.
None of this reflects the traditional American values of fairness, honesty, and rule by the consent of the governed.
With most of our institutions now captured by the morbidly rich, racism and voter suppression openly celebrated, and our police agencies shifting from protecting to oppressing our people, the only group left to stand up to defend what’s left of our shredded republic is We, the People. Us.
History shows that when fascists haven’t yet entrenched themselves as far as Hitler or Mussolini did (or Putin and Viktor Orbán today) it’s still possible for the people to rise up and throw them out. It happened in Ukraine, in South Korea, in Spain and Chile, among others.
People stood up in the face of fear of their governments and, instead, peacefully made those governments fear them. And it can happen here, too.
So, now it’s our turn. And our obligation. We’re the ones who must save us, who must stand up to these fascists, who must awaken our friends, neighbors, and relatives.