There's a bigger story here — and what Trump is doing isn't politics

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he and first lady Melania Trump board Air Force One to depart from London Stansted Airport, in Stansted near London, Britain September 18, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, wearing a gold pin of Donald Trump’s head that eerily resembles an old Chairman Mao pin I bought in Beijing in 1988, went after Jimmy Kimmel again just hours before he was back on the air on Tuesday night. Carr also mentioned station licenses again, in what seems like a thinly-veiled threat, when he tweeted:

“Democrats just keep digging themselves a deeper & deeper hole on Kimmel. They simply can’t stand that local TV stations — for the first time in years — stood up to a national programmer & chose to exercise their lawful right to preempt programming. We need to keep empowering local TV stations to serve their communities of license.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge prosecutor is reportedly demanding information on the FBI agent who was first to see the Sandy Hook carnage and testified against Alex Jones.

As I lay out in my new book, The Last American President, this is how terror and intimidation work. This is how free speech and the rule of law die. It’s how kings rule, not elected presidents of democratic republics.

And this is how power enforces obedience: by making an example out of person after person, news outlet after news outlet, comedian after comedian, until the rest of us are too afraid to speak.

That’s the bigger story here. What Trump is doing isn’t politics. It’s the deliberate centralization of power, seizing it from the people and the media, silencing dissent, bending institutions to his will, and cloaking himself in immunity given him by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

It looks less like a presidency and more like a throne.

He declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., despite crime being at a 30-year low.
He created permanent “quick reaction” National Guard units, ready to deploy into cities at his whim: a standing domestic army the Founders explicitly warned against.
He rolled the model into Memphis, calling it a “replica” of D.C., and bragged Chicago is next. Occupation, not governance.

Retribution is the centerpiece of his rule.

Security clearances stripped from John Bolton, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and dozens of others who dared to oppose him.
Justice Department staff and prosecutors purged for doing their jobs.
A $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times designed to bankrupt it for printing facts.
After Charlie Kirk’s death, networks pressured to fire Kimmel and silence Stephen Colbert. Everyday people hunted down online and forced out of jobs, from a Nasdaq employee to a 23-year-old Idaho worker. Fear is the point.

The state itself is being weaponized.

The FCC warned ABC affiliates they could face investigations, fines, or even license loss after Kimmel’s jokes about MAGA. Within days, Jimmy Kimmel Live was yanked from the air. If ABC can be threatened — and Trump repeated that threat when Kimmel came back — what message does that send to every other network? Stay quiet or be crushed.
Sanctuary cities are being starved of funds. Immigrants and entire communities are criminalized under Executive Order 14159.
The administration promises a crackdown on “left-wing groups,” presumably meaning activists, unions, professors, nonprofits, anyone who resists.

And the ambitions don’t stop at America’s borders. Trump has mused openly about reshaping the map of the Western Hemisphere.

He’s revived his obsession with Greenland, backing a House bill to purchase or “otherwise acquire” it, renaming it “Red, White, and Blueland.” He’s refused to rule out military force if Denmark resists.
He’s declared the U.S. should reclaim the Panama Canal, calling Panama’s fees “exorbitant” and floating the idea of seizing control in the name of national security.
He’s even suggested Canada could become the 51st state, and slapped massive tariffs on Canadian goods to show he’s serious.
Mexico, too, is in his crosshairs: trade wars, tariffs, and rhetoric that treat America’s southern neighbor not as a sovereign nation but as territory to be coerced.
And now, in the Caribbean, Trump’s America has gone further: U.S. naval forces have literally blown up three Venezuelan boats. People have died. Maduro calls it aggression, militias are mobilizing, and the two nations are sliding toward war. This is what happens when unchecked power turns outward: war abroad becomes the mirror of repression at home.

Abroad, he crowns this vision by embracing Vladimir Putin.

A red carpet rolled out for Putin in Alaska, gifting him legitimacy amid his war on Ukraine and his penetration of NATO airspace in Poland, Romania, and Estonia.
Russian state media celebrates Trump’s dismantling of USAID and his praise for Putin.
Meanwhile, long-time allies are trashed and abandoned. America’s power abroad is being traded away for the company of strongmen.

Support for Ukraine and NATO is now treated as transactional, not principled. Aid is approved one week, paused the next. The administration signals that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “unrealistic,” effectively rewarding Russian aggression.

NATO allies are pressured to “pay up” or risk abandonment, as if the alliance is a mob protection racket rather than a shared democratic defense. If America no longer defends democracy abroad, what confidence should we have that it will defend democracy at home?

The same coercive logic drives Trump’s use of tariffs.

He wields tariffs not as economic policy but as punishment, slapping Canada, Mexico, and Europe with sweeping trade taxes to force compliance.
Tariffs have become his political weapon: extortion dressed up as trade, a way to bend allies, neighbors, and even domestic industries to his will and intimidate them into giving him gifts like a multimillion dollar airplane or investing billions in his companies.
Just as troops in D.C. or the FCC threaten to silence dissent, tariffs silence resistance by making the cost of saying “no” unbearable.

And in Palestine, the U.S. has abandoned even the principle of self-determination.

Humanitarian aid is cut. Palestinian voices are dismissed. U.S. policy aligns squarely with occupation and repression.
This isn’t about building democracy; it’s about denying an entire people the right to decide their own future.
And when self-determination abroad is treated as expendable, it sends a clear warning at home: your rights, too, can be conditional, your voice too can be silenced when it no longer serves those in power.

The pattern is unmistakable: everything that disperses power — free media, independent science, civic education, state and local authority, progressive nonprofits, judicial independence — is under siege.

Scientists and public health experts are being fired, programs gutted, data suppressed.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor implicitly warns that Americans may no longer know the difference between a president and a king.
Courts face pressure, judges face threats, and rulings are bent to expand presidential immunity.
Election laws are being re-engineered to federalize control, cut access, and tilt outcomes.

This isn’t scattershot; it’s systemic. And here’s the truth history tells us: once power is seized, it is rarely given back.

If Trump normalizes troops in cities, that precedent will endure. If he silences networks with FCC threats, that precedent will endure. If lawsuits against journalists succeed, that precedent will endure. Each act rewires the presidency into a throne for a would-be king.

And yet some Democrats act as if this is business as usual while the ground is ripped out from beneath us. Their weakness is complicity.

But democracy is not passive. It has always been the people who’ve seizing power back from kings, dictators, and colonizers. The Founders understood this when they wrote the Constitution to divide power across three branches of government. They fought to prevent a new form of monarchy. And now it’s our fight again.

What we must do is clear:

Demand Congress block the abuse of emergency powers; contact your elect representatives every week.
Push courts to stop executive overreach before precedents harden.
Support independent journalism under attack.
Push back hard against censorship of the media and corporations that bow their knee to Trump.
Stand with those being punished: scientists, teachers, comedians, reporters, immigrants, protesters.
Mobilize peacefully but relentlessly in the streets; No Kings Day is in a few weeks.
Elect governors, legislators, and mayors who’ll serve as firewalls against federal occupation.

This is about power: who has it, who loses it, and whether it still belongs to the people.

If we do nothing, our children will ask what democracy was like, because they won’t have it. If we fight, we can still preserve the greatest system humanity has ever devised: a republic of laws, not autocrats.

Trump wants to be king. He’s already acting like one. The only question is whether we’ll kneel or rise, together, and take our democracy back.

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