Tennessee Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts, who’s eyeing running for Governor, has proposed legislation that would put women in that state who’ve had abortions in the electric chair. Republican policy has already killed hundreds of pregnant women: those who live in a red state with an abortion ban (almost all of them) are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or immediately after childbirth than women who live in states that allow abortion.

The founding principle of America is freedom, a word that’s been a touchstone for the GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan. Thomas Jefferson identified what his generation meant when using that word when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Today, however, all three of these rights that secure freedom’s predicates — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — are under assault by Trump and his Republican lickspittles.

So much for “Life”: Masked, armed ICE thugs have murdered two American citizens and multiple immigrants on the streets of our country in the first few weeks of this year, and women are dying in red states for lack of healthcare as Republican lawmakers substitute their obsession with controlling female bodies for the judgement of physicians.

An estimated 50,000 Americans — men, women, children — die every year in this country for lack of health care (and another 500,000 families are wiped out in bankruptcy) because Republicans refuse to even consider a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has.

Or “Liberty”: Trump’s secret police are compiling lists of people who’ve protested against them, are routinely smashing in front doors and car windows and imprisoning people without the warrants the Fourth Amendment requires, and are now even demanding — again, without judicial warrants — that all of the big social media companies turn over details on anybody who’s criticized ICE online. All of the companies, it appears, are complying out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them.

Or “the pursuit of Happiness”: Two entire generations are crippled with student debt since the Reagan Revolution ended free or cheap college in America; only about a tenth of Americans have the protection of a union since the GOP declared war on organized labor in 1981; and while you and I are paying income tax rates approaching 50 percent in some states, billionaires and giant corporations pay virtually nothing.

Our freedom to know what’s happening in the world and within our government is under attack by an administration that echoes Stalin’s “enemy of the people” and Hitler’s “Lugenpresse” (“lying press” or “fake news”) language as it sues and arrests journalists like Don Lemon for doing their jobs. Funding for NPR/PBS was ended, at the same time Trump surrendered the foreign information wars to Russia by killing off the Voice of America.

Our freedom to live without being poisoned is under attack by Trump’s regime gutting clean air and water protections while Bob Kennedy cheerleads Trump’s expanding production of cancer-causing herbicides like glyphosate.

Our freedom to vote is under direct assault by Republicans who want to purge from the voting rolls women who changed their names when they got married, as well as literally hundreds of smaller attacks on our right to vote across the Red states.

Our freedom to live without fear of our homes being destroyed by extreme weather is gone, as Trump and his GOP toadies gut our protections from greenhouse gasses, kill off Biden’s green energy programs, and bring back expensive coal to produce electricity.

Our freedom to be represented by people the majority of Americans want in office is similarly crippled: as reporter Greg Palast points out, if the 4+ million citizens who were either purged from the rolls or whose votes were challenged and thus not counted in the 2024 election had been able to cast their ballots, we’d have Kamala Harris as president and a Democratic-controlled House and perhaps even Senate.

Our freedom to live in a world at peace has been kneecapped by Republican administrations that lied us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan, now threaten war with Iran, and keep increasing military spending while pleading poverty when it comes to the needs of working people and their communities.

Our freedom to live in a nation free of corruption has been destroyed by the most corrupt administration in the history of America. Tom Homan taking a $50,000 bribe. Pam Bondi taking a $25,000 bribe. Kristi Noem and her boyfriend (both married to other people) flying around at taxpayer expense in a lavish “flying bordello” 737 with two plush bedrooms. Trump’s and Witkoff’s kids making billions off corrupt deals while “representing America” overseas.

Our freedom to a stable economy free of manipulation by the morbidly rich is gone, as the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts have run up a $38 trillion national debt. We’re paying more now in interest on the national debt — over a trillion dollars a year — than it would cost to solve much of the problems of homelessness, student debt, and healthcare in this country. All so over $50 trillion could be transferred from the middle class to the Epstein billionaire class over the past 40+ years.

Our children’s freedom to a safe, secure childhood has been shattered by decades of Republican obeisance to their donors in the weapons industry; kids are regularly thrown into a state of terror by active shooter drills in their schools and the knowledge that in America — and only in American — the bullets could start flying anytime, anywhere.

Our right to religious freedom — and freedom from religion as well — is under daily assault by wealthy Christian nationalist fanatics and hypocrites like “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth forcing extremist Christianity on our troops and states forcing the Ten Commandments on their own schoolchildren. (A list of commandments that have all been violated by our current president.)

Even our businesspeople are losing their freedoms: Trump is now threatening publicly traded Netflix with “consequences” unless they remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from their board. He’s extorting millions in “donations” and “gifts” from corporate CEOs while making billions for himself and his corrupt family. And small businesses across the nation are being crushed by monopolies that 45 years of Reaganism have allowed to flourish.

When American oligarchs and their rightwing media shills rant about “freedom,” they mean freedom from taxes and regulation so they can get richer and poison the world for profit while they systematically crush workers. They’re calling for an end to personal and corporate responsibility, but only for themselves.

Freedom isn’t a slogan (although Republicans have abused it as one for decades): it’s found in the lived experience of average people.

When Americans can no longer feel safe in our bodies and homes, secure in our votes, stable in our economy, and confident in our education and healthcare, then Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” have become aspirational again rather than actual.

Which appears to be exactly how the neofascists who’ve taken over the GOP want it

Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.

In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.

When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.

Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.

Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”

It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to c--- on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”

And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.

Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.

This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.

It’s produced headlines like these:

• “How oligarchs seized Central Europe’s media”
• “Serbia: State Influence on Media Ownership: Igor Žeželj and Telekom Srbija”
• “Media in the Balkans: the rise of oligarchs”
• “Media Oligarchs Go Shopping”
• “The Media in Indonesia: Journalism Between the State and Oligarchs”
• “Slovene Media Owned by Oligarchs, Corrupt Politicians”

And now, here in the United States:

• “When Billionaire Government Contractors Are Also Media Moguls”
• “Musk and Bezos Get Their Billion-Dollar Federal Contracts After Sucking Up to Trump”
• “Meta Gains Approval To Supply AI Services to US Government Departments”
• “Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive”

To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.

We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.

Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.

As Colbert joked this week:

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”

And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”

But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.

Axios and Raw Story report that:

“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”

Miller and Eskew added:

“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”

State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.

In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.

Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.

And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.

In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.

If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.

Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.

We’ve only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon’s. I believe we’re on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come.

The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Donald Trump. When asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators she’d indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant that included:

“Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein.“Donald Trump — The Dow — the Dow right now is over 50,000. The S&P at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

Nobody was buying it any more than when Trump said on Wednesday of this week, “I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing.”

Instead, both became punch lines for comedians and have Republicans hiding to avoid being interviewed.

And on Thursday we saw the bookend of this Watergate-like tipping point, when the former Prince Andrew was arrested by the British police. They didn’t even give the royal family an advance notice, didn’t invite him to come and be questioned, but instead just showed up and took him away, then tore apart his residences looking for evidence.

Consider the analogy.

The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown.

Early reporting in the mainstream media largely dismissed the initial furor of Democrats over their headquarters’ offices being broken into as partisan huffing and puffing, because almost nobody thought Nixon himself had anything to do with the crime.

Conservative media at the time ridiculed Democrats’ concerns as political opportunism, calling the event — as Nixon himself said — “A third-rate burglary.” The legal system was largely disinterested, beyond holding the burglars themselves to account for a crime where it wasn’t clear that anything was even taken from the offices.

And the Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.

What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.

We’re damn close to that moment now.

The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex.

This week, reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least four times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews ­(case number 3501.045) had mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.

The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.

Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.

Late in the evening on Aug. 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone.

I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.

And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.

A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.

Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And allegations of child rape are a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.

It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.

And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.

Bondi and Patel insist the Epstein investigation is closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refuse to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defies over 4,400 court orders and refuses members of Congress or the press entrance to its brutal concentration camps. Trump goes after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family make $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucks up to Putin.

Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.

The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).

That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.

Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.

Donald Trump‘s Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “on life support” as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father’s and husband’s ordeal?

This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it — and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it — the more they do it. We’ve been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

Then I laid out the mechanism behind that, the way men like Trump who want to become dictators co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán did when they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary.

Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed a rather strange rhythm in the news. A judge orders a man like Kilmar Abrego Garcia released and the Trump regime simply finds another way to hold or punish him. Another court blocks a deportation, and administration officials announce they’ll try again using a different legal strategy.

The result is that, as of last week, courts around the country have ruled more than 4,000 times that Trump’s ICE detentions were unlawful, and yet the detentions continue — more than 70,000 people so far, including families and children — while larger facilities are being built every day to hold still more people.

Nothing going on here in America resembles the movies we all watched as kids. Nobody announces the end of the Constitution and the rise of a new dictator or regime. The courts still appear to otherwise function, lawyers still argue their cases, and judges still write opinions explaining why the regime has overstepped its authority. Sometimes, like with the judge who just ordered Trump’s lickspittles to restore the history of George Washington’s slave-holding, their opinions are even blunt and scathing.

On paper the system appears intact, but in practice something subtler has been happening with greater and greater frequency, particularly since last summer: the rulings by the judges and the outcomes that seem to contradict them slowly drift apart. The legal system, in other words, is beginning to crack and fail under the strain of their constant “unitary executive” attacks that use the Project 2025 arguments that Trump is above the law.

This is how the end of democracy begins.

Most of us were taught a reassuring civics lesson when we were young. We were told that when our government acts illegally, we can simply go to court and the court would fix the situation. The lawsuit may take time, but once the judge decides, the matter is settled.

That belief is the quiet foundation beneath every other freedom enjoyed by the citizens of any functioning democracy. We rely on it when we speak, when we vote, and when we criticize or ridicule those in power. We assume that somewhere in the background, operating quietly but irresistibly, there exists a constitutional place where the arguments end and the court’s decisions hold those in power to account, restoring balance and maintaining our democracy.

But that’s a damn fragile assumption that hasn’t been tested in our lifetimes because we haven’t had a lawless president before, so we can easily fail to recognize it.

However, the men who wrote the Constitution — who’d actually lived under a very real tyranny — understood the fragility of that assumption through their own personal experience. They’d lived under a corrupt government that repeatedly insisted it was acting lawfully while colonists instead experienced exploitation, abuse, and brutality.

In the 1770s, history books tell us, British officials could always produce a justification for their actions. Doors were kicked in under broad and often specious warrants or no warrant at all, people were sent to prison in rigged trials, and the local judges who didn’t work for the King but stood for the rule of law were brushed aside because the King and his men said so.

Even though the British authorities always claimed a legal excuse for what they were doing, people still felt pushed around and powerless. The problem wasn’t that there were no laws, but that the regime could keep doing whatever it wanted while everyone argued about whether it was actually allowed. Just like Trump and his toadies are doing as you read these words.

Alexander Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 78 when he explained the peculiar weakness of courts in any republic. The judiciary, he wrote, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” [emphasis Hamilton’s] Courts don’t command armies or control money; they issue their decisions and depend on the rest of government — and the approval of the public — to carry them out.

That arrangement only works so long as everyone agrees that a court’s judgment ends the matter. The moment officials discover they can treat a loss in court as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding stop sign, the character of the entire system changes from democracy to something else altogether.

Nothing dramatic needs to occur for this transition to begin. Elections continue to happen, politicians and pundits offer complaints and justifications, and the legal briefs pile up in the courthouse files. But the practical effect of a ruling weakens, because the losing side — in this case, the Trump regime — simply continues under a new rationale so the argument starts all over again, while they keep doing what they were doing before they were challenged.

We see this with ICE routinely violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as I detailed yesterday. With Trump defying the law and withholding monies appropriated by Congress. With Whiskey Pete Hegseth murdering people on the open seas day after day in defiance of both American and international law. With “Blankie” Kristi Noem refusing to hand evidence in the Good and Pretti murders over to local authorities, and “Have You Looked At The Dow?!?” Pam Bondi refusing to hand evidence of Trump-aligned billionaires’ participation in Epstein’s gruesome crimes over to Congress.

And it usually begins with the emerging dictatorship going after the weakest groups among the population.

Hitler’s first victims — in his first weeks in office — were trans people, the same group Republicans whipped up hate against to seize office last year. Putin went after “outsider” Chechens, who weren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Russian. Orbán campaigned and won election on a slogan of “build the wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep out brown-skinned Syrian refugees (and he then built the wall when in office).

History tells us that tyranny invariably begins with attacks on those easiest to ignore, the marginal, the disliked, the politically powerless, like the “Mexican murderers and rapists” Trump turned into electoral gold in 2016. Most citizens simply shrug when they hear about it, because they don’t imagine themselves ending up in the same position.

But once emboldened with their early successes, within short order tyrants and their toadies always move on from the weakest to arresting and punishing those who might restrain them through legal or public pressure: lawyers, entertainers, reporters, pundits, students, professors, universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and eventually opposition politicians.

Over time, a dictatorial regime’s habit forms: act first, deal with the consequences later. Kill a few people in the streets. Jail a couple of judges and politicians. Prosecute a smattering of reporters. Defund democratic institutions like NPR, VOA, and USAID. Gut the social safety net to throw the working class into crisis so they’re otherwise occupied.

And through it all, keep ignoring the court orders and relentlessly move forward in the project of deconstructing the democracy that was carefully built and nurtured for centuries before.

Losing in court or even at the ballot box becomes mere delay instead of defeat, until eventually the public grows accustomed to seeing courts disagree with the government while the government just plows ahead anyway.

When that happens, the line between democracy and tyranny has first, quietly, been crossed. If not stopped right away, it’s all downhill from there.

Before that line is hit, elections actually change the direction of public policy because politicians and bureaucrats are committed to listening to public opinion, following the law, and obeying the courts.

After that line’s been crossed, elections merely alter political theater, as the machinery of tyranny continues grinding forward. The forms of democracy remain, but their corrective power fades, not because judges stopped ruling, but because rulings stopped controlling events.

Just ask any modern Russian or Hungarian. Or read the history of Europe in the early 20th century.

As a German professor told reporter Milton Mayer in the early 1950s of his experience living through the rise of Hitler:

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

None of this means a democratic country suddenly flips into tyranny on some particular, identifiable day, whether proclaimed or not. It means that freedom depends on whether citizens, officials, and institutions stand up to the wannabe tyrant and demand that legal decisions have real-world consequences.

In other words, public opinion is the last wall a tyrant must shatter. It’s where, when it prevails, tyranny is finally stopped. And that is you and me.

The founders’ ultimate safeguard of our democracy was neither heroism nor violence (Second Amendment nuts notwithstanding), but the shared expectation that the law binds the leader even when he protests. When that expectation falls apart, when the judiciary’s orders are routinely ignored, Hamilton’s warning becomes more than a theory and the nation’s democracy only survives if the public loudly demands its judgments be honored.

Understanding this tells us what we must do now and next.

• We must pay attention when courts order the government to change course, and raise hell when the Trump regime ignores those orders.
• We must regularly call our elected officials and demand that they require legal rulings be followed, particularly if they’re Republicans and such a position may be politically costly to them.
• We must support local and national leaders who defend our court’s decisions instead of treating them as optional obstacles.
• And we must participate in the civic pressure between elections that keeps the constitutional machinery honest, because voting alone can’t overcome a regime that’s learned it can disregard the referee whenever it wants.

A free republic doesn’t depend on its leaders never overreaching; it depends on overreaches producing immediate and painful consequences. The danger moment arrives quietly, however, when a nation gets comfortable with the idea that the leader and his sycophants can keep breaking the law even after courts and public opinion told them they must stop.

Hamilton warned us the courts possess judgment but neither sword nor purse, and Jefferson told us our government exists solely by “the consent of the governed.”

Whether those judgments still govern events in America has always been up to us.

This fight isn’t really about immigration. It’s about whether the Constitution still restrains government power at all.

When elected officials call it a “nonstarter” to require federal agents to get a judicial warrant before kicking in doors, to give people bail or a trial before they face long-term prison, and to allow protests, they’re not debating border policy, they’re testing whether the Bill of Rights is still binding or has become merely decorative.

The Bill of Rights was written to put friction between the state’s power to use force and the people it governs. To restrain government.

If that friction can be removed so government can attack any one disfavored group, then constitutional rights stop being universal guarantees and turn into conditional privileges. And once that shift happens, history — and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem — show us that the groups of people who’re unprotected never stays small for long.

This week’s news which highlights this crisis is that Republicans have shut down the Department of Homeland Security because they say Democrats’ call for ICE to follow the law and the Constitution is “a nonstarter.”

Seriously. Here’s the first sentence of the Democrats’ demand that Republicans say is so unreasonable:

“DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.”

Right now, ICE is kicking in doors and smashing windows of cars in order to attack and arrest both citizens and non-citizens alike. They do it because they say they can. And to arrest, detain, and imprison people they claim they can issue their own phony, made-up “administrative warrants” and don’t need a judge or court to see any evidence or say a word.

This is complete bull----, and it’s genuinely astonishing that Republicans are backing them up. The Fourth Amendment isn’t complicated. Here it is, in it’s entirety (notice it does NOT say “citizens” but says “people”):

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s it. Every word. And it applies to any “person” who happens to be in the United States. Nonetheless, ignoring 250 years of American law and history, DHS General Counsel James Percival said:

“[I]llegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”

His argument is that kicking in the front doors of the homes of people where undocumented immigrants may be staying, or smashing the windows of their cars, is not “unreasonable.”

This is a classic example of how law can get twisted into gibberish by a criminal regime like we are currently suffering under. And it doesn’t even include the right to a trial by jury, the right practice journalism, or the right to protest, all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Yesterday I told you about something the people who started this country learned from bitter experience and their deep reading of history: a wannabe fascist government (like Donald Trump is trying to turn ours into) doesn’t have to openly break the law to destroy liberty.

It just has to have enough sycophants in positions of power to ignore the law so it no longer restrains the government’s awesome power.

To modern Americans that may sound like an abstraction, but it’s critical. Government is the only institution that has widespread cultural approval to use violence, to imprison or even kill us, and to tear our lives apart in search of alleged criminal activity.

The whole point of a democracy is to restrain that power and prevent it from ever becoming so concentrated in a small number of hands that it can be abused for the benefit of one group over another.

Our movies and old newsreels of the Nazi era seem to tell us that we’ll recognize tyranny when there are tanks in the streets, newspapers are shut down, elections are canceled, and we see public executions of protestors.

But that’s not how tyranny usually works in its middle stages, like the one we’re in now.

At our founding, for example, the British Empire never announced, “Colonists have no rights” the way ICE’s lawyer is now proclaiming that immigrants aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Parliament repeatedly insisted the opposite. Americans were British subjects, protected by British law, and the king’s officials repeated that constantly.

And yet, nonetheless, British agents kicked in doors without meaningful warrants. People were faced with almost daily violence. British agents monitored, followed, and often beat or arrested people who protested. Newspapers were shut down and writers arrested. And the courts couldn’t meaningfully restrain officers acting in the name of the Crown because their authority was both granted and limited by a single man, the King.

Everything existed inside a legal framework, and the British repeatedly insisted that it was the colonists, not their own agents and troops, who were “breaking the law.”

That’s what finally snapped the colonist’s patience. It wasn’t a single outrage like the Tea Act or the Boston Massacre — although those highlighted the oppression they experienced — but their final realization that every complaint they filed was answered with a legalistic explanation of why the abuse was justified.

Read the Declaration of Independence — which I quoted yesterday — closely and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Jefferson doesn’t just list harms. He listed systemic, undemocratic structural and jurisdictional moves: judges who were dependent on the ruler, military power that was put above civil authority, the denial of power to local courts, tax laws that only benefited the rich, and people transported for trial elsewhere.

The issue wasn’t cruelty or British abuse of power, although both were terrible. It was that the very structure of authority, the system, had been arranged so law was constantly being rewritten on the fly, tweaked to confront defiance, and abused to enhance and justify government power over people’s lives instead of limiting it.

That distinction, after the Revolutionary War, shaped the Constitution that came next.

We tend to treat the Bill of Rights as a moral document, a statement of national values, but the people who wrote it were being much more practical than philosophical. They were building a machine they believed would make tyranny as a governing method impossible.

They assumed — again, based on their own experience and their reading of history —that every government would always want to expand its own power because every government throughout history always had.

That’s why they wrote our Constitution the way they did: to establish a structure, a system, that’s bigger than any politician (including the president).

• If the government wants to arrest or imprison someone, it must first charge them with a specific crime.
• If it charges them, it must present valid evidence to an independent judge or jury.
• If it presents evidence, the accused can confront it and has a mandatory right of defense counsel.
• Before force like arrest, home invasion, or imprisonment is used, the courts must review and can even prevent it.

Those protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the overall three-branch structure of our government weren’t there out of kindness or to enhance public morality. They were put into the highest law of our land to produce serious friction — a proverbial “throwing sand into the gears” of our system — that would slow down any politician’s or party’s rush to destroy democracy.

They understood that when politicians and bureaucrats have to explain themselves in public, when they must justify their actions, they’re less likely to abuse people the way the King of England had done during their era.

Perhaps even more important, the Founders and Framers of our Constitution also knew from history that when any group seizes enough power to rise above the law, the republic itself is on its last legs.

Once a segment of society (like the Epstein-billionaire-class or ICE) reached that point — whether because of government employment or vast riches — they knew that the system would be distorted and democracy could die, even if the black-letter text of the law remained intact.

When that happens — as we’re seeing today with Trump having ignored more than 4,400 court orders — court’s rulings become technically binding but the government feels free to ignore them.

The British abuse of the colonists in 1773 is an ancient echo of what we see in Minneapolis today where the FBI just this week officially refused to turn over evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to the local authorities who, under the law, have jurisdiction over murder.

Under this Trump regime federal government officials now refuse to comply with the Constitution, the law, with court orders, and with even normal American expectations for human decency. They shop around for friendly judges, laugh at court orders, and daily ignore the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

This is exactly why early Americans were obsessed that the due process provisions in the Bill of Rights must apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just allies, not just the respectable. The moment any government starts to decide who receives full legal protection and who the law can either abuse or elevate, it has quietly shifted into that second operating mode the King of England was asserting in 1773. What our nation’s founders called “tyranny.”

History shows what happens once the law restrains some and elevates others above itself: the category of both the abused and the exempt expands. Both always expand, because power, once exercised, becomes precedent. What began as an exception becomes “normal.”

The Founders knew republics — when corrupted by rich, unscrupulous men — drift into this new mode. Like in modern-day Russia and Hungary, elections continue, laws remain on the books, courts keep ruling and yet the poor, the workers, the dissenters, the protesters get crushed while the rich and well-connected — the Epstein billionaire class — rise above any accountability whatsoever.

Which raises the harder question we, as Americans suffering under this regime, must confront right now:

If our government can commit violence, violate the Constitution, lie to the public on a daily basis, repeatedly lose in court, and yet continue acting however they want because the structure now allows it, is there some specific point or line where we’ve officially moved from democracy to tyranny?

It turns out, history tells us that such a line exists. Political philosophers have argued about it for centuries, but the people who wrote our Constitution were quite certain they knew roughly where it lay.

History also tells us there is a line, a point where a democracy stops being a democracy. The people who wrote our Constitution believed that line is crossed when those in power can ignore the law and face no consequences.

It’s passed when rights can be denied to some, when court orders can be brushed aside, and when the government can use force without meaningful oversight. And when that happens, our republic itself is in danger.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that threshold and explain what it means for us today, because whether we’ve crossed it or not determines whether normal political remedies like elections and legal processes can still function — or ever again function — the way most Americans still assume they do.

At 3:07 in the morning the pounding started.

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

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

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

It was 1773 in Boston.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider where we are today.

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

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

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

As Dean Blundell notes:

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

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

The final report from the Conference says of America:

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

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

After all, as Reuters reported last week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost nobody talks about it anymore.

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

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

Donald Trump, the GOP, the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet, and the ~150 billionaires who made him president again are all on the side of oligarchy. And we’re already most of the way there, thanks to five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

As President Jimmy Carter told me 11 years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.” [emphasis added]

Democracy is when the will of the people is regularly converted into policy and law by their elected representatives. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Oligarchy, on the other hand, is when the morbidly rich own the government and dictate policy, the “consent of the governed” be damned. We’ve been creeping in that direction since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, when rich people stopped paying taxes, corporate consolidations exploded, unions were attacked and wages stagnated, and it began to cost a fortune to get decent healthcare or a good education.

But the danger of oligarchy isn’t just that rich people get richer and the rest of us get poorer, which has been the steady trajectory of the Reagan Revolution for 44 years. As I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, oligarchy is almost always just a transitional system.

It doesn’t last, because working class people eventually get tired of being ripped off by the morbidly rich. Which is exactly what we’ve been seeing with our political system for the past two decades: whichever candidate — the best examples are Barack Obama and Trump — who promises “change” gets elected, because the people are angry about the morbidly rich oligarchs having taken over the government and turned it exclusively to their own benefit.

In some countries throughout history, that anger is translated into revolutions and civil wars. More often, however, it follows the course it is on right now in the United States: extreme polarization, seizure of the news and political system by the rich to hang onto their oligarchy, and millions of frustrated citizens showing up in the streets.

As Jack London put it in The Iron Heel, the oligarchs “own the Senate, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures” leaving the middle class’s supposed power as “an empty shell.” The rich and powerful boast, “We are the Iron Heel, and none can withstand us,” and insist that morality itself largely flows from “the class interests” and “feelings of superiority” of those on top.

Eventually, however, it gets more and more difficult for an oligarchic government to hang onto power because people hate oligarchy.

The government toadies of the oligarchs then must either move back toward democracy by making real concessions to the people like FDR did — giving them better wages, taxing the rich, making healthcare and education free or cheap, breaking up the monopolies — or they have to clamp down and put an end to the protests.

We’re seeing that being played out right now in America, as protestors are beaten, gassed, arrested, and even murdered right in front of us, with the agents of the oligarchs — ICE in this case — suffering no consequences whatsoever.

Similarly, Trump just tried to get six members of Congress thrown into prison for saying that military people shouldn’t follow illegal orders, which actually is the law of the land. Don Lemon is being arraigned for daring to do his job as a reporter. In a spectacle resembling Russia or Belarus, the regime’s goons now gas, beat, and kill people with absolute impunity.

This is how every tyrant in modern history — from Germany in the 1930s to Russia in the early 2000s to America today — makes the transition from democracy to oligarchy and finally to absolute tyranny.

Germany called them Brownshirts. Russia called them Rosgvardiya or the KGB/FSB, and here in America we call them ICE. They’re the shock troops, loyal exclusively to Dear Leader, whose job is to crush public dissent on behalf of oligarchs who, like Fritz Thyssen in 1930s Germany, believe turning the country into a dictatorship will make them even richer and more powerful.

Elections still happen, flags still wave, politicians still give speeches about freedom. But the real power concentrates at the top and, when the people begin to seriously push back, the government becomes violent, using terror and imprisonment as its main weapons.

After the state murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (with no consequences) and the violent gassing, beating, and detention of thousands of protestors, the demonstrations in Minneapolis began to thin out. Fewer and fewer people are willing to be exposed to poisonous gas, get their bones broken, be thrown into brutal detention, or even be outright killed. And who could blame them?

Make no mistake: this is the direction Trump and today’s Republican Party are taking America as quickly as they can. Already we have more people in concentration camps than Hitler did by 1939, and the oligarchs have been looting our country and crushing the middle class ever since Reagan invited them to take over in 1981.

• 45 years of massive tax cuts for the rich totaling over $35 trillion have been put on our nation’s credit card (our national debt) by Republicans, overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and making the ultra wealthy richer than any king or pharaoh in history.
• On Thursday, Trump gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses because the fossil fuel industry crossed his palm with cash. He’s done the same with other environmental regulations, worker safety rules, and is handing billionaires control of our media left and right.
• Corrupt, oligarch-friendly judges groomed by billionaire-funded legal networks populate the Supreme Court and about half of our appeals courts, consistently siding with concentrated wealth and state power instead of the rights of ordinary citizens.
• To prevent the people from fighting back at the ballot box, Republican legislatures across the country have passed laws making it harder to vote, are purging voter rolls, restricted ballot access, and are redrawing districts to entrench GOP rule. There’s now Republican-sponsored legislation before Congress that would disenfranchise tens of millions of married women and low-income voters.
• With Trump following Putin’s playbook, we first saw family separations and detention camps that human rights observers say are actually concentration camps. Children were taken from their parents as a matter of policy, and entire communities were demonized by Trump, Vance, et al with racist rhetoric about “invasions,” “infestations,” and lies like, “They’re eating the dogs and cats!”

That kind of language isn’t accidental. It prepares a country to see some people as “others” not deserving of human rights, accept government-sponsored cruelty, and view a police state as a “protective force” (Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or SS is “protection force” in English). It normalizes and speeds the transition from oligarchy to outright dictatorship.

And they know all about the psychological tools they’re using to bring about this transition here in America. Throughout history, racism and misogyny have been the oligarch’s favorite tools. Divide working people by race, religion, and gender so they’ll never unite to challenge the oligarchs.

Even our foreign policy has been transformed from one that advocates and supports democracies around the world to supporting and lionizing authoritarian leaders while attacking our democratic allies. Trump undermined NATO, cozies up to brutal strongmen like Putin and Middle Eastern dictators, and treats global alliances and tariffs like protection rackets to push other countries to subsidize his family building another hotel or golf course.

And through it all, we see a steady erosion of trust in elections themselves, what Thomas Paine called the beating heart of democracy. Trump’s lickspittles and his billionaire-owned media outlets promote claims of “widespread voter fraud” with quite literally no credible evidence. And now they’re using that same bull---- to try to rig this fall’s election.

So, what do we do? This year, forget about third parties or skipping election day, and vote for every Democrat on the ticket.

We all get it that the Democratic Party isn’t perfect. There are corporate sellouts in the Party like the so-called “New Democrats” and “Problem Solvers.” Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seem to lack backbones. There are compromises that frustrate Americans who want real action and a restoration of the middle class.

But at least the Democratic Party is still operating inside the democratic tradition. It supports expanding voting rights, not restricting them. It backs labor organizing instead of union busting. It pushes to reduce the influence of dark money instead of unleashing more of it. It fights for clean air and to stop climate change. It appoints judges who respect precedent and civil rights rather than dismantling them.

When Democrats win, there’s space to fight for more democracy. When Republicans aligned with Trump win, the fight becomes about whether democracy survives at all in America.

In a two party system like ours, refusing to vote because one candidate or party isn’t pure enough usually doesn’t create a better option; it simply strengthens the faction that’s openly comfortable with authoritarian tactics and oligarchic economics.

If we want a country where working people have a real voice, where votes are counted and respected, where diversity is seen as strength instead of threat, we have to defend the imperfect democratic coalition we have. And that means voting for Democrats this fall, and supporting them now, almost without exception.

Of course, we want to demand better values, universal healthcare, bold climate action, serious campaign finance reform, free college, and real taxes on the morbidly rich. We have to organize, protest, and push our representatives with regular phone calls and other actions. That’s how democracy grows stronger.

But we also have to understand the stakes when we talk with friends and neighbors, support candidates, and step into the voting booth.

A vote for MAGA Republicans, or a failure to vote, is a statement in favor of the normalization of racism, the rigging of our voting system, and the continued consolidation of ever more wealth and power in the hands of billionaires. A vote for Democratic candidates, even weak ones, is a vote to keep the democratic experiment alive long enough to improve it.

This isn’t just another election cycle, it’s a crossroads: we must pick democracy or continue to embrace oligarchy fueled by Citizens United.

That’s the choice. History will remember which side we chose, and our children and grandchildren must live with the consequences.

Donald Trump is doing something to America that no foreign adversary has ever managed, something Vladimir Putin’s been dreaming about for decades: he’s convincing our oldest and closest allies, countries we fought wars to defend and liberate, and with whom we share a democratic system of government, that the United States can’t be trusted.

For example, France’s government just announced it’s ripping U.S. videoconferencing platforms — Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and others — out of its government offices nationwide and replacing them with a new French-created system called “Visio.”

That’s roughly 2.5 million French public employees who’ll no longer be using American digital products because the French have concluded that U.S. tech — and the Silicon Valley billionaires’ pathetic fealty to Trump, bringing him bribes and gifts and groveling in front of him — is a national security risk.

And it’s not just France: the German state of Schleswig‑Holstein just moved 44,000 employees off Microsoft and over to an open-source platform, and is now considering replacing Windows with Linux. They also dumped Microsoft’s SharePoint file-sharing system, going with open source Nextcloud.

We’re no longer seen as a reliable partner: many of our former allies now view us as a potential enemy.

Denmark’s government, Swiss authorities, Austria, and other European countries are exploring or implementing similar moves. The EU’s senior official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, said that Europe’s dependence on American technology “can be weaponized against us.” As ABC News reported:

“A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.“The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel [International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad] Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a ‘kill switch’ that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.”

It’s the same reason Canada is reconsidering purchasing F-35s from America, which would be another major economic and strategic blow to us. Under a leader as corrupt, mentally ill, and erratic as Trump, few countries are willing to have their essential tech or defense infrastructure vulnerable to his whims and tantrums.

Even more shocking, the National Security Desk reports:

“In a stunning shift announced today, NATO stripped the United States of command of all three of its operational‑level Joint Force Commands — the four‑star headquarters responsible for leading the Alliance in crisis and war.“For the first time since NATO’s founding, every major operational command will now be led by European officers. The United Kingdom will assume command of JFC Norfolk, Italy will take over JFC Naples, and Germany and Poland will rotate leadership of JFC Brunssum. SACEUR remains American for now, but only symbolically; today’s tectonic move makes a future European SACEUR a matter of timing, not theory.”

This isn’t about Europeans “hating America” any more than than No Kings protestors calling out Trump’s fascist actions means they despise our country.

Quite simply, European leaders — like millions of Americans — are looking at Trump’s naked embrace of Putin, his open contempt for democracy, and his casual threats against NATO allies and concluding that no critical tech or defense system should ever again depend on the whims of this narcissistic wannabe American strongman.

Speaking of wannabe strongmen, ABC added:

“Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials worry about relying on his Starlink satellite internet system...”

Analysts now explicitly warn that Trump’s and his toadies’ hostility to the EU and his willingness to weaponize sanctions and economic tools have made Silicon Valley firms look more like extensions of an unpredictable strongman who ignores the law, rather than the neutral digital providers they’ve historically positioned themselves as.

After all, if you’re a European defense or interior minister, you have to ask yourself: what happens to our communications and data if Trump wakes up p----- off at us one morning because we didn’t leap high enough when he yelled “Jump!”

Even more distressing, the damage isn’t just confined to tech. It’s hitting the very heart of the Western alliance system — which we largely created — that has kept relative peace since World War II. It’s been Putin’s goal for decades, and now he’s getting exactly what he wants from Trump.

When Trump said he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies that, he claimed, weren’t “paying up,” European leaders didn’t shrug it off as a joke. European Council President Charles Michel called the comments “reckless,” correctly saying that such statements “serve only Putin’s interest” and undermine the core promise of mutual defense. Of course, serving Putin’s — rather than America’s — interests is exactly what Trump has been doing for a decade now.

Even NATO’s Secretary General felt compelled, once again, to publicly restate that Article 5 — the pledge that an attack on one is an attack on all — remains “ironclad,” slapping down the President of the United States.

As Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said in response to Trump threatening to unleash Putin on Europe:

“He’s more interested in aggrandizing himself and pleasing Putin than protecting our allies. It would be enough to make Reagan ill.”

Schiff’s sentiments were echoed by Charles Michel, the president of the European Council:

“Reckless statements on #NATO’s security and Art 5 solidarity serve only Putin’s interest. They do not bring more security or peace to the world. On the contrary, they reemphasize the need for the #EU to urgently further develop its strategic autonomy and invest in its defense.”

So, here we are: the head of NATO and the head of the European Council reduced to reassuring the world that America’s president doesn’t speak for the alliance when he invites Russia to attack its members. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, couldn’t have come up with something more bizarre.

European security analysts now talk openly about “low trust” and “ruptures and new realities” in their relations with the United States. One EU security study notes that Trump has shown “elements of active hostility against the European project,” highlighting his bizarre, paranoid claim that the EU was set up to “screw” the US, as well as his refusal to rule out the use of force to annex Greenland.

And now Trump has his emissary visiting rightwing and neo-Nazi parties and think tanks in Europe, offering them American cash and support. He and Putin appear totally committed to making the world safe for dictators and oligarchs by damaging the democracies of the world.

America’s and democracy’s enemies, of course, are thrilled. As one European think‑tank piece put it bluntly, Trump’s rhetoric is “a gift to Putin.” When the president of the United States trashes NATO, praises autocrats, and undermines the EU while half of Ukraine is being tormented by brutal cold, the man in the Kremlin doesn’t have to spend a ruble to fracture the West. Trump, like a dutiful dog, is doing it for him.

And this isn’t just elite hand‑wringing at the level of governments and ministers; ordinary Europeans are recalibrating their relationship with America, too. Surveys over the past year show European opinions of the United States dropping sharply, a reality we also see in the collapse of European vacationers to the United States.

One EU institute reports that nearly three‑quarters of Europeans now see the United States as a “somewhat or very unreliable” partner now, with average Germans among the most skeptical.

A broader survey across Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and Italy found U.S. favorability down, sometimes by double digits, with only about one-in-ten respondents expressing real trust in Trump’s America to defend them.

Another poll summarized by Politico found that even a majority of Canadians now see the US as a “negative global force,” driven largely by Trump’s erratic behavior and his obsession with self-enrichment, having already collected an estimated $4 billion for himself and his family since he was sworn to office.

Put simply, our allies are doing what any rational nation would do when a key partner goes rogue: they’re hedging.

They’re hedging by building their own tech infrastructure, so that Trump can’t flip a switch and cut off vital services or demand back-doors into their communications systems or share information with Putin. So Trump can’t hand them over to Putin the way he is Ukraine. They’re hedging by embracing “strategic autonomy,” aka European defense capabilities that don’t rely on Washington or anybody in America.

Meanwhile, here at home, Trump and his lickspittle Republicans are busily transforming America into exactly the kind of oligarchic, strongman system our grandparents fought World War II to stop.

He’s pardoned insurrectionists, is purging institutions and installing loyalists, and covering up the child-rape crimes of his billionaire friends, all while aligning himself — and, thus, America — with oligarchs and dictators abroad.

When you combine that internal authoritarian drift with external contempt for allies and admiration for Putin, you get the worst of all worlds: a United States that can no longer credibly lead democratic nations and may increasingly act as a spoiler on behalf of strongmen, grifters, and oligarchs worldwide. And, of course, on behalf of Putin.

Trump promised to “make America great again.” Instead, he’s teaching the rest of the free world that they need to live without us. All to our and our children’s detriment.

Get ready.

At Tuesday's hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) lied through his teeth, saying of Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act:

“They let millions of illegal aliens into the country. They set up sanctuary cities so you can’t enforce these federal laws that are on the books that Congress has passed.“Now they won’t vote to stop these illegals from voting in our elections. If the American people don’t understand what this is about, it’s about one word. It always has been. That is power.
“They want power and they need illegals to vote in our elections. That’s why they don’t care about fraud either. They need those votes as well.”

And it’s not just a lone crackpot congressman from Arizona. As Walter Olson wrote for the Cato Institute in 2024:

“If you believe Elon Musk, ‘Democrats’ are permitting large numbers of immigrants into the country on purpose in order to win elections. By ‘ushering in vast numbers of illegals,’ he wrote on X March 5, ‘they are importing voters.’ …“Musk’s co-thinker on this topic … Donald Trump, said in January in Iowa: ‘That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.’ And a television ad from [then] Ohio Republican Sen. J. D. Vance claims that current border policies mean ‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country.’
“‘Treason indeed!’ exclaims Musk.”

Trump has made good use of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie, famously claiming that the 2020 “election was stolen” from him. And now he’s preparing to use one of the GOP’s favorite perennial Big Lies to disrupt this November’s midterm elections.

If he can find an excuse (Tulsi Gabbard is working on it, from media reports) to seize ballots and voting machines in congressional districts that may flip from Republican to Democratic this fall, his lickspittle Squeaker Mike Johnson can refuse to seat the newly-elected Democrats in the House, keeping it in GOP hands.

After all, Johnson was in the middle of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election by organizing Republicans in the House to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes that year, and this year he held up the swearing in of Dem Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) for over a month just because he could.

All he’ll need is for Tulsi (or others) to find even one questionable ballot among the ones they took from Georgia — or insert one — to wave around like a bloody shirt and, if history is any guide, the corporate media will fall into line, saying, “Ah, ha! He’s found voter fraud!”

And then Johnson can claim “election irregularities,” just like Republicans did in the election of 1876, and refuse to seat Democratic winners in the House, giving their seats instead to the Republican losers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) mentioned this exact scenario on my radio/TV program on Tuesday, saying Democrats are seriously concerned House Republicans may be actually planning for it.

All to keep Democrats from taking over the House and having the power of the subpoena so they can investigate Trump’s massive corruption, self-dealing, bribe-taking, Putin-bootlicking, and possible exploitation of young girls with his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein.

The driving force behind all of this is a classic GOP Big Lie, the false allegation of widespread “voter fraud” in America.

Republicans have been using this lie to attack the heart of our democracy right out in the open ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the year they responded by rolling out Operation Eagle Eye, yelling about nonexistent “illegal alien voter fraud” and using it as an excuse to intimidate minority voters in the Goldwater-Johnson race.

It’s a phrase Republicans essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy when they used it to suppress the votes of poor whites who opposed that oligarchy. And the GOP has been using it for more than 60 years now with barely a peep from either Democrats or today’s media.

Back in the day, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of dozens of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As the New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

“Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent ‘vote fraud’ in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry ‘fraud.’“The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from ‘stealing’ the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.”

Keep in mind, this was novel back then. The GOP’s “voter fraud” Big Lie was brand new. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few southern states for a century; the phrase usually appeared in quotation marks as it was so unusual. The 1964 Times article continued:

“The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as ‘a program of voter intimidation.’ He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.“‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, ‘that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.’”

But that one NYT article was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican Big Lie.

In the 60 years since then, no major American news media has seriously and persistently challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades they have routinely used it for blocking minority and woman voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp and Ken Paxton did in Texas and Georgia.

Weirdly, the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute have both weighed in on the issue, and not in a way that makes Trump happy.

Over at Cato, Stephen Richer last week wrote an article titled, “Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It.” And, as Reuters reports, “The conservative Heritage Foundation found 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.”

That’s 24 instances total over a period of 20 years! And if you go all the way back to 1982 in the early years that Ronald Reagan was talking about “undocumented alien voter fraud,” you’ll discover, as Heritage did, a total of 99 cases in 44 years.

Not a single election in modern American history has ever been even slightly affected by a non-citizen voting. None.

And in the past few years, in response to Trump’s squealing about 2020, multiple Republican governors have audited their own voter rolls with a fine-toothed comb. Utah, it turns out, had one non-citizen on its rolls. Idaho found 36, Louisiana had 79, and Montana 23. Most were probably errors.

After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What immigrant wants to draw the attention of law-enforcement by voting? What possible payoff is there to that?

It defies common sense, although that’s never stopped Republicans from pushing a good conspiracy theory.

Among functioning democracies, this Republican Big Lie and its use to make it harder for people to vote is unique to America. No other functioning democracy in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s every bit as nonexistent in other modern democracies as it is here.

The only three major countries in the world that use “voter fraud” as an excuse to make it harder for minorities and women to vote are Hungary, Russia, and, now, the United States.

Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t need or want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote. Like with Social Security here, when you’re born you’re put on the list (which is also usually the list for their national healthcare system and their equivalent of Social Security), and when you turn 18 you can vote. In many democracies, particularly across Europe, they simply mail you a ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody who’s on the list gets one.

As I document in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, in all the years since the 1960s when Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack on American voting rights claiming that “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.

Most even behave as if the GOP’s phony claims of “voter fraud” are legitimate, so Republicans continue to aggressively use them to make voting hard, reject mail-in ballot signatures, and purge voting rolls of Black and brown people.

As reporter Greg Palast found, the only reason Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the House and Senate today is because Republicans succeeded in preventing more than 4 million US citizens from voting or having their votes counted in 2024’s election.

The simple reality is that there’s never been a non-citizen “voter fraud” problem in America — or any other advanced democracy — so there’s no need for a “solution.”

What Republicans know, however, is that the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti-voter-fraud registration requirements.

And the poorer a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

Republicans also know that millions of women are seriously p----- off about the Dobbs decision, particularly in the 20 Republican-controlled states with bans on abortion. This is on top of the long-term reality that women are 12 percent more likely to vote Democratic than men.

Thus, we now have Republicans pushing federal legislation that would mandate ID all across the nation, and would require that birth certificates carry the same name as driver’s licenses and passports.

This demand for proof of citizenship to prevent “voter fraud” is the main way the GOP is now expanding its suppression efforts to women. The National Organization for Women notes:

“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.

“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

Many women won’t have them, won’t be able to track them down, or can’t afford to replace them, so millions will just shrug and go back to their lives, figuring that “just one less vote” won’t make that much difference.

And women who adopted their husband’s last name at marriage but failed to go before a judge to make a formal, legal name-change will be locked out of the voting process, too. As many as 80 million of them.

Claiming widespread non-citizen “voter fraud” is the GOP’s primary go-to strategy to prevent people from voting or even registering to vote and every day it seems they come up with new ways to exploit it, as Crystal Hill pointed out at Democracy Docket:

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents, claiming the move will ‘facilitate [voter] fraud.’”

Additionally, the GOP has expanded their campaign against “voter fraud” by planning to dispute millions of mail-in votes, particularly in Blue cities, through so-called “exact signature match challenges.”

The GOP is recruiting as many as 100,000 people to examine millions of signatures on mail-in ballots, the majority in Blue cities, so they can reject ballots that, in the observers’ opinions, don’t exactly match signatures and thus could be “fraudulent.” Those ballots will not be counted unless the voters show up at the Secretary of State’s office within a few days of the election to prove that their signature is still theirs.

And it’s all based on the lie that there are non-citizens voting, which is total b-------.

Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie to burst onto the scene over the next few weeks with much sturm and drang — and pontificating Republicans on Sunday shows trying to act like Very Serious People as they wring their hands about non-citizens voting — as the media will almost certainly give Trump and the GOP another pass on this monstrous lie when they threaten to shut down our government this weekend over ICE funding.

There is a way to put an end to this Republican scam, though: a way to fight back.

Here’s FDR’s take on the GOP’s perennial willingness to make things up, as he shared in 1944 with a group of UAW auto workers, complete with his suggestion about how to confront Big Lies the first time Republicans rolled them out:

“The [Republican] opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

When Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipe-out 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media ignored FDR’s warning and treated Trump’s Big Lie claim like a joke for years.

As a result — just like Roosevelt predicted — it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans that Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him. That worked for them, so now they’re trying to do it with “voter fraud.”

This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican “voter fraud” scam for 60 years.

No democracy anywhere in the world can long survive if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately cast and counted. This lie about non-citizen voting — that the GOP first rolled out in 1964 — is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.

If it’s not debunked and destroyed by both the Democratic Party and our national media, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascist reign.

It’s beyond time for our corporate media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie of “voter fraud” before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.

Donald Trump’s presidency now has a human body count.

“We really feel like we’re being hunted, we’re being hunted like animals,” an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian.

I’ve seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time in Colombia on behalf of the German-based international relief organization I’ve worked with for more than half my life. I shared the story in my book about those experiences, The Prophet’s Way, detailing one of the “hunt clubs” I ran across in Bogotá.

These were mostly middle-class European-ancestry (white) men, many of them off-duty cops, who go out at night in camo with high-powered rifles and night-vision gear to hunt dark-skinned “los gamines,” the million or so street children who commit much of the petty (and often serious) crime in the city.

Afterwards, they go drinking and partying, celebrating their kills. Some of the clubs even have names, like “the deer hunters” (cazadores de ciervos).

“Hunt clubs” is my term (and that of my host in Bogotá); during that era, what these men were doing was called “social cleansing” or “limpieza social” and in addition to killing kids, they also targeted for beatings or death homeless people, sex workers, LGBTQ people, drug users, and others they labeled “undesirable.”

As Amnesty International noted in a 1993 press release:

“There is concern for the safety of thousands of street children in Bogota following the appearance on 11 August 1993 of posters in the city centre inviting them to attend their own funerals.“These posters, which announce the extermination of ‘delinquent street children’ are signed in the name of industrialists, shopkeepers and civic groups. There have been an increasing number of reports of killings of so-called ‘social undesirables’ (desechables sociales) in what are routinely called ‘social clean-up operations,’ generally attributed to shadowy ‘death-squads.’”

But the hunt clubs of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s were pikers, compared to what Trump, Miller, Homan, Noem, et al are running today in America.

So far since Trump took over their operations, they’ve killed at least 40 people, both in their so-called “detention facilities” and on the streets of our cities, and imprisoned more than 70,000 men, women, and children in over 230 concentration camps. And Trump just cut off funding for medical services for those in the camps, so expect the death numbers to grow quickly.

Unlike the “volunteers” in Bogotá, Trump’s thugs are well-paid, making up to $200K when you include signing bonuses, bounties, and other benefits.

And they get to go hunting!

• Supervisory Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, for example, reportedly bragged to his fellow ICE hunt club members that when he shot Miramar Martinez in Chicago suburb Brighton Park there were “5 shots, 7 holes.” The following day, he shared with his ICE buddies a text message saying, “Cool. I’m up for another round of ‘f--- around and find out.’”
• After shooting Renee Good five times for daring to tell him to “have a nice day,” ICE hunt club member Jonathan Ross called her a “f------ b----.”
• And when two ICE thugs murdered Alex Pretti, they rolled his body over to count the bullet holes as nearby agents laughed and applauded.

Like the hunt club members in Bogotá, today’s ICE hunt club members — under color of law and with the approval of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the applause of Trump’s senior officials — pick out people based on how dark their skin is and routinely kick in brown-skinned people’s doors or drag them out of their cars before assaulting and even killing them.

And, while the hunt club members in Bogotá only occasionally wear masks or balaclavas to conceal their identity, ICE hunt club members can do it all the time.

America has — at least for the past few generations — always considered itself better than this.

These ICE hunt clubs don’t operate in secret. They wear (concealed) badges. They draw salaries from your and my tax dollars. They joke about murder and violence in their text messages. They pose for photos with their victims.

And they know — absolutely know — that powerful people will protect them. After all, the vice president of the United States claimed they have “absolute immunity” from prosecution.

But that protection only works if the rest of us stay quiet.

Colombia’s hunt clubs didn’t (largely) vanish because they had a moral awakening. They ended when the public finally said no and forced accountability. And the country today shudders every time that story is told. History tells us, unambiguously, how this sort of disgrace ends.

Every modern society that normalizes “hunts” of the poor, the dark-skinned, the undocumented, or the politically inconvenient eventually discovers that the culturally-acceptable definition of “undesirable” keeps expanding.

Today it’s brown-skinned migrants. Tomorrow it’s white protesters (they’ve already started that, building a database of “domestic terrorists” who film them and even revoking their access to TSA PreCheck). Then journalists (they just raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson). Then judges (they arrested Judge Hannah Dugan).

Then anyone who won’t clap loudly enough.

Colombia learned this lesson the hard way. As did Germany, Chile, and Argentina. So did the American South after Reconstruction, when “posses” and “night riders” were praised as patriots until, in the 1950s and 1960s, we finally admitted to ourselves what they really were and did something about it.

But here we are again.

The people running today’s ICE hunt clubs may feel untouchable now. After all, people like them always do. But history keeps receipts and is utterly merciless with those who choose to hunt human beings.

I’ve been talking into microphones since I did the morning news on WITL in Lansing Michigan in the late 1960s, and I’ve seen a lot of ugly moments in American politics. But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it’s surprising, but because it’s so painfully revealing.

This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens — is one of those moments.

That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.

Promoting a video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as non-human primates isn’t a joke. It isn’t satire or an accident. It’s the oldest racist smear in the book, dressed up in a cheap meme and now blasted out by a man who once swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the president of the United States does something like this, it doesn’t just insult two people. It tells a story about who, according to the most powerful man in the world, belongs in America and who doesn’t.

For centuries, racism in this country has relied on the lie that some people are less than human. That lie has been used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and mass incarceration.

It’s the lie that made it easier for people to look away while their neighbors were brutalized. It’s the lie that justifies ICE’s brutal, racist behavior. When Trump shares imagery that taps directly into that history, he’s not being edgy: he’s reopening wounds that never fully healed.

When the President of the United States signals that this kind of racism is acceptable, it gives permission to others. It tells the kid being harassed at school, the family being targeted by a hate group, and the voter being pushed out of the polling line that the cruelty they’re experiencing is justified. That it’s their own fault.

It tells the bullies and thugs of ICE as they do their “Kavanaugh Stops” — targeting people based on their race — that they’re on the right side of power.

This isn’t just about harm to minorities, although that harm is real and immediate. It’s about what happens to democracy itself when the presidency becomes a megaphone for dehumanization.

Democracy depends on the idea that we’re all political equals. Once you start suggesting that some Americans are animals, that idea collapses. It becomes easier to justify taking away voting rights, ignore court rulings, or shrug when violence follows hateful rhetoric.

I remember a time, during the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when the presidency stood as a kind of moral North Star. Even when presidents like Nixon and Clinton failed to live up to it, there was at least a shared understanding that the office itself mattered. That it should pull us together, not rip us apart.

Trump has spent years doing the opposite, from the 1970s when he was busted along with his father for refusing to rent to Black people to his recent use of words like “vermin” and “----holes” to describe Hispanic and Black people and majority-Black countries. Last night’s post is another brutally clear example of Trump’s deep, lifelong racism.

What’s even more chilling is the silence from Republican leaders and elected officials. If you can’t bring yourself to condemn something this overtly racist, where exactly is your line?

Silence in moments like this isn’t neutrality: it’s complicity. It tells people of color in America, already dealing with the burden of centuries of institutional racism, that their pain is irrelevant and their dignity a plaything in the hands of white people.

I know some people will say we should ignore it, that reacting “just feeds the outrage machine.” Trump’s propaganda princess, Karoline Leavitt, tried to downplay it by telling reporters:

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But pretending this doesn’t matter is how we normalize it and weaken our shared sense of humanity. And the end point of that is always disaster.

As California Governor Gavin Newsome posted:

“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”

“Denounce” is a bare minimum. This country can do better. We’ve done better before, often after terrible struggle and sacrifice.

But we won’t get there by minimizing moments like this or waving them off as “just another Trump post.” We get there by calling it what it is, by standing up for one another as equals in our humanity, and by insisting that the presidency must reflect our highest ideals, not our ugliest instincts.

If this doesn’t provoke the 13 white billionaires in Trump’s cabinet — who would all instantly fire anybody in any of their companies who posted such an image on their company’s servers — to start 25th Amendment proceedings or endorse impeachment, it’ll tell us everything about who they are, too.

America is stronger when we recognize each other as fully human. The moment we let that slip, we all lose something precious.

Dear Trump Administration Official,

I’m writing to you not as a political opponent, but as a historian who’s spent a lifetime studying what happens when democracies flirt with strongmen and otherwise decent people convince themselves that loyalty to Dear Leader today will be rewarded by safety and protection tomorrow.

It almost never is.

You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.

History is littered with people who believed the same things: let’s start close to home.

Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison: his loyalists did.

His attorney general John Mitchell did hard time in a federal prison. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman did hard time, as did John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and his White House attorney John Dean. The burglars did time, as did the fixers. The 40 Nixon officials who went to prison even included two members of Nixon’s cabinet, Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.

The people who “just followed orders” or egged Nixon on — like you’re doing now with Trump — were the ones who went to jail, while Nixon walked away to a quiet retirement.

That’s the pattern history shows us over and over, all the way back to the Roman Republic: the boss either dies or escapes while his helpers become the long-term fall guys.

Every authoritarian system runs on the same fuel you’re today giving Trump: people who believe that by protecting the leader they’re protecting themselves and their families. Tragically, at least for them, it never works out that way.

When Hitler’s regime collapsed, he was dead but his inner circle faced tribunals, prison cells, and even the gallows.

The men who signed orders, ran ministries, moved trains, seized property, and “made it all legal” discovered that when corrupt administrations fall, their paperwork trail lasts longer than their leader’s loyalty. Their defense of “I was serving my country” or “just taking orders” didn’t save them: it convicted them.

Mussolini’s story is even darker. As his own crimes caught up with him, his own allies turned and ran. He was executed by people horrified by his excesses. His son-in-law, once his foreign minister and a loyal insider, was put up against a wall and shot after a show trial. Dictators never go down alone: they take their flunkies with them and it’s typically the flunkies who bear the harshest punishments.

Chile’s Pinochet managed to dodge some justice himself, but the men who ran his torture chambers and death squads didn’t. Years later they were dragged into court, convicted, and sent to prison. Time didn’t save them, and neither did politics or the loyalty they expected from the good general. And it won’t save you.

The same happened after Saddam Hussein fell; his henchmen were tried and executed or died in prison. In Romania, the Ceauşescus were hunted down and shot but their senior officials faced courts, disgrace, and decades in prison. Across history, when the music stops, the people closest to the guy at the top inevitably find there aren’t enough chairs.

Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.

So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob.

And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights.

They’ll start, in other words, with the people who made Trump’s crimes happen: people like you. That’s how conspiracies are proven in a court of law: not by vibes, but by nailing the insiders.

Right now you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side.

But history has a funny way of circling back:

• Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.
• The seniormost Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.
• Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.
• Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.

There’s a simple and perennial reason why prosecutors always say, “Follow the money” and “follow the paper trail”: abusive power always leaves fingerprints.

And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away.

Obstruction of justice. Conspiracy. Civil rights violations. Election interference. Murder under color of authority. Bribery. Abuse of power. False statements. Unlawful detention. Retaliation against whistleblowers. Collusion with foreign enemies.

These aren’t political talking points that I’m trying to wave around to score with public opinion or scare you, they’re criminal statutes.

You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves.

Already we’re seeing this pattern with dozens of people who’ve left Trump’s first term employ, from his Attorney General, CIA director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, and FBI Director all the way down to functionaries in the Oval Office:

“I didn’t know he was that crazy.”

“They acted on their own.”

“I was advised incorrectly.”

“They went too far.”

Every authoritarian uses the same script and Trump has already proven that he’s no different. Do you think he’s suddenly going to decide to protect you rather than run off with the goodies? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously, here’s the part nobody in the cheering crowd has bothered to tell you: when regimes fall — or even just lose power, like Nixon did — the leader’s efforts become solely about his own personal survival. Your life, as a disposable underling, becomes a tool he can use to redirect blame and avoid accountability.

The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did.

Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes?

That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat, to abandon your “conservative” principles, or even to leave your party. Instead, I want you to realize that the Constitution is older than Donald Trump and far more durable than any cult of personality.

There’s a reason the Founders feared concentrated power and split it among three branches of government: like their advisor Montesquieu, they’d also studied history.

Strongmen always promise protection to the people they con into doing their dirty work. What they deliver to those folks, though, is always collateral damage.

Right now you’re standing close to a light that feels bright and powerful. History suggests, however, that it’ll end by burning the people nearest to it. Including you.

Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.

You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in.

Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.

As people testified before Congress on Tuesday about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:

“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:

“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:

“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.

They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.

The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”

The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).

The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.

When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.

“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.

The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)

By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.

By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.

In Tennessee, the Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.

Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.

In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.

In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.

Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.

Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.

Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.

History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.

History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …
“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

• Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?
• Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?
• Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?
• Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?
• Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?
• Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?
• Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?
• Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?
• Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?
• Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?
• Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

See you in the streets on March 28th!

A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility, or for-profit concentration camp, in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn’t cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what’s happening to him. Odds are he has no understanding of why he’s being treated with such brutality.

Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a “deterrent” to “illegal immigration” that’s “poisoning the blood” of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

Liam is confined to a cell in a cold, concrete facility where the lights are kept on day and night.

There’s no school for him to attend, nobody to hold him and reassure him, his medical care limited, and the food is so bad he’s struggled to keep it down.

His lawyer says his health has declined while in government custody.

But this isn’t really about immigration; it’s about power. And how stories and language facilitate the exercise or restraint of that power. It’s about what happens when a nation starts talking about its own people (and the people seeking refuge here) as if they’re enemies in a war.

As Radley Balko noted on BlueSky:

“I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” — Tom Homan in February”Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely.” — Tom Homan in March
”I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room…” — Tom Homan in July, referring to a Democratic congressman who’d offended him.

This week, during a press briefing, Homan again used the language of war to describe immigration enforcement against brown-skinned people, and resistance from blue states. Words like “fight,” “battle,” “theater,” and “invasion.” When asked how many of his masked goons were still in Minneapolis, he said:

“3,000. There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.” [emphasis added]

“In theater”?!? That’s how Gen. Eisenhower used to talk about taking on the Nazis in Europe. That’s not how law enforcement talks; it’s how invading armies speak of invading the territory of their enemies.

That’s no accident by Homan, nor is it the mere use of “colorful phrasing.” When he uses that kind of language, he does it explicitly as a political weapon. And history tells us exactly where that leads.

Richard Nixon taught us this lesson when he declared a “war on drugs” and then used it to spy on and persecute antiwar and civil rights leaders: the language of warfare changes the moral rules.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In war, suffering is normal. In war, collateral damage is unfortunate but socially acceptable. In war, the people caught in the middle stop being human beings with rights and start being obstacles to be managed, broken, or, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed.

Five-year-old Liam, one of hundreds of children Trump and Homan have shipped off to Texas, is now living inside the consequences of that shift in language, that “war” rhetorical frame.

This is absolutely unnecessary.

The United States has laws for immigration enforcement. We have courts, due process and longstanding legal standards for the treatment of children in government custody.

I recently wrote about a friend who was deported during Barack Obama’s administration by ICE agents in windbreakers with badges and ID, who politely gave him a month to get his affairs in order. Obama actually deported more people than Trump in any given year, including 2025, and nobody had their window smashed in or took 10 bullets in the back.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since 1924 when the Border Patrol was created, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.

After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is more about the skin color of the deportees than about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

None of those systems require keeping children locked in facilities where the lights never go off. None of them requires denying a child a hug or an education. None of them require the conditions that lawyers and doctors have repeatedly warned cause physical and psychological harm to both children and adults but that Miller, Homan, Trump, et al insist on using.

The conditions of this child’s confinement aren’t a bureaucratic accident; they’re the predictable result of a system designed around the use of violence, isolation, terror, and pain directed at people with nonwhite skin as a brutal way of enforcing “deterrence” to Make America White Again.

A system designed to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to private prison operators on the assumption they’ll recycle a good chunk of that back as campaign contributions and “gifts” to Republican politicians.

For years now, Republicans and rightwing media figures have described immigrants as if they’re part of an invasion. A “flood,” or a “threat” to be repelled. When leaders and the press talk about human beings that way, people find it easier to treat them as less than human. It becomes easier to cut corners, ignore the suffering, and to look away when a child gets sick or even dies behind locked doors.

And — like Nixon’s war on drugs — it doesn’t stop with migrants.

Trump’s war on immigrants is as phony as was Nixon’s War on Drugs. Blacks are again the victims, but now instead of the young white men and women who took LBJ and Nixon down, he chose brown-skinned children. This is a sickness.

When that same war language is turned against Blue states, states that disagree with grandstanding politicians and brutal, inhumane agendas, something even more dangerous happens. Political disagreement becomes treason. Federalism becomes defiance. And America itself starts to look like a battlefield.

If we accept that it’s normal to treat migrant children this way because we’re at war during an invasion, what else becomes acceptable? What happens the next time a governor refuses to comply with a federal directive? What happens the next time protesters take to the streets, or a reporter chronicles a demonstration? Who gets labeled the enemy then?

This is not hypothetical. We don’t even have to reach back to the 1930s in Europe; we’ve seen this movie before right here in America.

The “war on drugs” gave us mass incarceration and militarized police. The “war on terror” gave us torture, secret prisons, and ongoing surveillance.

Every time we let wartime language redefine our domestic policy debates, the result is the same. Rights shrink, power concentrates, and dissidents, members of the media, and the most vulnerable alike pay the price.

Children are supposed to be the line we never cross: they’re the moral stress test of any society. If a system refuses to protect its children, it isn’t a system worth defending.

Little Liam locked up in that Texas facility behind concrete and razor wire is not a symbol: he’s a child who should be in school. Who should be sleeping in his own bed at home, tucked in by a loving parent. Who should be held by people who see him as a human being, not a person with brown skin to be exploited to satisfy the racist blood-lust of the MAGA base.

Supporters of these policies will say that enforcement is necessary. That the private, for-profit facilities they use meet legal standards. That Homan’s rhetoric is just “tough talk.”

But it’s all bull----: enforcement doesn’t require cruelty. Following the law doesn’t require dehumanization. And words are never just words when they come from people with power.

Language shapes policy. Policy shapes systems. Systems shape societies.

That’s the through line from Homan’s bizarre press briefing filled with war talk to a small child lying awake hungry, shivering, and crying under fluorescent lights.

A nation that truly believes in liberty and justice doesn’t have to declare war on children to enforce its laws. It doesn’t need to turn sovereign states into enemies in order to govern effectively, or imprison reporters for doing their jobs. And it doesn’t need to abandon its humanity to keep its citizens safe.

The question this regime confronts us with isn’t one of how to enforce or not enforce immigration law; it’s what kind of society we’re willing to become in the process.

America’s economic system has never been fair or perfect but for more than a century it rested on basic guardrails that kept instability in check and allowed us to fight for progress and win. Those guardrails are now being stripped away by policies that favor wealth and power over accountability and long-term stability.

For over a hundred years, the United States has been the cornerstone of international economic stability. The independence of our central bank (the “Fed”) has been a part of it, as has the strength of the dollar, which comes about in large part because the rest of the world relies on our currency as the default for international trade.

And now Donald Trump and the GOP are threatening it all.

Trump has added $2 trillion to our national debt in the past 12 months, and he’s on course to do it again (or worse) this year. While our entire GDP — the entirety of all goods and services produced in America every year — is roughly $31.1 trillion, our national debt stands at $38.4 trillion.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell pointed out on Wednesday:

“Right now we’re running a very large deficit at essentially full employment and so the fiscal picture needs to be addressed, and it’s not really being addressed,” adding, “the path is unsustainable and the sooner we work on it, the better.”

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, our national debt was less than $1 trillion, because every president from FDR to Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Ford to Carter had worked to pay down the roughly 140 percent of GDP debt we ran up fighting World War II.

Across those same presidencies, America had also built a broad and strong social safety net for its citizens, primarily through the New Deal and Great Society programs. And Republicans hated it all, particularly because it’d been paid for with a 74 percent to 91 percent income tax on billionaires and a 50 percent income tax on corporate profits.

They were desperate to find a way to force Democrats to gut their own “Santa” social welfare programs, so, Republicans reasoned, if they just cut taxes on rich people and then ran the debt up hard and fast enough it would freak out Democrats and force them to dial back social spending.

They called it their “Two Santas” strategy, which I detail here, and over the course of the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and two illegal wars, four Republican presidents managed to add over $37 trillion to our national debt.

The grimmest consequence of this is that we’re spending $1.2 trillion every year on interest payments on our national debt. That’s money that could otherwise have gone to create a national healthcare system, provide free college education, or help people buy their first homes but, instead, is going to payments to wealthy investors here and abroad who hold US Treasuries.

Up until recently, we were able to pull this off because the US Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency for the better part of a century. All sorts of international transactions (especially oil) are denominated in dollars, so there’s a huge worldwide demand for our currency because you can’t trade without them; that keeps the dollar’s value strong and lets us borrow at what would otherwise be absurdly low rates.

That, in turn, is essentially a subsidy for Americans of all stripes: lower mortgage rates, lower car loan rates, easier credit, and US-based companies can more easily finance growth and new product development.

It also gives our government more power on the international stage because we control the dollars everybody must use, so we can exploit that leverage to seize other countries’ dollar-denominated assets, enforce embargos, and freeze economic activity.

But twice in the past twelve months the value of the dollar has taken a huge hit, in both cases because the world freaked out at Trump’s insanity and started to sell dollars.

The first was in April of last year (a 6 percent drop in value) when Trump announced his bizarre worldwide tariffs; the second was last week when he went to Davos and blithered through a semi-coherent speech that left international leaders wondering about his sanity, his judgement, and his reliability. And, by inference, the judgment and reliability of the United States itself.

Trump’s own economic illiteracy and impulse-driven tariff policies, in other words, have damaged the value of our currency and may have put the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency at risk.

The most visible consequence of this collapse in the dollar’s value are spikes in the prices of gold (now over $5,000/ounce, up from $1,077 in 2015) and silver, and how much more expensive foreign travel has become. Three years ago, the euro was at parity with the dollar (one dollar buys one euro), but today a dollar only buys €0.84 (84 cents).

As the dollar drops in value, that’s ultimately reflected in everything imported becoming more expensive (which drives inflation), although it does help companies that export things as it makes their goods and services cheaper.

The big impact, though, could come if international investors and other countries conclude it’s unlikely that the US will be able to repay our debts.

Ever since the Bush Crash of 2008 revealed how deregulation had corrupted our banking system, foreign investors holdings of US debt have steadily declined.

For the rest of the world to have “full faith and confidence” in the US and our currency, they must be convinced we operate with economic transparency and consistently abide by the rule of law.

Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs, often used to extort other nations into giving his family a new hotel or golf course, his constant lies on the international stage about everything from renewable energy to our “right” to invade a foreign country and capture its leader, to his killing fishermen off the coast of Venezuela and his current threats against Iran, all argue against trusting us.

Trump’s already destroyed our soft power by gutting USAID, ruined our relationships with our allies by embracing Putin and trash-talking NATO and the EU, and now is shaking the confidence of our remaining democratic allies by imposing police-state tactics on Blue cities.

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries are on the move, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE having joined recently in an agreement to use their alternative currencies instead of dollars. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) is now also challenging our SWIFT system, and South Africa and Brazil are the most recent countries to integrate it into their own financial systems. They’re using the real and the yuan to trade things like soybeans, going entirely around the dollar.

India and the UAE are now trading in rupees and the dirham, and China is using yuan to buy natural gas from the UAE. China has almost entirely abandoned the dollar for their trade with Russia, the UAE, and Iran. Like South Africa, Brazil has increasingly been using the real and the yuan to settle bilateral trade with China, bypassing the US dollar.

Thus, in recent years, alternatives to the greenback are gaining traction. Even Trump’s good buddy Javier Milei in Argentina is now trading with China in yuan instead of dollars.

We still have enormous momentum and a collapse of the dollar or the international system based on it is unlikely to happen in the near term, but if Trump continues to badger our Federal Reserve or appoints a toady to its chair, and continues with his erratic, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior here and abroad, there’s a good chance that a concerted international effort to de-dollarize will pick up even more steam than it already has.

Economic collapse isn’t inevitable, but it becomes more likely when demagogues choose inequality, debt, and instability over responsibility and shared prosperity.

Whether this era is remembered as a turning point or just a warning from our Fed chief will depend on whether we ignore those choices Republicans have made for 45 years, or if we finally confront and reverse them.

Hang on, keep your eyes open, and follow these trends. Forewarned is forearmed.

There is something deeply unsettling about Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning 80 years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every 80 years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy.

What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Nobody’s sure exactly why this keeps happening every 80 years. It may be because when the people who lived through the last catastrophe have just died off, their lived memory of repression and violence is gone with them. The guardrails then weaken, the warnings are forgotten, and people take leaps without remembering the lessons from the past.

Or it may simply be the way generations cycle through cultural and political power, producing recurring moments every eighty years when fear, grievance, and concentrated wealth overwhelm democratic restraint.

But it certainly appears to be real. Consider the history starting in the late 17th century as America became an important economic and strategic British colony:

• The government’s heavily armed men walked the streets as enforcers of religious conformity, making sure people showed up at the “right” church. Attendance was compulsory, dissenters or non-Puritans were fined or harassed, and the power of the state marched in lockstep with the power of the pulpit. Then came the Glorious Revolution and the end of King James II’s reign, as colonial charters were rewritten, Protestant dissenters gained new legal rights, and the idea of religious freedom in British America caught fire (eventually to be enshrined in the First Amendment). It was 1690.
• Eighty years later, the government’s heavily armed agents were roaming the streets looking for people who’d spoken out against King George III or his East India Company. If you defied them, they could imprison or even shoot you. The people, enraged, rose up, threw their tea in Boston harbor, and demanded self-governance and a political system that respected the rights of citizens. It was 1773.
• Eighty years after the American Revolution, armed enforcers again stalked the streets, this time in the Confederate South. They hunted abolitionists, journalists, and people of color who dared challenge the brutal system of racial hierarchy and human bondage they ran. If you resisted, you could be beaten, hanged, or shot with impunity. Speech was crushed. Violence enforced obedience. Elections were rigged. The nation was driven into civil war to stop an explicitly authoritarian system that had seized control of half the country. It was the late 1850s.
• Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, the government’s agents, heavily armed, were going door-to-door in communities across western states looking for people of color. Americans and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were immediately seized and put into concentration camps scattered around the country. It was 1942, just months after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
• Exactly eighty years after the end of World War II, Donald Trump sent his heavily armed agents into American communities on “Kavanaugh stop” missions to find people with dark skin or foreign accents, regardless of their refugee or legal status, and imprison them in privately-run for-profit concentration camps. In Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities people are rising up and fighting back when confronted with chemical weapons and armed thugs who believe they have what VP Vance called “absolute immunity” to kill American citizens.

Each of these moments forced Americans to make a choice.

• In 1690, we chose religious freedom.
• In 1770, we rejected having a king and embraced the creation of a government “by the consent of the governed.”
• In 1860, we rejected the fascist system that had completely seized control of the Confederate states and we preserved democracy for the continent.
• In 1943, we freed the 140,000+ Japanese immigrants and Japanese-ancestry Americans we’d imprisoned after Pearl Harbor and fought a war to reject Hitler and Tojo’s attempt at creating a worldwide fascist empire.
• And here we are, eighty-one years after the end of WWII, once again facing an authoritarian crisis that’s forcing Americans to decide afresh who we are and what form of government we want.

Trump and his gang of lickspittles, toadies, and incompetent hangers-on are hell-bent on turning America into a Russia-like authoritarian state with single party rule. Almost without exception, they’ve cowed the entire Republican Party into a frightened silence as their Brownshirts spread across the country to terrorize any city whose citizens had the temerity to vote against them.

Outside of a few real stars including Walz, Pritzker, Frey, Ellison, and Newsom, Democrats — particularly national Democratic leadership — have failed to meet the moment.

Nine turncoat Democrats even voted last week to give ICE more money and power (Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York) and Hakeem Jeffries did nothing to punish them. None lost committee assignments or other perks. No one from Democratic leadership or from the DNC has meaningfully challenged the power or death-dealing of the Trump regime.

As a result, average Americans have picked up the slack, organizing ad hoc when ICE shows up, and showing up by the millions in the streets for No Kings and other protests.

Emperor Trump’s response has been brutal, murdering citizens in the streets and then defiantly lying about the circumstances while slandering the memories of those his goons killed. He’s questioned whether the election will even happen this fall and is now demanding voting rolls from every Blue state so, presumably, his people can figure out how to purge them of Democratic voters.

We are thus at a turning point, much as we were in the 1490 War of the Roses, the 1570 Armada Crisis, the 1690s Glorious Revolution, the 1770s American Revolution, the 1860s Civil War, the Republican Great Depression and World War II of 1929-1945, and today’s Trump Fascism Crisis.

Every one of these prior “great turnings” has produced an expansion of human rights, an improvement in quality of life and freedom, and, essentially, a rebooting of the country. We stand today on the verge of another turning point, every bit as important and consequential as the six that preceded it.

Will America choose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarian model, compiling lists of “domestic terrorists” who dare film ICE operations, and killing people who dare drive away from them or try to protect people from being beaten to the ground and pepper-sprayed in the face?

Or will we constrain the jackbooted thugs who are currently running wild in our cities, stop the naked corruption of the Trump family that’s made billions in their first year back in charge, and help the GOP reinvent itself along the lines of Dwight Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism?

Neither outcome is guaranteed.

Trump and his degenerate suckups have no intention of relinquishing power, and billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison appear committed to using their media and social media power to back him up. MAGA families are replacing their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with ones that say, “Comply or Die” as submissive conservative men worship at the golden “Big Daddy Trump” altar.

But the flame of freedom also burns bright in the hearts of most average Americans and has for over 250 years. The heirs of MLK’s marches, the SDS resistance to Vietnam, and my father’s generation who put down Hitler like a dog continue to spark and inspire us.

A time of choosing is again upon us.

Will we stand with our ancestors and re-embrace democracy and reinvent America as a new and better nation with equal justice for all and a commitment to peace and human rights? Or will we become a MAGA version of Putin’s empire bent on war, conquest, and terror, egged on by rightwing billionaires and their media?

At the moment — but only at this moment — our fate is in our own hands. Now, we must choose.

Over on Threads, sierracascadia posted:

“CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying ‘there may have been a breach of protocol’ and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This f------ clown show guys. They are all going down.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement overseeing the Minneapolis ICE onslaught of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that.

But, wait a minute. Slow down. It’s way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.

Fascist governments don’t rise in one giant arc, nor do they collapse that way. It’s more of what electrical engineers and ham radio operators would call a “sawtooth pattern.” Climb an inch up toward fascism, get pushback from the public so you back down a half-inch until things quiet down, then move up another inch in another step toward the ultimate goal of total tyranny.

Learn from your own mistakes, while getting the public used to each step, so Trump and his lickspittles can move onto the next falling domino in the process of ending democracy and replacing it with strongman oligarchic autocracy.

Step-by-step, the fascist leadership gets there. As has happened so often in other countries across history.

In other words, ICE is still operating on the assumption of complete immunity, still kicking in doors without Fourth Amendment warrants, still capable of killing you or me without ever answering for it. And they know it.

We are still on the path to dictatorship.

Eventually, people in countries that are in the process of flipping from democracy to fascism figure out that they’re now living in a dictatorship; by then, however, it’s usually too late.

For people in Hungary, it was May, 2020 when Viktor Orbán started arresting people for their Facebook posts. For folks in Russia, it was December, 2011 when Alexi Navalny and his supporters were first assaulted in public and then arrested and sent to brutal gulags in Siberia. For Germans, it was July 14, 1933 — six months after he became chancellor — when Adolf Hitler outlawed all political parties except his own.

But at first, the steps from democracy to fascism and tyranny always seems like “just another thing the government has to do to deal with a very real problem.” Something that reasonable people would understand and can’t reasonably object to. Something that, even if weird, makes a certain amount of sense.

After all, we do have millions of people in this country without documentation….

Until suddenly the mask is dropped and the twisted face of hateful fascism peers out at the country with laser-red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with threats and lies. Wearing camouflage, anonymous, face masked, carrying handcuffs and pepper spray while brandishing a gun.

Today, Trump appears to be backing away from his senior toadies who’re still blaming Nicole Good and Alex Pretti for their own executions, and both Democrats and the media are proclaiming Bovino’s departure as a “victory for democracy.”

It’s no such thing.

This is a recalibration. Trump, like Orbán and Vladimir Putin before him, is learning just how far he can go before he or his people encounter resistance they can’t bludgeon their way through.

They’re figuring out which messages will work to get us to accept the changes they’re making to America and our political and economic systems, including how much they can steal for themselves and their families, and which schemes won’t work out for them.

This is an old playbook that dates back to Machiavelli and before. It’s how every dictator ends up fabulously rich while wielding life-or-death power.

Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very “banality” and “ordinariness” of such evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence ... and yet still hours of pleasure ... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).

“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote of himself, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

Everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Sound familiar?

Consider Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial:

“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.”

That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Can you imagine if Barack Obama had asserted such a power? Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should have set off alarm bells. Instead, it got the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay…and eventually acceptance with barely a follow-up peep from the media.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicled in The New York Times:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

Congressional Democrats, thinking they’re winning the PR war (and not realizing this is a battle within that war, not the war itself) are suggesting they’ll only vote to fund DHS/ICE this week to avoid a government shutdown under the following conditions, as Reuters reports:

“Democrats are seeking: a prohibition on ICE detentions or deportations of American citizens; a ban on masks worn by ICE agents; a requirement to wear body cameras; explicit prohibitions on excessive use of force; prohibitions on raids of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, as well as hospitals and schools; and no absolute immunity from prosecution of agents violating codes of conduct.”

It’s a reasonable list, if ICE were a legitimate institution worth preserving. And, of course, we do need somebody to enforce our immigration laws.

But this agency has become so corrupt, has developed such a toxic culture, and has hired so many outright dangerous former felons and open racists, that it must be shut down and replaced.

And what about arresting and prosecuting the people who committed the murders that we know about? And investigating the ones we’ve only heard rumors of?

And letting that prosecution go right up the chain of command all the way to the top, like it did during Watergate, when the Attorney General of the United States went to prison for years?

Why aren’t Democrats talking like that? You know, if the shoe was on the other foot, Republicans would be.

Even if Republicans were to accept all these reforms — and odds are they won’t — we’d still be on the same path toward fascism. It would just look more orderly and lawful, and we’d breathe a sigh of relief, not realizing we’d just helped the Trump regime with their latest readaptation.

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward.

The antidote to normalization is outrage and resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin” and attacks Somalis like Representative Ilhan Omar we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say, “That’s fascist rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize and demand an end to the entire rotten undertaking.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us peacefully in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

And demand that our Democratic leaders do the same.

Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress on Thursday was a master class at demonstrating how elected Republicans have become what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck termed People of the Lie, in his 1986 bestseller. It was the perfect example for this week being the 16th anniversary of the corrupt Citizens United decision.

For most of American history, lying in politics carried a real and immediate cost. Get caught and you’d lose credibility, maybe get voted out of office, and sometimes — as with the roughly 40 people around Richard Nixon who went to prison — even face criminal consequences.

That informal but effective enforcement mechanism depended on a shared understanding that truth mattered and that the law applied equally to everyone. Five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, shattered that understanding when they handed down Citizens United.

By redefining political bribery as “free speech,” Justices Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Scalia turned money into power without accountability and, in the process, turned lying into a currency that could be minted, traded, and hoarded by unscrupulous Republican politicians.

Once political power could be bought openly, the incentive structure in American politics changed. The goal of today’s GOP’s is no longer persuasion grounded in reality; instead, it’s morphed into a sophisticated system of lies and half-truths.

With social media amplification and backed up by a billionaire-owned rightwing media machine larger than any the world’s ever seen, the bigger the lie, the more emotionally gripping it is, and the faster and farther it’d travel, the more useful it became to Republicans. Lying stopped being a moral failing and became the foundation of their business and political model.

When a Republican politician can raise money, mobilize voters, intimidate opponents, or justify cruelty with a falsehood, that lie pays for itself with huge political, power, and even economic dividends. Truth, by contrast, became a liability as we saw Republican after Republican try to discredit or shut up Jack Smith, in the service of the Party’s 2020 “election fraud” lie.

The GOP has become so addicted to lies that its members can’t even say out loud the actual name of the Democratic Party, instead falling back on Joe McCarthy’s advice that “‘democratic’ sounds too nice” and instead Republicans should always “call it the Democrat Party, with an emphasis on the ‘rat’!” If you don’t know what I mean, just listen to the Republicans who appear on the Sunday political shows. And, sadly, Democrats and news people don’t even bother to call them out any more.

That’s the context in which the testimony by Smith must be understood. What we watched wasn’t just a partisan disagreement; it was an embarrassingly public demonstration of how deeply-monetized lying has woven itself into the Republican Party’s operating system, even before a pathological liar became the party’s standard-bearer.

Smith calmly laid out the facts and legal standards, and Republican members responded by repeating b------- narratives that have already been disproven in scores of courtrooms, in sworn testimony, and on the public record.

• They accused him of “weaponizing” the Justice Department despite the fact that his investigations relied heavily on Republican witnesses (he didn’t have a single Democratic witness on his lists for his proposed prosecutions of Trump) and followed long-established prosecutorial rules.
• Republicans desperately tried to frame routine subpoenas and phone metadata requests as “spying,” knowing full well those tools are standard operations in any serious criminal investigation.
• They minimized or redirected responsibility for January 6 while Smith stated plainly that Donald Trump caused it and then set out to exploit the violence to keep himself in power.
• They substituted grievance, character assassination, and personal insult for engaging with the evidence, turning the hearing into material for their fundraising emails and “sharable” or “viral” cable news clips rather than a serious attempt to find the truth.

Those moments illustrate the multiple layers of the lies Republicans have been selling us for four decades, as well as the new ones Trump is trying to get away with. They’re lying to the public about what the law allows, lying about what the evidence shows, lying about how investigations work, lying to delegitimize any person or institution that threatens their power, and lying to base voters who’ve been trained to accept the lies as gospel.

Each of those lies has value; each can be cashed in for attention, money, or even political or legal protection.

This poisoning of the GOP and its base didn’t start with Trump or on January 6.

• For four decades, Republicans have lied relentlessly about taxes, promising that tax cuts for billionaires would lift working families even as wages stagnated and wealth exploded at the top.
• They lied about “free trade,” insisting it would empower workers while entire communities were hollowed out and then told their suffering was just some weird but inevitable force of economic nature.
• They lied about unions, portraying them as corrupt or obsolete while quietly celebrating the theft of power from labor to capital.
• They lied about monopolies, calling consolidation “efficiency” while prices rose, competition vanished, and the average American family is spending $5,000 a year more than necessary because of this “monopoly tax.”
• They lied about deregulation, dismissing pollution and climate damage as imaginary or exaggerated while entire communities paid the health and environmental costs and thousands lose their homes every year.
• They lied about immigrants, claiming they were more likely to be criminals than American citizens when the opposite is true.
• They lied about fossil fuel subsidies, calling them “energy security” while gutting green projects that threatened entrenched Republican donors.
• The White House even lied about a protestor, editing her picture with AI to make it look like she was crying when arrested when the opposite was the case.

Every one of those lies followed the same pattern: ignore the data, attack the messengers, repeat the talking point, and cash the check.

Citizens United — which came into being when Clarence Thomas, himself on the take from a rightwing Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with business before the Court, became the deciding vote — supercharged that cycle. As a result, billionaires can now pour unlimited money into politics, teaching Republican politicians which stories are rewarded and which are punished.

With corruption having become the underlying foundation of the GOP, lying became not just acceptable but necessary. Telling the truth about inequality, climate change, immigration, corporate power, Trump’s crimes, the state of our health care system, or even democracy itself threatens the party’s revenue stream.

What made yesterday’s hearing so particularly revealing is that it showed how normalized lying has become for GOP politicians.

The Republican inquisitors evinced no embarrassment, no hesitation, and didn’t even attempt to reconcile their own claims with any of the known facts. The lies were delivered as ritual, as tribal identity markers, as proof of belonging. As we saw in Germany in the 1930s and the USSR in the mid-20th century, this is what happens when a political party internalizes lying as a political strategy.

M. Scott Peck warned decades ago that social systems built on lies eventually lose the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, loyalty from morality, or raw power from truth. We’re watching his 1986 warning play out in real time.

From the Reagan Revolution and his massive tax cuts to George W. Bush sending our young men and women off to Iraq and Afghanistan to Donald Trump pushing his claim he won 2020, when lying is rewarded by billionaire donors, complicit media, and with gullible voters, it doesn’t stay confined to campaign ads. It metastasizes through institutions, corrodes accountability, and turns governance into mere theater.

Citizens United didn’t just corrupt elections: it corrupted truth itself. And until we reverse it, until we restore the idea that democracy isn’t for sale and reality isn’t optional, lying will remain the most profitable commodity in Republican politics.

And our country will be forced to continue paying the price.

Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even Whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.

But that’s not their real message.

Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.

One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.

“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”

His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:

“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In other words: “Obey or die!”

It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.

This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.

Noem and Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.

Their real message — and Trump’s, Stephen Miller’s, and JD Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:

“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”

And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.

Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington, D.C., perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.

Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.

Billionaires are buying fancy homes around D.C. so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.

And the message under it all is:

“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”

Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.

— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.

Their message: “Obey or die.”

— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.

He didn’t obey, so he had to die.

These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Vladimir Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Viktor Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Recip Tayyep Erdoğan does in Turkey, and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi does in Egypt, among others.

This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook, as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”

It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.

They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”

And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.

The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.

Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.

When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.

That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.

Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.

We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.

Trump himself has already been found guilty of fraud multiple times, exposed for stealing money from a children’s cancer charity, and found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. His lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.

Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.

Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.

Soon, everybody is silent.

Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”

And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.

This isn’t merely scandalous or unethical: it’s impeachable on its face and dangerous to the survival of democracy worldwide.

Donald Trump is trying to use a United Nations resolution to justify making himself King of the World via a new “Board of Peace” that Trump says “might” replace the UN, with the ability to pass the title along to his son, Don Jr., if he continues to please his father.

No, this isn’t an exaggeration.

It all started when the United Nations Security Council voted to accept Resolution 2803 on Nov. 17, to make effective the Gaza peace plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas in October 2025.

Resolution 2803 called for a two-year international stabilization force and a “Board of Peace” to oversee the process in the region. It was explicit, however, that this would be a board with a very limited portfolio:

“The Security Council, Welcoming the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict … Welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace (BoP) as a transitional administration with international legal personality that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for, the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan, and in a manner consistent with relevant international legal principles, until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French Proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

In response to that, Trump had his administration lawyers create an entirely new private, non-governmental “treaty‑based international organization” with its own legal personality, that is not a U.S. government agency, corporation, or standard NGO/non‑profit. This new entity called the “Board of Peace” would:

• Make Trump its chairman, with essentially absolute power and a veto over every action.
• Make the chairman the only person able to invite or approve new member-states into the group.
• Give Trump the sole ability to appoint his own successor as heir/successor/chairman, such as Don Jr.
• Keep the Board of Peace in existence for perpetuity should the current or a subsequent Chairman decide.
• Make the entrance fee for permanent members $1 billion each, money the Chairman controls.

The draft charter Trump has proposed for his Board of Peace doesn’t even mention Gaza, anywhere; as a result, it appears designed to replace the UN as a new governing body for the entire world.

When asked if Trump intended the Board to replace the UN, he replied that it “might” do so, adding:

“The UN should have settled every one of the wars that I settled. I never went to them. I never even thought to go to them.”

The White House has already named the first four Executive Board members: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, billionaire and Trump friend Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Vladimir Putin also indicated he’d like to join and suggested Russia’s billion-dollar entrance fee could come from funds already seized by the US government.

This “give us an inch and we’ll take a mile” attempt to co-opt the power and role of the UN and give it entirely to the Trump family, creating a new international royal family that could rule the world for generations to come, was described by Jacob T. Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, as “impeachable.”

“Regardless of whether this organization ever even looks in the direction of Gaza, it’s an assault on the international order subordinating the decisions of states to the personal jurisdiction of the Trump family … It’s hard to be shocked anymore, I know, but we should be shocked.”

This international power grab also comports with Trump’s statement yesterday at Davos that his becoming a dictator for the world would be a good thing:

“…I’m a dictator,” he told a reception for CEOs, adding, “But sometimes you need a dictator.”

It’s an echo of his statement last August as he was ordering troops into the streets of Washington, DC:

“A lot of people are saying, maybe we like a dictator,” then added, speaking of people’s comments about himself, “Already they’re saying he’s a dictator. The place is going to hell and we’ve got to stop it.”

With no elections, accountability, or checks-and-balances, this “Board of Peace” is a direct assault on democracy worldwide. The chairman (Trump) is not answerable to voters, Congress, courts, or international law: this is the opposite of democratic governance.

The chairman overrides all collective decisions, and even if member states vote, their decisions mean nothing without Trump’s approval. That isn’t democracy, it’s veto-by-monarchy.

This is designed to normalize authoritarian governance worldwide, fulfilling Putin’s dream. If the U.S. president can create a parallel global authority that ignores democratic norms, why shouldn’t other strongmen like him and Xi Jinping do the same? Or simply start ignoring UN mandates and rules, saying they now submit to the BoP’s authority instead?

It’s also corruption, plain and simple. The billion-dollar “fee” to stay in good standing is legalized bribery, making the entire scheme simply a form of extortion dressed up as governance: pay or be expelled.

Because membership can be terminated at the chairman’s whim — even after payment — this isn’t a real “treaty organization”: it’s a protection racket that violates the most basic anti-corruption norms the U.S. claims to defend. “Nice little country you have there; we’ll help you bring peace if you pay up to the Trump family…”

It’s also establishing a new form of dynastic rule with the Trump family at its center. Trump appointing his own successor isn’t even subtle: it’s a proposal for hereditary power without even the pretense of merit or consent.

And, because the Trump family, not the American people, controls the future of the organization, it’s not even a nod in the direction of the democracy our Founders and generations of Americans have fought and died to bring into being and keep alive. Even if voters were to decisively reject Trumpism at the ballot box, the Trump dynasty would still keep power at a level above the United States itself.

This mirrors the logic of autocracies the U.S. claims to oppose, including Russia, North Korea, and the Gulf monarchies that are all so dear to Trump. America fought a revolution to escape dynastic rule, but now Trump wants to establish one here and then export it worldwide.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a direct threat to American constitutional government because the US itself, under the terms of this charter, becomes subject to Trump’s personal authority. Under the proposed document, the U.S. can be expelled unless it pays a ransom or pleases the chairman.

This also undermines the American presidency as an institution — and future American presidents — because a future democratically elected president could be extorted or sidelined by this private Trump-led entity. It also bypasses Congress entirely with no treaties, no ratification, and no oversight. This isn’t “America First”: it’s Trump and his family first, raw personal power, with America Optional.

And it takes a direct whack at the international order established by the United Nations eighty-plus years ago. The BoP charter doesn’t even bother to mention Gaza, its supposedly humanitarian justification. International law is thus replaced by the Trump family’s personal jurisdiction, and nation-states are no longer equal actors; they become simple clients dependent on Trump’s favor.

The structure also rewards authoritarian regimes and punishes democracies. Dictators can pay, flatter, and comply, while democracies are constrained by law and public accountability and thus disadvantaged.

Already, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has said, “We have, of course, accepted this honorable invitation.” After the United States pulled back from 66 UN organizations and is now $1 billion in arrears on our dues, the 21 nations already committed to signing up also include: Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Israel, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Uzbekistan and Mongolia.

This dangerous precedent doesn’t bring peace to Gaza or anyplace else. Instead, it replaces law with loyalty to the Trump dynasty.

If Trump can get away this, so can the next demagogue because once democratic norms are abandoned, they don’t magically return. It sets a precedent for private, unaccountable global power.

Which is why Jacob Levy is right: this is impeachable on its face. This phony “Board of Peace” is a personal power project that treats democracy as an inconvenience, the rule of law as optional, and the world as a Trump family inheritance.

We should be as shocked and furious as are the leaders of Europe’s top democracies — who have said they will not participate — and moving quickly toward impeaching our wannabe king and his courtiers.

Donald Trump went to Davos on Wednesday morning and gave the speech that Vladimir Putin wanted him to, lying and pissing off Europe and shaking the North Atlantic alliance to its core.

Our president has refused to help Ukraine in any meaningful way for a year now, giving Russia the room to destroy much of that country’s electric and heat infrastructure so badly that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel his trip to Davos to deal with the crisis.

Trump’s now invaded Venezuela and is threatening the same with Greenland, legitimizing Putin’s land-grabs in Georgia and Ukraine.

Trump’s ICE goons are destroying the rule of law in America, running amok in Minneapolis, punishing — and killing — the residents of that city for having elected politicians who’d dare advocate democracy over autocracy.

Russian media is proudly proclaiming that their own internal crackdowns on immigrants, dissidents, and people of color aren’t so bad because Trump’s doing the same thing in America. We’ve legitimized Putin’s racist police state.

Trump’s destroyed much of America’s “soft power,” our friendly relations with resource-rich developing nations, by killing off John F. Kennedy’s USAID program, directly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with more to come.

Many of the countries we’ve abandoned are now re-aligning themselves with Russia and China, to Putin’s delight.

Trump’s duplicating Putin’s “enemy within” rhetoric to amplify the Russian-promoted “Great Replacement Theory” meme that claims wealthy Jews are paying to have Black and brown people “replace” white men in their jobs and lives.

It’s become the operating system for ICE and is tearing America apart, pitting friends, neighbors, and relatives against each other while Russian media celebrates.

The biggest thorn in Putin’s side has been NATO, all the way back to his days as a murderous KGB intelligence officer, and Trump is now shaking that organization all the way down to its foundations by threatening to seize Greenland and trash-talking alliance member states.

Early on as Putin was rolling out his dictatorship, having destroyed Russia’s brief experiment with democracy, he put himself above the law by simply refusing to enforce rights the Russian constitution and laws gave to average citizens.

Trump’s today doing the same thing, simply defying the Epstein Transparency Act and other laws while approving as his ICE goons routinely violate Americans’ civil rights.

From Russia’s point of view, America’s biggest historic strength hasn’t been our formidable military (they have just as many nukes) but was our rock-solid multi-century relationships with allies.

Today, Canada is — for the first time in over a century — preparing to fight back against an American invasion, while the European Union is trying to figure out how to disentangle itself from our economy in the event we start a war with them.

Meanwhile a bigoted Australian billionaire family continues to pump daily pro-Russian-worldview (racist, nationalist, anti-democratic) poison into the minds of Americans.

In the 1940s, Sir Keith Murdoch built his family’s media empire, in part, by running sensationalist articles about Black American GIs stationed in Australia during World War II “raping” and having affairs with white Australian women. Now Fox “News” is one of the most frequently quoted American sources for Putin’s captured domestic media, according to The New York Times.

Everything Trump does, when it doesn’t involve soliciting bribes, hustling pardons, or making himself richer inures benefit directly to Putin. Which raises the question diplomats and leaders across Europe are increasingly asking out loud: why are elected Republicans tolerating this?

Is it just because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery and thus billionaire oligarchs who don’t believe in democracy now own them?

For example, billionaire Peter Theil, who financed JD Vance’s rise to power as the senator from Ohio, has said:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Could it be that most Republican politicians simply agree with those types of sentiments, that democracy is mob rule and inconvenient, and that strongman autocracy is a more stable and predictable form of government? That they’d love to jettison European and Asian democracies in favor of corrupt police states like Russia and Hungary where they can get away with just about anything just so long as they keep the emperor happy?

After all, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nakedly taking millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires with business before the Court and became the deciding vote in the Citizens United case; are Republicans going along with Trump’s corruption because they, themselves, are also taking bribes and using otherwise illegal insider information to make themselves rich?

Or is it because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from crimes and he thinks of himself as America’s monarch, as if he were mad King Ludwig of yore?

Are Republicans afraid — as Mitt Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins — that Trump will use the force of law or activate his lone-wolf white supremacist terrorists to bring GOP politicians to heel or even have their families intimidated or their homes attacked like the Trump supporter who went after Paul Pelosi?

Could it be that Republicans know that most Americans — at least those who haven’t bought fully into the Fox “News” and MAGA cults — have figured out that the GOP’s only loyalty is to billionaires and massive corporations?

All they’ve done since the Reagan Revolution is cut taxes on the morbidly rich while gutting the agencies that catch criminal or unethical activity in government and the military; maybe the GOP now realizes we’ve got their number and that’s why they’re working so hard to purge voting rolls in Blue cities?

Trump’s shocking behavior — and the even more shameful docility of elected Republicans and the lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with — raises questions that will probably only be answered by future historians.

Nonetheless, we must push back. Democrats need to grow a spine, and the upcoming vote on the DHS budget is a great place to start. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) have indicated they may support the legislation, while Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Sen. Rubén Gallego (D-AZ) are signaling a fierce opposition. The battle will almost certainly play out in the Senate over a Democratic filibuster; you can call your two senators and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at 202-224-3121.

Democrats also must signal now and repeatedly that Trump’s pro-Putin, anti-American rhetoric and actions are so unacceptable that impeachment is necessary, both for him and his brownnosers at DHS, ICE, and the FBI.

And if there are any Republicans who have left an ounce of decency, now is the time for them to stand up and speak out. And not to back away as soon as Trump growls, the way Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Todd Young (R-IN) just did with the proposed Venezuela war powers legislation.

Republican senator Barry Goldwater famously walked from the Capitol to the White House to inform Richard Nixon that his criminality had become so severe and obvious that Republicans in Congress could no longer support him and would, if necessary, vote to impeach and convict him.

America needs today’s Republicans to find their spines, reclaim their integrity and patriotism, and politically stop Trump in his tracks. And maybe it’s starting to happen: Republican Rep. Don Bacon (R-NB) just told reporters he’s threatening impeachment:

“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this [Greenland issue]. If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s a start, but there’s a long way to go if Trump is to be held to account.

When future historians ask what Putin wanted from Trump, the answer may be painfully simple: “Everything America once stood for.”

Whether that happens is not yet settled and ultimately depends on what we Americans — across the political spectrum — do next.

For decades, Americans were told that “conservative values” stood for restraint, responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. The rise of Donald Trump forces an unavoidable question: were those values abandoned, or were they a generational lie that made his authoritarian takeover possible?

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP’s abandonment of the principles that animated John McCain and Mitt Romney in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy will keep them fat and happy.

They’re wrong.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said something on my radio program on Monday that would have been shocking just a few years ago but now is becoming increasingly self-evident to anybody with a conscience and an honest view of American politics and history.

He said the GOP as a party with an ideology, a set of principles, or even a governing philosophy is now almost entirely dead.

It’s been replaced by a violent, racist, lawless, unprincipled cult organized entirely around Trump. It’s a cult that demands total loyalty and punishes dissent with both political annihilation and, increasingly, with threats of real-world violence.

Remember when Romney said there were plenty of Republicans in the Senate who wanted to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, but they began flipping when senators started getting death threats against their families?

His biographer, McKay Coppins, wrote that Romney told him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment — vote to convict Trump — and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety.”

That terror is delivered from the hands of both prosecutors who can threaten imprisonment and MAGA lone-wolf assassins like the one who murdered Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota, and those who routinely terrorize federal judges who rule against Trump.

Republican elected officials, Walsh said, echoing Romney, now live in a state of deep fear. Not a metaphorical fear, but genuine terror.

It includes a fear of physical violence, the fear of being primaried and losing their jobs, and the very legitimate terror that Trump will turn the power of the state against them and thus break them financially with legal fees and the threat of prison, as he’s trying to do today with Letitia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff, etc.

Mark Twain noted that history rhymes, and this one is getting downright alarming.

The end of the modern-day GOP and its conversion into a fascist-tolerant party started with Ronald Reagan flipping classical economics on its head with his “supply side” scam and his scapegoating Black people to justify gutting social and educational programs, all to benefit his morbidly rich donors.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement, exploded the costs of health care, housing, and college education, and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

He did this because devastating the working class was actually part of the plan to return “stability” to the American social order, following the outline of Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, and Lewis Powell’s infamous memo.

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the middle class, Republicans believed they could rebuild our nation along the lines of a new form of feudalism, one of the most stable of the ancient governing systems. And when Trump came along, riding the wave of outrage at the economic devastation Reaganism had caused, they thought they could control him, too.

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he’d made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him massively richer but never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 54 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators, he learned — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Thyssen described how traditional German conservatives also convinced themselves they could ride a demagogue into power and then control him. They feared the left more than they feared authoritarianism, believed “order in society” mattered more than democracy, and were certain that once Hitler’s power was secured, moderation would follow.

What followed instead, however, was a demand for total submission or the threat of total personal and national destruction.

Thyssen’s story shows us how fear dissolves loyalty to principles and power silences the soft voice of conscience. Loyalty to a man replaces loyalty to the law and its traditions.

By the time conservatives realized what they’d enabled, escaping Germany was the only remaining option; Thyssen fled the country in 1939 (although the Vichy French captured him and turned him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him until the end of the war).

That brings us back to Russell Kirk and his landmark book The Conservative Mind that I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Although Kirk argued strongly for “classes and order,” claiming that inequality is both natural and good, he also tried to anchor American conservatism in moral restraint, historical humility, institutional continuity, and a deep suspicion of demagogues and mass movements.

He warned repeatedly that if conservatives were to abandon those restraints out of fear or resentment, they’d become something else entirely. He explicitly feared rightwing hate ideology, leader worship, and the belief that force could substitute for virtue.

There’s little doubt Kirk would have despised Trump. Trump embodies almost everything Kirk warned against: contempt for history and institutions, appetite over restraint, grievance over stewardship, and power over a moral order. Trump is not even remotely a conservative in any Burkean or Kirkian sense.

He was able to seize control of the GOP because, over the past four decades, much of American conservatism has simply hollowed itself out as it embraced racism (Southern Strategy); promoted lies about trickle down, voter fraud, and tax cuts; and conducted debt-financed foreign adventurism including Iraq and Afghanistan.

What survived was hierarchy, nationalism, hostility to the left, cultural grievance, and the protection of wealth. Tragically, the GOP has discarded the moral restraint, constitutional humility, reverence for truth, and respect for institutional limits that were once elevated by men like Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and Mitt Romney.

Starting in the 1980s, American conservatism became less a philosophy than a set of race- and gender-based resentments married to perpetual deregulation and tax cuts for the party’s morbidly rich donors. Once that happened, the GOP was defenseless against a charismatic authoritarian who promised dominance and control instead of democracy.

Trump didn’t hijack conservatism from the outside: he stepped into a vacuum created by the GOP’s abandonment of constitutional and traditional American principles. Like Thyssen’s peers, today’s Republican donors and leaders believed they could use the wannabe dictator, ride his popularity, placate his followers, and keep the machinery of government power under control.

They were wrong in the same way German conservatives were wrong, and for the same reasons. Once fear takes over as a governing principle, the most ruthless and outspoken leader will inevitably own the party. Everybody else gets destroyed, some sooner, some later.

Now the GOP exists as a sort of permanent loyalty test. Tell the truth and you’re exiled, uphold the Constitution and you’re primaried, defy the leader and you’re threatened with death or imprisonment.

As Walsh pointed out, most Republicans know exactly what’s happening. They know the lies are lies, the elections weren’t stolen, and under Trump and Kristi Noem violence is being normalized. Many know where this road leads, but fear of Trump’s wrath silences them more effectively than their conservative ideology ever unified them.

This is where the comparison between today’s Republicans and their donors to Thyssen becomes unavoidable. In Germany, conservatism didn’t just die the day Hitler seized power. It began to collapse a decade or more earlier, when conservatives decided that democracy, law, and moral restraint were simply political tools rather than binding commitments.

Once they crossed that line, they lost both the authority and the moral courage to resist Hitler and his Nazi Party. As a result, when the time of real terror directed at them arrived a few years later, that terror was all that was left of the system.

That is where the GOP now stands. It’s no longer a party arguing about tax rates or regulation or even federalism. It’s become, instead, an cult of personal loyalty dedicated to the deification and enrichment of one man and his family. That’s neither conservatism nor democracy.

Which brings us to the question Democrats — and the rest of us — today find ourselves confronting: what do we do about it?

• First, Democrats must stop treating this as a normal partisan contest. This isn’t a disagreement over policy, it’s a struggle over whether the United States remains a constitutional republic governed by law or becomes a fascist regime organized around loyalty and fear. Democrats must say that plainly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. Not “threats to norms,” not “concerns about rhetoric,” but the clear truth: one of our two major parties has abandoned democracy and embraced fascism.
• Second, Democrats should relentlessly frame Trumpism not as strength but as weakness. Authoritarian movements thrive on the myth of invincibility, and Thyssen tells us how that myth collapses when its confronted. Democrats should point out, over and over again, that a party that can’t tolerate dissent, won’t allow truth-tellers, and must rely on hate, fear, and intimidation is not strong, but is fundamentally brittle and weak.
• Third, Democrats should invite disaffected conservatives like Joe Walsh and independents into a pro-democracy coalition without demanding ideological conformity. This is not the moment for purity tests: traditions — including our democratic traditions — survive by coalition and continuity. As fanatic a progressive as I am, I also know Democrats must welcome former Republicans, libertarians, faith conservatives, and business leaders who still believe in the Constitution, even if they disagree on taxes, healthcare, or regulation. The message should be simple: democracy first, arguments later.
• Fourth, Democrats must model the courage of our Founders and the generations since who fought for democracy. That means unrelentingly defending courts, free speech, and the rule of law. The contrast matters: as we saw in South Korea when Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from power last year, authoritarian movements collapse when their opponents are willing to fight for democracy rather than flee or hide in panic.
• And finally, this isn’t just about politicians. We average citizens have the biggest role to play, and Thyssen’s story makes clear what happens when we don’t.

Speak up loud and frequently. Support local journalism. Show up to school board meetings, city councils, and your local Democratic Party meetings. Defend your neighbors who’re being targeted by Trump and his ICE goons. Double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

Authoritarianism feeds on isolation; democracy survives on solidarity and participation.

The most chilling part of Thyssen’s book isn’t that he and his family had to flee Germany: it’s that by the time they did in 1939, it was the only option left.

For those of us who Trump identified in his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), it might be a matter of months or a year or two unless he and his regime are blocked from moving forward with their repression. America’s top three experts on fascism have already fled the country; if we don’t win this battle for the soul of America, the same may become necessary for many Americans sooner than we’d like to imagine.

Although the media covered it as a one-day story, NSPM-7 directs the FBI, ICE, other federal police agencies, and over 200 local police departments coordinating with them to begin putting together dossiers on any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

If that list includes you or people you love, now is the time to speak up and take positive political action to stop this missile aimed at the heart of our democracy and our Bill of Rights.

Russell Kirk warned that social and political order without moral restraint becomes despotism. Fritz Thyssen taught us that conservatives who empower authoritarians don’t survive the experience. Joe Walsh is describing the end state of that process in real time: a party that has ceased to exist as a governing institution and now operates only as an extension of one demented man’s will.

History doesn’t guarantee outcomes, but it does show us trajectories. Fear is never a stable foundation for politics and only delays the day of reckoning. And the longer the party exploiting it delays, the more catastrophic that reckoning becomes.

The lesson here isn’t that conservative values inevitably lead to authoritarianism: it’s that any political movement without courage, conscience, and adherence to constitutional principles and individual freedom eventually dies.

If “conservative values” can be so easily discarded in favor of fear, loyalty, and power, then they were never values at all, only a story they cynically told us to get elected.

Hopefully that’ll sink in for enough Republicans — and be loudly pointed out by enough Democrats — soon enough to rescue our republic from Germany’s fate.

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet.

“The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, the mayor of Minneapolis, and any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles:

Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out.

“You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet.

Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet.

Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia state policeman, because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes:

“The activist … has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town:

“They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As theTimes reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.”

In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian:

“It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night.

But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Stephen Miller posted last night about Minneapolis:

“Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Elon Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly.

But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than 20 years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly-liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid 40 years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Trump and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes.

Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them.

And then, of course, it’s too late…

Get ready. Something truly awful may be happening to our economy — at least for average Americans — as the result of Trump’s billions in tax breaks for billionaires, looting of our treasury and economy, $38 trillion national debt, and his corrupt embrace and promotion of foreign autocracies and digital currencies.

If it happens, it’s going to hurt many of us, all while making Trump’s billionaire buddies massively richer.

I remember the look on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s face when the economy crashed in 2008. The former Goldman Sachs CEO’s hands trembled as he stood at a podium and confessed that the GOP’s banking deregulation had blown up the American financial system and very nearly the global economy.

Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their retirements that year, but the barons of Wall Street lost nothing — except a brief moment of embarrassment — and then paid themselves tens of billions in bonuses.

About $430 billion was initially shoveled out the federal door and into the banks in just one month. And, tragically, both Bush and Obama decided that not one top donor executive should go to prison, and not even one major bank was broken up.

We coughed up $430 billion to make them whole. And now, it appears, the banksters are at it again.

According to a new report from Lever News, over the past few months the Federal Reserve has quietly extended more than $420 billion in emergency support to Wall Street’s biggest banks in near-silence, with minimal scrutiny, and no serious conditions attached.

This isn’t an accident: it’s the predictable end point of a system that punishes working people for falling behind and rewards billionaires for their political connections.

As headlines today warn of layoffs spreading through U.S. manufacturing (100,000 job losses since Trump took office) and the Federal Reserve is quietly extending hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support to Wall Street, it’s worth remembering a sobering but basic rule of history: when economies break, the rich make out like bandits.

That’s because recessions are basically shopping sprees for people like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

When Wall Street banks crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21 percent. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50 percent in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On Oct. 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

The market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, and working people, now out of work, were again selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27 percent in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why average Americans should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of Republican policy choices that get repeated over and over again — 10 of the last 11 recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered in plain sight.

Deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

So no, this warning isn’t fringe: it’s historical and empirical. And it’s being quietly confirmed by the behavior of the people like Warren Buffett — now sitting on $314 billion in cash — who know the markets best and are waiting for the crash to cash in.

So get ready. Reduce your debt as much as possible, nail down your employment and assets, prepare your garden, and get ready to live simply as Trump crashes our economy again just like he did in 2020, and then tries to use that as an excuse to consolidate his power while he and his billionaire buddies again make off like the bandits they are.

This week, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Nicole Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”

Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?

Well over a decade ago, the very Anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.

This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

At that time, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Barack Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bull----premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.

Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”

Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.

That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.

No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.

Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.

Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling CNN's Jake Tapper:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.

When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.

Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.

For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.

This is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.

This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.

It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.

It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.

It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.

Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:

“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)

That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”

Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.

After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.

This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.

That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.

This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s well high time that it stop.

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. On Tuesday, Rogan said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on Oct. 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on Sept. 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

• Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
• Abraham Lincoln said our Founders created “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
• Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
• FDR simply used the name of our nation on Dec. 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220-plus years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction.

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

• Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” As Malcolm Nance noted: “This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMEN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”
• The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
• Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base.

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. …“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964 were all Klansmen, and that’s where Donald Trump Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Ronald Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out.

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out.

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Their attempt to turn America into a Russia-like police state is suddenly failing, and a reckoning is coming. Donald Trump and his lickspittles look at the horizon and see mushroom clouds rising against a red sky, suggesting their season of power and brutality is about to turn on them.

As Mike Brock notes over at his excellent Notes from the Circus newsletter:

“The United States is experiencing the greatest political emergency since the Civil War. Right now.”

Sunday, masked ICE goons were going house-to-house in Minneapolis kicking in doors without search or no-knock warrants in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, federal law, state law, and local law. When a woman — a US citizen — whose home was being invaded and was trying to protect her children from the assault asked the secret police who’d just destroyed her front door to show her a warrant, they shot her with a Taser and zapped her with tens of thousands of volts of electricity.

Just before that, they’d shot Renee Nicole Good three times in the face for telling another ICE goon named Jonathan Ross that she wasn’t mad at him but was just going to drive away. Trump regime officials blanketed the airwaves over the weekend claiming Good was a “domestic terrorist” and they can kill anybody they want, whenever and wherever they want, as long as they say those two magic words. Now the DOJ is refusing to investigate the murder, causing four resignations in the Department.

Yesterday in Minneapolis, ICE goons stopped a man who was trying to drive to his home, causing the goons searching his neighborhood for brown-skinned people to think he was following them. They stopped him, confronted him, and demanded to know, “Did you not learn from what just happened?” in clear reference to Good’s murder, suggesting he could be next.

That was followed by a US citizen Hispanic couple being stopped by ICE in Minneapolis and, when the husband refused to show them ID because he’s a citizen and they had no warrant that named him and he’d not committed any crime or traffic offense, two ICE SUVs rammed his small car, disabling it, then fired tear gas at him when he got out of his vehicle.

They then snatched a US Marine veteran out of her car, beat her, laughed at her pain and screams, and told her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian -----.”

This is all criminal activity. As Malcolm Nance writes at his brilliant Special Intelligence newsletter:

“Minneapolis is quickly becoming the Boston Commons of a possible 2nd American Revolution, a peaceful one where we use people power to hit the streets.”

Calling the ICE surge an “unlawful federal invasion” that is “terrorizing Minnesotans,” Attorney General Keith Ellison (a regular guest on my show) unveiled a lawsuit against DHS and said simply, “This has to stop.” He added:

“The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota. People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted.”

Obviously, these are not the actions of a legitimate administration that is following the law and the Constitution. But more importantly, these are also not the actions of an administration that believes what they’re doing is right.

Trump, Kristi Noem, et al are freaking out right now, desperately hoping they can provoke somebody, anybody, to take a shot at or run over an ICE goon and create a martyr to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, which arguably could legalize much of this very behavior.

Hopefully, people will stay calm and not give them that excuse. But even if somebody does do something rash and stupid, America will see right through the pretext. Trump won’t get the validation or credibility that he so craves and believes he needs to survive politically.

Trump also knows his economy is falling apart. If you subtract the elder-care jobs that are being created by roughly 10,000 boomers a day aging into retirement, we’ve lost jobs every month since April 2nd when Trump declared his “Liberation Day” tariffs, with manufacturing being hit particularly hard (lost over 100,000 jobs) because of the increased tariff cost of raw materials. Fully two-thirds of Americans believe we’re now on the edge of — if not already fully in the midst of — a serious recession.

This has provoked Trump to the desperate move of threatening Fed Chairman Jerome Powell with prison if he won’t loosen interest rates, a move that would stimulate the economy over the short term (in time for the 2026 elections) but cause devastating inflation down the road. Powell, like Minnesota, isn’t taking it laying down, however. He called out Trump in a shockingly blunt (for a Fed chair) video.

On top of this, Trump is twisting in the wind around Venezuela and Greenland, the two foreign policy stunts he’s trying to pull to distract us from the chance that he was funneling young women and girls from Mar-a-Lago — and perhaps his teenage talent agency and Miss Teen beauty pageant — to his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are in full cover-up mode, but it’s not working.

In the past week Trump’s lost two big votes in Congress, one on Affordable Care Act subsidy extensions and the other a procedural vote in the Senate setting up a bill that will limit his war powers. He’s threatened each of the “turncoats” with primary challenges and will probably follow through, but he’s sounding increasingly desperate.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), the former Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a biweekly guest on my radio/TV program for years, pointed out last week that he knows of multiple Republicans who will be turning on Trump once they’ve made it through their primaries and he can no longer threaten them. They’re increasingly sick of him, his petty grievances, his gaudy gold geegaws, and his pro-Putin and world-destabilizing rhetoric.

The earliest 2026 congressional primaries are scheduled for March 3, and the last regular primaries are currently set for mid‑September, with June being the busiest month, so sometime mid-summer you can expect that Trump will lose a significant amount of the power he currently holds. And nobody is taking JD Vance (or whatever name he’s using by then) all that seriously as an heir apparent; the man is completely lacking in relatability and charisma.

None of this means that we’re home safe. Trump and his rightwing billionaire funders are still openly opposed to democracy, red state governors are actively purging people in their blue cities from the voting rolls with the approval of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and billionaire-owned and -run media operations from CBS to Fox to Sinclair daily sing his praises.

But there’s also an active and growing resistance across media, in local communities, and emerging within both parties. Even as Facebook and Twitter censor anti-Trump posts and armies of trolls and bots attack Democrats and progressives, average working-class people are waking up hard and fast from coast to coast.

History tells us that when dictators or, in this case, wannabe dictators find themselves backed into a corner they tend to lash out furiously, knowing things won’t turn out well for them if they can’t pull off a last-minute victory.

Trump is haunted by the fact that 69 of Richard Nixon’s closest associates (including two Cabinet members) were indicted for going along with his lawlessness, 48 were convicted, and 40 went to prison including his Attorney General, White House Chief of Staff, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, White House Counsel, Special Counsel to the President, Deputy Director of the Committee to Re‑elect the President, and Secretary of Commerce.

While Bondi, Noem, Patel, Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, and others involved directly in Trump's crimes and coverups are probably confident they’ll get away with it all because Trump will pardon them, that’s not a sure bet and they’re all still vulnerable to imprisonment on state charges even if they do get pardoned. And, of course, there’s no doubt whatsoever that if Trump getting off scott-free means he has to throw them under the bus that he’ll do it, as he has done with almost every other aide throughout his life.

Given the stakes, then, it’s reasonable to expect that the whole bunch of them, Trump’s entire criminal enterprise, will be working with him to produce a Hail Mary of some sort to prevent Democrats from taking power this fall and office next winter. The Insurrection Act is a good bet, but they’re going to need a credible excuse, which may be why they’re going so far out of their way to antagonize the good citizens of Minneapolis.

But I don’t believe it’ll work; even his sycophants on the Supreme Court seem to be tiring of his toddler-like tantrums and repeated violations of US and international law.

In summary, we need to redouble our resistance and our vigilance as we enter these critical days and months. These are, as Thomas Paine noted, “the times that try men’s souls.”

But also, to quote Paine’s appendix to Common Sense:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. … The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

This past week, Donald Trump demanded that the Pentagon produce an invasion plan for Greenland, an action that would have world-changing consequences to the benefit of Vladimir Putin and the detriment of Europe, democracy, and America. He followed that by suggesting that Marco Rubio should be the next president of Cuba, the same way Putin had promised his generals and oligarchs that they could have Ukraine.

Step-by-step it appears that Trump is trying to turn America into Russia. We saw the latest and most gruesome example this weekend as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — who shot her puppy in the face and bragged about it — went on national TV to defend Jonathan Ross shooting Nicole Good in the face, then calling her a “f------ b----.”

What’s becoming increasingly clear to Americans — which is why so many millions were in the streets this weekend — is that Trump is trying to use ICE as his own private version of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a secret, unchallengeable police force loyal to him rather than the law, whose job is to terrify and pacify the population so they won’t object to having their pockets picked and their freedom taken.

And his threats against Greenland are designed to break up NATO, fulfilling Putin’s deepest desire, which could ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Atlantic alliance and eventually to the military domination of Europe by Russia.

Both Putin and Trump appear to want the thorn in their sides of the example of a democratic Europe to fail, thus making the world safe for looter-mentality strongman autocracies.

I used to think that Trump always did whatever Putin told him to, during both his administrations and even before, because Putin was blackmailing him or dangling billion-dollar Trump Hotel Moscow opportunities in front of him.

While both of those options are still pretty likely, increasingly I’m seeing that Trump is doing what Putin suggests because he wants to be like Putin. And he wants America to be like Russia.

These two men are deeply damaged psychopaths who never matured emotionally because of the psychological trauma of their childhoods.

They think alike, as do most dictators in history, men who feel fundamentally insecure and get their feeling of safety by dominating others. Abusers who were abused and now inflict abuse.

• As a result, they both delight in killing people via their militaries.
• They get high by terrorizing people with their secret police and militias.
• They both hate and fear a free and open press and any sort of legislative or judicial power that may constrain them.
• They both have corruptly made billions from their political positions, both use public monies to shower wealth and opportunity on their friends, and both wield the police and judicial powers of their nations to punish their enemies. Trump’s most recent is Fed chair Jerome Powell.

Other dictators throughout history have shared these same characteristics. Hitler was an abused, unwanted child, much like Trump and Putin. Saddam Hussein, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco were all the victims of violent alcoholic fathers who beat them and their mothers, growing up in severely dysfunctional families.

Historian Brian Junkermeier notes that, “Stalin’s father was so violent, that on more than one occasion, he physically abused Stalin to the point where he would have blood in his urine for several days.”

All of these men grew up to be abusers, not just of their family members but of their entire nations.

Most Americans, not being psychopaths who survived cruel childhoods, don’t understand and can’t identify with these impulses. But it’s a safe bet that many of the people who’re enthusiastically answering the ICE recruiting call to “reclaim our nation” from Black and brown people and democracy-loving liberals also share Trump’s and Putin’s propensity for violence.

After all, it wasn’t until Renee Nicole Good told Jonathan Ross that she wasn’t mad with him and was leaving — a statement that she was in control and was leaving her abuser, the exact moment when most abusive husbands who kill their wives take that final step — that he fired three times into her head and called her a “f------ b----”

It’s a classic abuser’s move, particularly against women.

Meanwhile, a handful of emotionally stunted rightwing billionaires who are democracy-skeptical are right there with Trump, using their financial power to promote autocracy and oligarchy. Many have had their worldview twisted by the power their own wealth gives them.

Robert Caro once noted:

“Power doesn’t corrupt. Power reveals. When a man is climbing, when he needs votes, when he needs allies, he is careful. When he has power, he no longer needs to be careful — and then you see who he really is.”

In that, he’s echoing Lord Acton’s famous 1887 observation:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Trump, the billionaires he surrounds himself with (13 in his cabinet, over a hundred others as major donors), and the police-state toadies like Miller, Noem, Vance, Homan, Patel, Bavino, etc are — based on observable behaviors and statements — almost universally opposed to democracy.

They’re trying to normalize turning America into an oligarchy with the First Family making billions in their first dozen months and their secret police openly killing people in the street and then blaming their victims on national television.

The danger with this is that oligarchy, as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, is a transitional form of government that rarely lasts more than a generation or two. It’s so unstable because when the people realize the oligarchs are ripping them off and essentially stealing the nation’s wealth for themselves, they tend to rise up and loudly object.

That’s what we’re seeing with the No Kings and other protests here in America.

• Average Americans know that when modern GOP-driven Reaganomics started in 1981 fully two-thirds of us had a good, middle-class life with a single paycheck but today it takes two paychecks to barely reach that level, which is why the middle class has collapsed down to fewer than half of us.
• They know that the top 1% has extracted more than $50 trillion from working class people over the past 44 years via Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and the destruction of the union movement.
• They know that when Reagan came into office a home cost three times the average salary and today it’s ten times a single salary (or five times a two-income household’s income).
• They know their parents went to college for free or cheap and they’re now indebted for half or more of their lives.
• They know that healthcare and health insurance used to be affordable when hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofits, and are now a massive trillion-dollar annual wealth-extraction scheme that’s making people like Rick Scott and Dollar Bill McGuire richer than the pharaohs.

So, when the morbidly rich seize power and rip off the working class, history shows that people rise up against the new oligarchy, leaving Trump and his billionaires with two choices.

1. They can, like they did in the face of FDR’s overwhelming popularity and success with the New Deal, simply retire from politics and just go back to making money and running their businesses (1933-1981).
2. Or they can, like they did in Russia two decades ago (and are doing today in numerous other countries including Iran and Venezuela), come down on the protestors with an iron fist, a steel-heeled boot (to paraphrase Grover Cleveland), led by state power and a brutal secret police and intelligence force.

Trump and the hard-right billionaires who made him president appear to be betting option number two will work out for them as well as it did for Putin.

It’s up to us and the politicians we’ve elected to represent us to make sure they don’t succeed and our nation returns to the rule of law.

History tells us how this moment will end if We the People hesitate.

Autocrats like Trump don’t stop because they suddenly find a conscience; they stop when institutions push back, when laws are enforced by judges and the military refuse illegal orders, and when ordinary people refuse to be intimidated into silence.

Russia didn’t fall into tyranny overnight. It slid there step by step, excuse by excuse, “reasonable step away from law and order” by reasonable step, until the police and military were no longer servants of the law but enforcers of loyalty, and regime-aligned billionaires became untouchable partners in plunder.

America is standing at that same fork in the road right now.

Either we insist — loudly, relentlessly, and electorally — that no president is above the law, that no secret police may operate without accountability, that no billionaire may buy immunity, and that democracy is not optional…or we allow fear, exhaustion, and cynicism to finish the job Trump has begun.

This is quite literally a battle over whether the United States remains a democratic constitutional republic or becomes another cautionary tale taught to future generations who inevitably and naïvely ask how a free people could have let it happen.

The choice is still ours, at least for the moment. But history makes one thing clear: once the jackboot is fully laced, it rarely comes off without blood.

Democrats should be loudly calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump now, run on it in November, and then, when they take the House, actually do it.

Because what he’s is doing right now is not “norm-breaking,” or “provocative rhetoric,” or even the oft-quoted “Trump being Trump.” It’s an open assertion of unchecked power, limited — in his own words — only by his own “personal morality.”

His shocking interview in the New York Times was decisive. That isn’t how a president speaks in a constitutional republic. Instead, it’s a classic example of how a strongman, a wannabe Mussolini or Putin, speaks as he tries to reinvent the nation so the law becomes optional when it comes to him, his flunkies, and his billionaire buddies.

When asked if there were any limits on his power, he told the Times’ reporters, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He added, “I don’t need international law.”

And he’s acting it out in real time, creating his own private, unaccountable, masked army (or death squad) that’s actively terrorizing American citizens and being used to punish the cities and states of any politicians who dare stand up to him or call him out.

Not to mention his petty revenges: last week, he cut off billions in childcare and other low-income funding to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York in direct violation of the law and the Constitution because those states’ leaders had the temerity to defy him.

The Founders saw this coming. They obsessed over it, and relentlessly warned us future generations about it. And they built a solution for it into the Constitution they drafted in the summer and fall of 1787: impeachment.

James Madison, in Federalist 47, cautioned that the greatest danger to liberty wouldn’t come from a foreign invasion, but, instead, from a president who turned the powers of government into instruments of personal will:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Alexander Hamilton, no radical by any stretch, wrote that impeachable offenses are those which “proceed from the misconduct of public men” and injure society itself. He hoped, in Federalist 68, that no man with “[t]alents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would ever reach the White House, but that’s exactly what we’re now watching in real time.

And, no, impeachment is not some “unprecedented Democratic overreach.” Republicans have demanded impeachment of Democratic presidents for nearly a century, and tried multiple times, most recently just two years ago.

• Republican legislators screamed about impeaching Franklin D. Roosevelt over his threat to pack the Supreme Court if they didn’t stop knocking down his New Deal programs.
• They floated impeachment of Harry Truman for going into Korea without a formal declaration of war.
• They threatened both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with impeachment over the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and the War in Vietnam.
• They introduced impeachment resolutions against Jimmy Carter over the Panama Canal treaty.
• They campaigned openly to impeach Barack Obama over his “dictatorial” executive orders and the “communist” Affordable Care Act.

The idea that impeachment is too “divisive” to even discuss now is a naked lie, and a very convenient one for authoritarian Republicans. What’s different today isn’t the tool of impeachment; it’s the target.

Trump has now made explicit what Richard Nixon tried to pull off but failed: that his presidency exists above the law and he can freely ignore both domestic and international law. Nixon at least had the decency to mutter it privately, once even telling David Frost that, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump has put it into public policy.

When a president claims the law doesn’t restrain him, as Trump has done — when he treats Congress’ approval as if it were optional, federal judges as if they were political enemies, treaties as inconveniences that can be gotten around or even ignored, and war powers as personal prerogatives — impeachment stops being political theater and becomes a constitutional necessity.

While I vehemently disagree with Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires, gutting USAID and other agencies, and inflammatory rhetoric (among dozens of other things), this is not about policy disagreements.

It’s explicitly about his unilaterally making war without congressional authorization, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, dangling pardons and financial opportunities for his allies but the law as vengeance for his critics, and the obscenity of his mass pardons for the criminals who attacked our Capitol on January 6th.

It’s about, in other words, a president who’s told us all, bluntly, that legality and government power — including the power to execute a woman who was just driving home after dropping off her child at school — flows from his own definition of “morality,” his “own mind,” and no other source, the American Constitution be damned.

He’s asserting the “morality” of a man convicted of fraud, adjudicated a rapist, repeatedly accused of sexual assault, who gleefully takes bribes of gold, Trump hotels, and jet planes and rewards the bribers with tariff reductions, American weapons, and other benefits.

This is how Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán transformed Russia and Hungary from democracies into strongman single-party autocracies, and Trump is eagerly following their examples (and apparently taking their regular advice).

Here’s an example of what articles of impeachment could read like, a version that could be read into the Congressional Record tomorrow:

Articles of Impeachment Against Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

Article I — Abuse of Power and Usurpation of Congressional War Authority

In his conduct as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of his office by initiating and directing acts of war without authorization from Congress, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

President Trump ordered and executed military actions against the sovereign nation of Venezuela, including strikes within its capital and the seizure of its head of state, without a declaration of war or statutory authorization from Congress. In doing so, he substituted his personal judgment and the desires of his donors in the fossil fuel industry for the constitutional role of the legislative branch, nullifying Congress’s exclusive authority to decide when the nation enters hostilities.

Such conduct is not a policy disagreement but a direct assault on the separation of powers. The Framers vested the war-making power in Congress precisely to prevent unilateral, impulsive, or self-interested uses of military force by a single individual.

Wherefore, President Trump has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government and has committed an abuse of power warranting impeachment and removal from office.

Article II — Contempt for the Rule of Law and Constitutional Limits on Executive Power

Donald J. Trump has asserted that his authority as President is constrained only by his “own morality,” explicitly rejecting the binding force of domestic law, treaty obligations, and international legal norms ratified by the United States.

By publicly declaring that neither Congress, the courts, nor the law meaningfully constrain his actions, President Trump has advanced a theory of executive power fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution. Treaties ratified by the Senate are, under Article VI, the supreme Law of the Land.

A President who claims legality flows from personal judgment rather than law announces an intent to govern as a sovereign, not as a constitutional officer.

This conduct constitutes a profound breach of the President’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Article III — Corrupt Use of the Justice System for Political Retaliation

Donald J. Trump has abused the powers of the presidency by directing or encouraging the use of federal law enforcement and prosecutorial authority to target political opponents for retaliation and intimidation.

The President has publicly demanded investigations and prosecutions of political adversaries while signaling protection for allies. Such conduct weaponizes the justice system and undermines equal justice under law.

This pattern of conduct constitutes an abuse of power and a violation of the public trust.

Article IV — Subversion of Democratic Institutions and Checks and Balances

Donald J. Trump has engaged in a sustained campaign to undermine the independence of the judiciary, the authority of Congress, and the legitimacy of constitutional constraints on executive power.

By encouraging attacks on judges, disregarding statutory limits imposed by Congress, and treating oversight as illegitimate, the President has sought to weaken the institutions designed to restrain executive excess.

Such conduct represents a betrayal of constitutional responsibility.

Article V — Abuse of the Pardon Power to Undermine Accountability for an Attack on the Constitution

Donald J. Trump has abused the pardon power by issuing broad clemency to individuals who participated in or supported the January 6, 2001 attack on the United States Capitol.

While the pardon power is substantial, it was never intended to erase accountability for a violent assault on Congress itself. This use of the pardon power undermines deterrence, encourages future political violence, and weakens constitutional governance.

Conclusion

In all of this, Donald J. Trump has demonstrated that he will place personal authority above constitutional duty, power above law, and loyalty to himself above loyalty to the Republic.

Wherefore, Donald J. Trump warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

Then comes the part Democrats keep flinching from: begin a loud and public campaign for impeachment. After all, just this week he told Republicans that his biggest fear if the GOP loses control of the House is that he’ll be impeached for a third time.

On Thursday afternoon, I got one of Trump’s daily fundraising emails. This one didn’t ask if I’d yet made a donation to get my name on the list for my “tariff rebate check” like others this week and last but, instead, said (and the bold type is also bold in his email):

“Dems plan for 2026 is simple but disturbing to EVERY MAGA Republican:
1. Flip the House
2. Flip the Senate
3. IMPEACH PRESIDENT TRUMP
4. Kill the MAGA agenda permanently”

He’s not just talking about impeachment; he’s fundraising on it! Democrats, frankly, should do the same.

I realize that a conviction will never pass the current Senate (although we may be surprised if he keeps doing and saying truly crazy and offensive things), but it’s important to get this into the public dialogue and prepare the ground for next year.

That’s why Democrats must tell voters now exactly what they intend to do with power if they win it this coming November (or before, if the GOP loses any more House members).

And they need to stop pretending that through some weird magic our democracy can be preserved by silence, caution, or simply hoping that this convicted felon will suddenly discover restraint or cave to a judge’s demand.

There is a real possibility, by the way, that today a handful of Republicans in the House could decide that preserving Congress’ war powers, the power and independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law matters more than protecting one aging politician. After all, yesterday five Republicans in the Senate voted against Trump on his Venezuela oil-stealing campaign and nine in the House voted against him on healthcare. It happened with Nixon, and it can happen again.

But it won’t happen if Democrats continue to treat impeachment like a dirty word instead of a constitutional obligation.

Yes, it’ll anger Trump’s base and rightwing media will go nuts. But his base is already filled with rage and rightwing media will do what they do no matter what, impeachment or not. Democrats need to stop cowering.

So let’s say what needs to be said without euphemism or apology:

Democrats should introduce articles of impeachment now, run on them this November, and then actually do it.

The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website this week, purporting to tell the history of the January 6 insurrection attempt. It opens with this (which, interestingly, appears to be 100 percent AI-generated):

“The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump — despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.“In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power. This gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy.”

The most dangerous lies a government can tell aren’t about how tax cuts will create prosperity or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although those were bad. When a malicious, corrupt government wants to truly break down trust in a society to more easily seize and manipulate it politically and loot it economically, it inevitably tells lies about the past.

Because once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support.

That’s what makes the Trump administration’s new official White House website about January 6th so chilling. This isn’t spin or selective memory: it’s an industrial-scale, government-run attempt to erase the memory of a violent insurrection and replace it with a fantasy narrative where Donald Trump and the attackers were the heroes, the police and Mike Pence were the villains, and Joe Biden simply winning the election was the real crime.

The site claims that January 6 was marked by “minimal violence”; that the rioters who smashed doors and windows, smeared feces on the walls, urinated on carpets and papers on Democratic members’ desks, contributed to the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others were “peaceful”; and that the police officers trying to prevent the mob from greater violence weren’t brutally assaulted but instead “allowed” the “protesters” into the Capitol.

The White House claims the police “aggressively” fired “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions. Video evidence shows officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building — actions that facilitated entry — while simultaneously deploying violent force against others. These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”

One section even argues that the real injustice wasn’t the beating of officers with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and fists, but that Trump’s violent supporters were later prosecuted at all.

Another section claims that the January 6th defendants were victims of “political persecution,” while the police officers who defended the Capitol were the aggressors.

These are simple, blatant lies, something we’ve grown to expect from Trump and his people but are shocking, nonetheless.

More than 140 police officers were injured so severely that day that they were hospitalized. We watched officers crushed in doors, dragged down stairs, tased into heart attacks, beaten, eyes gouged out, and left bleeding on the ground. We heard their screams live on television.

Multiple courts reviewed thousands of hours of video and multiple juries sent hundreds of Trump’s thugs to prison. Multiple judges — many appointed by Republicans — called January 6th an “attempted coup” and an attack on America’s constitutional order.

And now our government itself — today in the hands of a billionaire wannabe dictator and his lickspittles because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let billionaires buy an election — is trying to tell Americans none of it was real.

History would like to have a word with us about this despicable attempt at revisionist propaganda.

In Nazi Germany, the regime’s most important lies weren’t about economics or foreign policy; they were about violence. Nazi street thugs were recast as patriots while the victims of their violence, including socialists, gays, immigrants, and Jews, were reframed as the provocateurs.

When the Nazi state lied about who committed violence and why, it taught its citizens that paramilitary force is legitimate when used by the “right” people.

In the Soviet Union, people didn’t necessarily believe the government’s lies, but that didn’t prevent the USSR’s dictatorship from holding power. Instead, it produced something worse: mass cynicism.

A common joke in Russia about the two major newspapers — Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”) — was “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestia there is no truth.” (В ‘Правде’ нет известий, а в ‘Известиях’ нет правды.) When citizens assume the government is lying all the time, truth stops mattering, participation becomes mere theater or social climbing, and power becomes untouchable and, thus, increasingly brutal.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the goal of constant lying during the Nazi era wasn’t persuasion about the rightness of Hitler’s pronouncements, laws, and flunkies but widespread public disorientation.

When people can no longer tell fact from fiction, she pointed out, they stop resisting and retreat into a sort of semi-tribal existence. Loyalty to “your” particular tribe replaces the rule of law.

And that’s exactly what this lie-filled January 6th website is doing.

By declaring that Trump’s mob was innocent and the American criminal justice system is corrupt, it sends a clear message: violence in service of Trump will be forgiven, even celebrated, going forward into the future.

This is an old tactic that dictators have used since the days of Ancient Rome. Putin today has motorcycle gangs called the Night Wolves, for example, who terrorize “liberals” and gays in Russia with impunity. It’s not hard to imagine the militia members in America who’re now being recruited by ICE being turned loose on the rest of us in a similar way once the “immigration emergency” is “resolved.”

The police who defend democracy, these White House lies tell would-be vigilantes, will be abandoned by the very government that employs them, while the courts that are the historic arbiters of the law will be smeared and ignored. Elections that should reflect the will of the people will instead be treated as optional suggestions rather than binding decisions.

We’ve seen this movie before in America, too. After the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” mythology rewrote an armed rebellion to preserve slavery into a noble struggle for “heritage.” That lie didn’t heal the country, but instead justified the rise of the Klan and a century of racial terror, voter suppression, and political violence that endures to this day.

These official lies about January 6th are laying the groundwork for the same kind of future for those of us who may oppose the Trump regime and its successors.

This isn’t just about salving Donald Trump’s fragile, 10-year-old ego. It’s also a setup to condition the public to accept the next time Republicans lose an election and respond with violent attacks.

The message isn’t subtle: if January 6th was “peaceful,” then January 6th is within the new norm and can — or even should — happen again. If police were the villains, then police can be ignored next time. If courts are corrupt, then their verdicts don’t count when they’re inconvenient to these new American fascists.

A democratic republic can survive policy mistakes and bad presidents; G-d knows we’ve had our share of both. What it can’t survive, though, is a government that looks straight into the camera and tells its people that violence didn’t happen when everyone watched it live.

In other words, this depraved new website isn’t just a lie: it’s an invitation.