Commentary

Today, I have a few things to say about that putz Stephen Miller. First, he’s been on TV a lot lately, because that’s how he pours more poison onto the president’s already-poisoned brain. He doesn’t whisper lies into the ear of the old and demented sovereign the way Wormtongue does in Tolkien's epic. King Théoden didn’t have a TV. King Donald can’t stop watching his. So Stephen Miller delivers poison that way.

Over the weekend, the White House advisor wrote on Twitter there’s “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

In the days since, Miller has repeated a variation of that “insurrection” theme during numerous TV appearances. Last night, for instance, he told a CNN anchor that ICE protesters are “actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government. … ICE officers have to street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building.”

Every word here, including “and” and “the,” is a lie.

But today, we saw the fruit of Miller’s labor.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Governor Pritzker, too.”

I have talked a lot before about how Trump has dementia and how growing public awareness of his disease could make him vulnerable to the allegation that he’s not really in charge – that malicious and unaccountable forces are pulling his strings. But I haven’t talked about how. Well, this is how. And Stephen Miller is doing it in plain sight.

The second thing I want to say about that putz is about his personality, specifically, about the character of a man who goes on TV to goad an old, demented president into invoking the Insurrection Act to impose martial law. (Miller seems to believe if he says “insurrection” on TV enough times, something in Donald Trump’s head will finally click.)

Before they lie to anyone else, liars like Stephen Miller lie to themselves. They must, because they cannot face the truth. However, I don’t mean just any old truth. I mean capital-T truth, which is to say, the whole truth about themselves. If they had to face it, they would die. (They believe they would die, because they have no faith.)

So they lie, as if their lives depend on it.

What truth? In Stephen Miller’s case, I can’t say I know for sure, but it’s probably that he’s a mediocrity. He’s neither exceptionally intelligent nor exceptionally gifted. Let’s say he’s bland-looking. He’s short by Washington standards. (He says he’s 5 foot 10.) Of course, there are plenty of men who are born of average appearance, talent and smarts, but who accept who they are and lead decent, honorable, happy lives.

Not Stephen Miller. Why? Titanic ego. The truth shall never be true! So he lies to himself, about himself. I would surmise that from a very early age, he began living his life as if he were surviving an endless series of traumatizing events. Do this long enough and you end up not knowing who you are, what you want or what you stand for. And because the lies you tell yourself, about yourself, literally prevent you from feeling joy or satisfaction, always present in life is a desperate, junkie need.

I would suggest this junkie need is the root of hatred. Miller looks around at others who are living their best lives according to the truth about themselves. He sees you doing you better than he’s doing him – and it makes him mad. You cannot do that to him. It’s an injustice. You must be stopped. Indeed, the only way he’s going to feel better is if you are forced to accept the lies he tells himself, about himself. The Stephen Millers of the world, including the president of the United States, are not mediocrities. They are not even human. They are gods. You shall obey. And if you refuse, they will “use legitimate state power.”

I’m dwelling on this facet of Stephen Miller’s personality, as well as on the nature of the totalitarian mind, for a reason. What he’s doing – goading an old, demented president through TV appearances into imposing martial law – is scary. But manipulating the president only gets Miller and the rest of the regime so far. If they are going to take control of the republic, which is their objective (make no mistake), they must convince the American people there’s no use in fighting back – that resistance is futile. And they are going to do that by lying.

During TV appearances this week, Stephen Miller made Donald Trump seem like a sovereign lord endowed by the law and the Constitution (and perhaps by God) with the divine right (“plenary authority,” Miller told CNN) to do whatever he wants in the name of his people, and that any opposition to his divine rule is not only pointless but punishable.

Greg Sargent put it this way. Miller “believes that if he supercharges the debate over Trump's abuses of power with enough propaganda, he can polarize it and force low-info voters to embrace authoritarianism.” (Greg’s latest in The New Republic is about how Democratic Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom are taking Miller’s “theory of fascist power politics” at face value and devising a strategy to combat it.)

In other words, Miller is lying in order to get you (and “low-info voters”) to give up. And he’s doing that, because surrender is strategically vital. That is, without surrender, Miller and the rest of the regime got nothing. They lie, believing that you will believe their lies, and you end up doing their work for them – by conquering yourself.

But they can’t conquer you if you don’t believe them.

The moment you stop believing them is probably their most vulnerable moment, as we saw when Stephen Miller was asked by a Fox host to respond to comments made about him by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a stream for constituents, AOC discussed the critical role of ridicule in fighting fascism. For instance, she said:

“Laugh at them. Stephen Miller is a clown. I’ve never seen that guy in real life but he looks like he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he’s angry about the fact that he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he is so mad that he is 4’ 10” that he’s taking that anger out at any other population possible. Laugh at them.”

Fox’s Laura Ingraham played that clip, right there on live TV. The written word cannot do justice to the face Miller made while watching it. (You have to see it for yourself.) All I can say is he looked wounded, as if AOC had stabbed him, and that’s because the injury was very real.

She did the unforgivable: refused to accept the lies Stephen Miller tells himself, about himself, and she deepened that wound by daring to enjoy herself while doing it. She not only hurt him, emotionally and psychically, but she reminded him of his misery he endures daily.

I’ll close with this. You cannot debate a liar like Stephen Miller. You cannot persuade him with logic or facts. You cannot find common ground with him. There is no compromise. They are too weak to be worthy of trust, and therefore, they can only be opposed. Trump said JB Pritzker should be jailed. In reply, Pritzker said come and get me.

Low-info voters might not understand much.

But they can understand that.

Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge.

No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.

People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?”

Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Jimmy Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.

And by “all” I mean you, too. None of us are safe if all of us aren’t safe. We have to stand up and speak out now.

Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people.

Soldiers rapelled from Black Hawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours.

They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking and scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “F--- the children.”

This is the exact same sort of thing that British forces did against the colonists in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“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.”

MAGA is delighted; puppy-killer Noem claims people were “clapping in the streets,” although there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that. MAGA folks seem to think that because they’re white they’re safe from attack by this regime.

But when they’re done with the brown folks, they’ll be coming for the white people next. They’ll start with Democrats — Trump called them “Satan” last week — but history shows they won’t stop there.

It’s already started, with Trump’s most recent National Security Directive that instructs the 200-plus local police/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces all across the country to begin investigating anybody or any group that exhibits or has ever given a donation to any group showing “indicia of terrorism” including being anti-Christian; anti-capitalism; extremism on migration, race, or gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional views on family, religion, or morality.

Do you have a queer kid? A Black or Hispanic friend? Are you a union member? Have you failed to attend church over the past few years? Are you Jewish or Muslim? Unitarian? Ever donated to a civil rights group? Voted Democratic? Or voted for a Republican who Trump despises, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?

You’re next.

They may have already started surveilling you, tapping your phone, reading your emails, collecting your browser and location history.

This isn’t the first time masked, armed agents of the government have terrorized American citizens. In the late 1870s and the 1920s, in Portland, Oregon (among other cities) armed, hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan were deputized and unleashed against racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, union members, and other “criminals and undesirables.”

Oregon had been so taken over by the Klan that in the election of 1876 their electoral college votes were challenged by both parties in Congress, leading, in part, to the election being handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Eventually, Oregon and the rest of America rejected masked secret police and vigilantes in our streets. Now, in this generation, it’s our turn.

Christopher Armitage, on his Existentialist Republic Substack newsletter, argues forcefully that masked federal agents committing crimes should be arrested by state and local police:

“Here’s what you need to know: Federal agents are committing state felonies every day. Breaking and entering. Kidnapping. Assault. When they kick down doors without judicial warrants, when they detain citizens without probable cause, when they point guns at children, these are crimes under state law. And Democratic governors have the power to prosecute those crimes …“When ICE agents face potential state prosecution for breaking down doors, they’ll start getting real warrants signed by real judges. When pointing guns at families could mean assault charges, they’ll think twice. When detaining U.S. citizens could mean kidnapping prosecutions, they’ll check IDs more carefully.” (emphasis added)

And Trump can’t pardon state crimes; those convicted end up in state prisons. It’s probably why, like the Klan of old, they conceal their identities.

ICE isn’t bothering to get the kinds of warrants required by the Fourth Amendment, instead they’re using “administrative warrants” signed by ICE officials; these are just window-dressing paperwork and are not legal warrants.

Armitage points out:

“So when ICE breaks down a door with only administrative paperwork, that’s burglary under California Penal Code 459. When they haul away citizens without probable cause, that’s kidnapping under Penal Code 207. When they point weapons at unarmed families, that’s assault under Penal Code 245.”

He correctly tells us all to contact our state and local elected officials and demand that they enforce the laws of our states.

You can duckduckgo.com search for your town’s mayor’s office, your state representative and senator, and you can call your House and Senate members at 202-224-3121.

This brutal, illegal attack on American citizens last week was the Trump regime’s most visible “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If it stands, it will become normal and none of us are safe.

When the government becomes the criminal, silence is complicity. The Fourth Amendment is not a relic or a privilege; it’s the firewall between freedom and tyranny. If we allow it to burn, we’re setting fire to the idea of America itself.

Every citizen, every journalist, every elected official who still believes in the rule of law must speak out, organize, and demand accountability before this becomes irreversible. History does not forgive those who stayed quiet while justice was destroyed in plain sight.

The time to speak out and demand action is now.

On Friday, the president changed his mind. He decided that he is not going to break the law by withholding $187 million in federal funding for an intelligence and counterterrorism initiative in New York City.

And you should be grateful.

“I am pleased to advise that I reversed the cuts made to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for New York City …” he said. “It was my Honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But Donald Trump didn’t change his mind. Not really. He just wants us to think so. Fact is, he wasn’t part of the decision to (illegally) cut off the money. Someone in the regime decided for him. Here’s the Times:

The cuts, which represented the largest federal defunding of police operations in New York in decades, were made by the Department of Homeland Security, without explanation and without the approval of President Trump, White House officials said.

Indeed, President Trump was blindsided by the decision to defund the police, not learning of the cuts until Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called him on Sunday to protest the change after the fact, according to three people with knowledge of the call.

If the cuts had gone through, Trump would have defunded the police more than anyone, ever. That would not have been a good look for a president who bills himself as the great champion of law enforcement, and here’s the thing about that: someone in the White House knew it.

They knew it would hurt Trump to be seen as the president who kneecapped New York cops, seemingly making it harder for them to stop the next 9/11. Yet this someone went ahead and did it anyway, in the knowledge that Big Daddy is preoccupied with other matters.

I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but this sometimes happens when the father of the family, as it were, is old and doddering, and can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. This sometimes happens when a “family member” really hates Big Daddy and wants to expose him. That way, everyone sees the truth!

I kid, but only slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone in the White House who really hates Trump, despite working for the hate regimes, and actively seeks ways to humiliate him. (Consider the unknown aide responsible for putting makeup on his hand to cover up whatever ailment he has. The makeup’s color and his skin color are so mismatched that you can’t help thinking it was done on purpose!)

More important is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone – or a group of someones – that recognizes the chance to seize the reins of power for themselves and if it goes sideways, Trump can take the fall.

The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies. “We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.

It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight. Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

But mostly, Trump learns about what his regime is doing when the press corps asks about what it’s doing. This is an ongoing pattern but most recently, Trump did not know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had convened a meeting of the top military officials until questioned. The AP: “the president's participation was not part of the original plan for the meeting but that he decided that he wanted to go.”

His speech there was word salad. As I wrote Friday, he twaddled on about Biden’s autopen; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

Then, amid the outpouring of words, there was a moment of clarity, and Trump seemed to remember what his people had been telling him.

“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.” (Last night, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.” (In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)

This pattern is so frequent and so public that the Washington press corps really should be asking, as Dan Froomkin recently suggested:

• “Is he a confused old man?
• “Is he being manipulated by his staff?
• “Is he delusional? Is he gaslighting us?
• “Who’s in charge?”

On Friday, I argued that the growing awareness of the president’s dementia (so far primarily due to Pritzker’s use of the d-word) could present an opportunity for coalition-building – between anti-Trump partisans who always believed him to be a threat to democracy and non-partisan swing voters who supported him in the mistaken belief that he’d solve pressing problems, like inflation and the cost of living.

The main obstacle to building a coalition is changing minds, namely, that indie voters are not going to admit they were wrong to choose a fascist. It hits different, however, when the same fascist appears to have dementia and, as a result, is doing weird stuff, like trying to defund the police while ordering troops to do the work of the police. At that point, the lift is less heavy. Liberals are not asking swing voters to stand up for democracy, just to stand against demented chaos.

It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president. That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.

In this light, I think Project 2025 becomes something bigger than the authoritarian playbook that liberals go on and on about, and that indie voters tend to tune out. It becomes a stand-in for the schemers pulling Trump’s strings. They know their policies are so unpopular that they would never become reality if Vought and Miller couldn’t whisper in the ear of a doddering old man who can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.

To be sure, I don’t trust the press corps to do the work that democracy needs. Reporters are happy to show a live feed of Trump seemingly not knowing what’s going on, but that’s the extent of it. They are not going to ask for the names of the puppet masters. They are not going to hold Trump to the same ageist standards that they held Joe Biden to. (They are certainly not going to flirt with the same conspiracy theories.) The hypocrisy is so baked in that, for now, I have no hope of it changing.

(And to be sure, all my talk of Donald Trump’s dementia might give the impression I don’t think he’s an evil man who’s capable of committing his own atrocities. Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.)

But the news media isn’t the only thing that swing voters experience. They also experience the pain and the chaos of unpopular policies pursued by this regime: tariffs, inflation, healthcare cuts, not to mention masked thugs ripping families apart. The more pain and chaos they feel, the more they might be open to the argument that the pain itself is proof that the democratically elected president isn’t in charge.

We are just a few days removed from the most toxic, anti-American speech ever given by a sitting President of the United States, and I am not letting it go.

And neither should you.

While addressing a gathering of military leadership from across the globe at Marine Corp Base Quantico in Northern Virginia Tuesday, the vile, America-attacking Donald Trump called on our generals and admirals to “… use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” so that he can attack us again.

There’s no sense being cute about it, or trying to sanitize it. The President of the United States is intent on using our military against us. And because I am one of the few in media — or the Democratic or Republican Party for that matter — who refuse to just merrily skip to the next Trump-made catastrophe, I want to repeat this again, until everybody hears it and understands it:

NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America. EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

By words and by deed it is clear as day that Trump has absolutely no respect for the country he violently assaulted, nor our men and women who wear the uniform, because like any authoritarian leader he sees them as servants to him, and not our country.

And just so there was no misunderstanding about his objectives, Trump went on to say that the people who protest against him in America and disagree with his policies are, “The enemy within.”

Can you please read that again?

Look, while these words might pour out of his dirty mouth like contaminated water from an overflowing toilet because he is such a dreadful public speaker, they are nevertheless scripted and tested for affect before he ever harrumphs upon some poor, unsuspecting stage to use them.

The President of the United States was very intentionally telling us he will use our military against any American he doesn't like, which we all know is a very long list.

I suggest we take this very seriously.

Just a decade ago, if you heard the leader of any country say these things, you would have rightfully said, “Thank God I live in the United States where these kinds of terrible things never happen.”

Trump’s vile speech should have triggered a national discussion that would be reaching a fever pitch right now. Instead, we’ve just moved on to more drama: the predictable Trump/Republican shutdown of our United States Government that they so clearly hate.

We have dealt with shutdowns before, but never a president who is so intent on using our military to attack us.

All pressure should be brought to bear on these military leaders that this kind of thing is not remotely OK in America. As a veteran and journalist who worked closely with military leadership during my professional career, I would like to think that the vast majority of these men and women understand this.

Don’t get me wrong, I dealt with a few screwy, power-drunk flag officers during both my time at Stars & Stripes, and as a sailor way back when, but for the most part, I have confidence that most of these people understand nuclear-grade fascism when they see it and hear it.

I’d think they also know when they are being insulted by their punk of a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who can’t hold his liquor, his tongue, or handle a tricky communications platform like Signal.

So a suggestion: Locate the nearest military base to your home and contact the commanding officer (CO). Tell him or her how outraged you are by the commander in chief’s unbecoming conduct. If you can’t get to the CO directly make sure you are in contact with a base public affairs officer.

These folks are generally very responsive, and if I have this at all right, will be relieved by your concern. As I typed Tuesday after Trump’s grotesque speech: “Any flag officer who wasn’t deeply disturbed and insulted watching this unhinged rant isn’t worth the uniform she or he is wearing, and should apply for a job cleaning Trump’s pool.”

We have entered the most dangerous time in America history since our Civil War.

We may yet be able to solve this terrible mess politically, but if Trump continues to succeed in militarizing our troops against us, we are finished.

Done.

This is not the time to move on to the next thing, just because Trump and his odious Republicans want you to.

This is the time to fight back, because we have to.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” —Abraham Lincoln

“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot.”—Thomas Jefferson

People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion to the morbidly rich?

Historian Kevin M. Kruse captured the zeitgeist brilliantly, reflecting widespread public bewilderment when he posted over on BlueSky:

“We’ve had ----ups in the White House before, but never a president who seemed so deliberately intent on being a ---up. It’s been said before, but if these people were actual agents of an enemy power seeking to divide, dismantle and destroy the USA they wouldn’t be doing anything different.”

So, let’s engage in a simple thought experiment. If you or I were hired by Vladimir Putin, an angry group of billionaires who want to end democracy, or a wealthy serial killer, and our orders were to tear our country apart and make us vulnerable to foreign takeover, what would we do? What steps would we take?

As I mentioned a few days ago, if we follow the Dictator’s Playbook there actually is a simple, 12-step formula to make that happen.

The first step would be to turn Americans from E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) into hate-filled warring factions. Turn us against each other. Divide us by race, religion, gender, region, education, income, and whether we live in cities or rural areas.

In Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), he described the first three strategies that “despotic moralists” use to rip apart the fabric of a society. They were Fac et excusa (“Act now, and make excuses later”), Si fecisti, nega (“If you commit a crime, deny it”), and Divide et impera (“Divide and conquer”). Jefferson perhaps inspired Kant when, in 1787, he wrote, “Divide et impera [is] the reprobated axiom of tyranny…”

When Hitler claimed that Jews, Gypsies, and queer people weren’t “real Germans,” he was invoking that principle. Joe McCarthy tried to divide us by political ideology. David Duke said we should be separated by skin color.

Its most recent invocation was just this week when Trump and Pete Hegseth told our nation’s generals that most Black, Hispanic, and female officers were only in their positions because of their gender or skin color. “Whiskey Pete” was blunt, claiming that Ronald Reagan’s invocation of America’s traditional belief that “our diversity is our strength” was an “insane fallacy.”

Next, we’d want to immiserate as many Americans as possible, creating a huge pool of mostly white men who are pissed off because they’d been left behind economically and feel locked out of the American Dream.

That strategy would include several steps:

• Destroy unions that bind workers together with their employers and raise standards of living.
• Gut programs that lift people out of poverty and into the middle class, including high-quality universal public education, low-cost college, and inexpensive access to healthcare.
• Ship manufacturing overseas to low-wage nations while using incoherent, ever-changing whim-based tariffs to batter the domestic economy.
• Build media operations that demonize “the other,” telling them Blacks, Hispanics, queer people and women are the cause of their troubles.
• Ban books that embrace diversity and teachers who use them.
• Spread hate and conspiracy theories via powerful social media and search engine algorithms that make them seem normal, coarsening the entire culture.
• Throw people off programs offering healthcare, student debt repayment, and housing subsidies.

Third, we’d want to destroy people’s faith in straightforward news. Loudly proclaim that it all has a “leftwing bias” and can’t be trusted, that reporters are elite “enemies of the people,” and attack the media relentlessly.

Fourth, shatter people’s faith in reality itself. Challenge science and expertise. Flood the zone with conspiracy theories. Convince citizens to stop taking commonsense steps to protect themselves and their children including vaccinations, precautions against airborne diseases, or measures to slow climate change. Sow confusion until they no longer know who to believe, and then offer yourself as the only source of truth.

Fifth, deconstruct international alliances that go back centuries by alienating traditional friends and embracing openly hostile foes while tearing up norms of defense, trade, and commerce.

Sixth, fracture citizens’ faith in their elected officials and the government itself. Legalize the practice of morbidly rich people and giant corporations buying legislation and the loyalty of politicians with cash by claiming that “money is speech” and “corporations are persons.” Define opposition political parties as “radical,” “dangerous,” and “outside the mainstream.”

Seventh, turn the military and police forces of the nation against its own people, making them terrified of challenging armed, masked men in the streets, kicking in their doors at midnight. Start with vilified minorities like immigrants and, when they’re “under control,” turn those forces against anybody who dissents from the new single-party rule.

Eighth, demolish faith in the nation’s currency by seizing political control of the central bank while villainizing its leadership.

Ninth, run scams to accumulate as much wealth as possible in the hands of Dear Leader and his close cronies while refusing to raise the minimum wage so as to keep people in poverty.

Tenth, use the power of government to force institutions — corporations, universities, law firms — into complete submission and even explicit collaboration in the enshitification of the nation.

Eleventh, seize control of the legislative and judicial branches so your law-breaking, election-rigging, and bribe-taking is never held to account. Openly and brazenly break laws like the Hatch Act that forbids the use of any government agency or property for political or commercial purposes.

Force agencies to make illegal, partisan statements denigrating the opposition party and defy anybody who calls out that naked criminality. Sneer and laugh at those who demand that people committing crimes in office should be held accountable.

Twelfth, turn the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies into tools for punishing political enemies while ignoring the crimes of friends of the regime, thus destroying faith in equality under the rule of law and terrorizing anybody who speaks out.

All of these 12 simple steps have been used by every despot in history, from the ancient Roman Empire through the kings of the Dark Ages to the fascists of early 20th century Europe to today’s strongmen including Orbán, Putin, Erdoğan, El-Sisi, Maduro, Netanyahu, and Modi.

Whether Trump has put America on this road at the insistence (or by the payment from) Putin, rightwing American billionaires, or just his own authoritarian impulses and with strategies he’s learned from Orbán and Putin, it doesn’t have to end with America resembling today’s Russia or Hungary.

The good news is that multiple countries have elected men to leadership who tried to run through this list and were stopped before they could finish the job. Instead of letting their leaders turn their nations into permanent autocracies, the people rose up and took the power back for themselves and their democracies.

They include Ukraine, the Philippines, Brazil, Poland, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Peru, South Korea, Romania, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Gambia, Malawi, Moldova, and South Africa.

History shows that any democracy can fall into tyranny if its citizens grow cynical, give up, or look away. The question — the only question that matters now — is whether enough of us will choose to stand up, to act, and to reclaim what generations before us fought and bled to pass along, like the citizens of those countries listed above have done in the recent past.

If they can do it, so can we.

Donald Trump’s lawless cabal has just declared war on an imaginary dragon they call “antifa.” National security directive NSPM-7 stipulates that anyone who insults Trump, calls him or his enablers “fascist,” or opposes Christo-nationalism is anti-American. Anyone deemed “anti-American” is a proper target of persecution.

To support the directive, Trump’s Department of Justice first removed from its website a National Institute of Justice study on domestic terrorism. The removed study showed that right-wing extremists are responsible for far more politically motivated violence than far-left extremists.

Having removed accurate crime statistics from public view, Trump then issued a national security directive based on false ones.

In it, he ticked off a curated list of violent acts he blamed on the left, deliberately omitting the attempted torching of the Pennsylvania governor’s home; the assassination of Minnesota House Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband and the attempted assassination of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife; the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband; the plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer; last week’s Mormon Church attack by a Trump supporter; and all the political violence executed on his behalf since 2015 when he began encouraging MAGA to assault others.

Perfecting his dark art of projection, Trump declared that violence from the left is “designed to silence opposing speech,” then issued a directive to do just that.

Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional directive calls for “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies.” According to Trump, people will be targeted as domestic terrorists if they hold views that diverge from the far right’s views on “family,” “morality,” “race,” “gender,” “migration,” “Christianity,” or “capitalism.” Even trespassing is now considered a ‘politically motivated terrorist’ act, which is meant to repel reporters from ICE facilities.

Planning to silence political organizations that oppose him, Trump is declaring a “crackdown” on anyone whose speech offends “democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental civil liberties,” as he alone decides. Applying plain English to his directive, Trump should have been imprisoned years ago. Failure to hold him legally accountable is the predicate crime now threatening the union.

Oregon mocks Trump’s false narrative

Pursuing these directives, Trump threatened to invade Portland, Oregon, where green hair and Kombucha kiosks scream “antifa,” to the MAGA faithful at least. Incensed by the spectacle of nose rings and flannel, Trump posted that he had authorized federal troops to protect “War ravaged Portland” with “Full Force, if necessary,” because Oregon’s ICE Facilities are “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

Portlanders pushed back immediately by livestreaming images of farmers markets focused on local produce, artisan goods, and community. Memes of colorfully knitted tree trunks popped up threatening, “We knit at noon.” The City of Portland showcased locals in faded denim overalls “visiting Saturday Markets, feeding geese, sipping espresso, biking, playing in the park, and going to food carts.”

Nonetheless, on Sept. 28, tone deaf and possibly impaired “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth sent a memo to Gov. Tina Kotek authorizing the Oregon National Guard to descend on Portland.

Four hours later, Oregon’s Attorney General sued Trump, Hegseth, et. al in federal court.

Challenging Trump’s patently unlawful plan, Oregon’s complaint for declaratory action somberly notes, “Traditional and strong resistance of Americans to any military intrusion into civilian affairs has deep roots in our history…” It recounts how Oregonian officials gave Trump repeated assurance that state and local law enforcement were well equipped to handle public safety without federal interference, and that federalizing the National Guard therefore lacked legal basis.

Citing the Posse Comitatus Act, Oregon notes the obvious absence of any emergency, uprising or invasion that would warrant Trump’s power grab. Posse Comitatus forbids the use of soldiers for domestic law enforcement except when “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” The primary exception, which arises under the 1792 Insurrection Act, allows a president to use the military “to control civil disorder, armed rebellion or insurrection,” none of which are present in Portland.

Instead, it looks like Trump wants to endanger Portlanders by deliberately inciting a violent response to his overreach.

If the absurd optics of masked, armed soldiers vs. granola hippies weren’t bad enough, the whole plan appears to have been hatched while Trump was watching a misleading segment on Fox News.

Evan Watson of KGW8 in Portland, Oregon, reported that Trump said during an interview he had spoken to Oregon’s governor, and “she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place ... it looks like terrible.”

Yes, Mr. President. We’re sorry to inform you, Sir, that Fox News lies. The Oregonian/OregonLive noted in a timeline that Trump issued his first threat to militarize Portland on Sept. 5, the day after Fox aired a “special report” on Portland that misleadingly mixed in outdated video clips from 2020 showing violence from Black Lives Matter protesters.

Trump later suggested he was backing off from his threat, but it appears troops are still heading to Portland.

Military rule is incompatible with liberty

Oregon’s complaint provides historic context for what our country is now facing:

“Our nation’s founders recognized that military rule — particularly by a remote authority indifferent to local needs—was incompatible with liberty and democracy. Foundational principles of American law therefore limit the President’s authority to involve the military in domestic affairs…”

The suit correctly traces historical resistance to deploying the military domestically to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves general policing powers to the states. It also establishes civilian control over the military and gives Congress, not the President, the power to deploy the militia.

Trump’s finger on the trigger is clearly twitching, so if it’s not Portland, it will soon be another Democratic-led city. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice told the Washington Post, “In the 250-year history of this country, presidents have deployed troops to quell civil unrest or enforce the law a total of 30 times. This would be President Trump’s third time in nine months.”

Here’s hoping he climbs into his MedBed for the next three years and wakes up refreshed, detoxed from the addictive hatred coursing through his veins. If he ever finds peace, maybe he’ll try a shot of Kombucha and take up knitting.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

I could be wrong, but JB Pritzker may be the first Democrat to apply the d-word to Donald Trump. More importantly, the Illinois governor may be the first to link his criminality to his dementia. And! He may be the first to explain America’s existential crisis in context of a remedy.

A threefer! He said:

"It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in, but he's copying tactics of Vladimir Putin. Sending troops into cities, thinking that that's some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there's some sort of internal war going on in the United States is just, frankly, inane, and I'm concerned for his health. There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked."

Like I said, I could be wrong. California Governor Gavin Newsom came close to saying it. Last month, his social media account mocked one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, parsing all the lives, with a zinger on top: “Take your dementia meds, Grandpa. You are making things up again.” (Newsom has also said there’s something wrong with Trump. He suggested his cognition has decayed dramatically since his first term.)

But that’s as close as Newsom got, and as far as I can tell, no Democrat as high as Pritzker has said outright that Donald Trump is demented.

This is not to say no one has been talking about it directly. I have. USA Today’s Rex Huppke has. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has. The Hill’s Chris Truax has. There are dozens more examples. (There’s also a repertoire of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that the Democrats have used since Joe Biden dropped out of the campaign. Kamala Harris talked a lot about Trump’s “stamina” and “weakness.” Others followed her lead.)

But that’s pretty much the extent of it. Despite wall-to-wall coverage of Joe Biden’s mental state, now to the point where some respectable journalists are claiming there was a vast conspiracy to cover it up, the Washington press corps seemed to have priced into their coverage of Trump his obvious deterioration. There’s barely a hint of anything about it. Absolutely no one has used the d-word in their reporting. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy to cover it up.

I will say that something changed this week, at least in terms of coverage by the New York Times, which tends to be a bellwether for newspeople. A piece on his gathering of top military brass resulted in this reaction from a seasoned Times-watcher: “I assert that The New York Times has changed its approach to writing about Trump.”

The article, headlined “Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44,” was about how difficult it is to pick out the newsworthy bits from Trump’s speeches, as they tend to be retreads of the same things he’s always going on about. Despite addressing elites of the American military, Trump twaddled on about Biden and the “infamous autopen”; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

As Times reporter Shawn McCreesh said: “These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.”

But then, out of that miasma of mangled words, broken thoughts and disconnections arose “something new. Something different,” McCreesh wrote. The president of the United States said that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

To make sure you don’t miss it, McCreesh repeats those words in italics. “‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,’ the president of the United States said.”

McCreesh is reporting, not commenting. He’s not saying directly that Trump looks like an old man whose brain is so broken he can’t stop perseverating on the same five topics or that out of that word salad, he sometimes spews the pristine proclamations of a dictator. Instead, he takes a reportorial approach toward arriving at a similar conclusion. He’s showing, in other words, not telling, and the showing is clear.

“It has become harder to perceive the occasionally revealing things the president says … because of the way he sometimes says them,” McCreesh wrote. “For a 79-year-old, he’s often shown a great deal of energy, but he seemed a bit sapped Tuesday. As his remarks went on and on, his voice took on a more monotonous quality. A day earlier, when he spoke … Mr. Trump sounded out of breath at times.”

McCreesh could have taken a different reportorial approach.

He could have backgrounded the word salad and focused on how the “training ground” remark is in keeping with all the other dictatorial things Trump has said, which altogether are in keeping with Project 2025, published prior to the election. McCreesh could have focused on how, with each of these statements, the president seems to be coming around to publicly embracing that manifesto, after having renounced it. Indeed, such an approach would have gone viral. Just today, Trump said, in essence, he lied when he said he had nothing to do with it.

In short, McCreesh could have set aside the word salad to establish continuity between, say, the president who led an attempted insurrection and the president who said, years later, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Instead, McCreesh foregrounds Trump’s word salad to suggest that something has changed, and that such change could itself suggest that his dictatorial statements are the exception to the rule. “Thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth,” he wrote. “Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.”

Which brings me back to JB Pritzker. He’s why I’m dwelling on this piece and the way Shawn McCreesh wrote it. In being the first leading Democrat to use the word “dementia,” he’s doing something similar – foregrounding Trump’s deteriorated mental state such that all the crazy things that he’s doing in defiance of reason, morality, the Constitution and the law are downstream from there. (McCreesh’s foregrounding is, of course, implicit while Pritzker’s is explicit).

While other Democrats are making what seem to be ideological or policy-based arguments against the president – he’s a threat to your freedoms or he’s failing to protect your health care – Pritzker can take what you might call a position of big-hearted centrism. He can stand against Trump’s tyranny while at the same time genuinely lament that his disease has turned him into a despot. Now the dementia has set in, Pritzker said, Trump is copying Putin. “I'm concerned for his health.”

This won’t be fully convincing to a lot of people, myself included, but its effectiveness with independent voters might bring us around in time. Pritzker, or another ambitious Democrat, could easily pivot this framing to include all those things that swing voters thought he was going to do but didn’t. Why is food still so expensive? Why did my electric bill go up? Why didn’t Trump do what he said he was going to do? You could, as liberals often do, say that he lied, or that he actually wants to immiserate the middle class. But that would require changing swing voters’ minds. It would require them to admit they were wrong. Probably more effective to say, well, he’s gone mad with the dementia.

It’s the difference between the patient and his sickness. He isn’t saying “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds,” because he’s a fascist. He’s saying it because he’s sick. While the symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is politically what matters.

Consider comments made by Jack Cocchiarella. A CNN host asked the young YouTube influencer for his thoughts on the government shutdown. “Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” he said. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, because he doesn’t want to get the job done.

“He just doesn’t seem interested in negotiating. He’s taking pleasure in what Russ Vought said, which would be the traumatizing of federal workers. That was their goal coming into this administration. So it seems like that’s all they wanna do. And I don’t know how that gets any Democrat, who actually cares about people who are gonna see their premium double, triple, to come to the table, and why would you?

“This Administration doesn’t want to engage.”

Nothing here about Trump being fascist. Cocchiarella merely thinks he doesn’t want to negotiate with Democrats because he’s old and mean.

Since last year’s election, the Democrats have been in debate with themselves. Some say they need to keep sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy. Others say that didn’t work last time and they should focus on “kitchen-table issues,” which is to say, economics.

Dementia, in the way that Pritzker used it, could be the link between them. Why is Trump acting like a dictator? Why didn’t he do more to bring down my grocery bill? Same answer. It’s as elegant as it is simple.

Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News bobblehead with documented alcohol problems, summoned the military’s top 800 generals, admirals and flag officers to Quantico, Virginia this week to degrade them with a juvenile rant he could have delivered on Zoom.

Pacing back and forth in front of a backdrop from Patton, cosplaying Hegseth delivered what’s been called “an unhinged address filled with confusing contradictions, wild-eyed cheerleading, and politically charged rhetoric.”

Hegseth seemed oblivious to the fact he was lecturing brass with far more military expertise and experience than his own.

Hegseth’s speech was a tired attack on “woke.” He told the officers, “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate-change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions... As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit.”

He then suggested hazing and harassment are now OK, assuring brass that they shouldn’t be overly concerned with legalities. He offered up new directives “designed to take the monkey off your back and put you, the leadership, back in the driver's seat.”

He defined, for the four-star generals, what it means to be in the US military: “We don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”

The enemies of our country, they would next learn from Donald Trump, are Americans.

Proof of insanity

At the conclusion of Hegseth’s immature rant about beards, killer ethos and real men, Trump stepped into the spotlight like it was a MAGA rally.

Meandering from topic to topic for more than an hour, Trump mused on his fondness for the television show Victory at Sea, asserted his claim to a Nobel Peace Prize, criticized how former Presidents Obama and Biden walk down stairs, described how he walks down stairs, insulted “radical Democrats,” declared his love for tariffs, attacked Biden or his autopen 11 times, criticized how military ships “look,” mentioned making Canada the 51st state, and described the kind of thick paper he prefers to use when signing promotions.

Trump bizarrely told the officers he’d ended more than six wars, even though many people in the room continue to work on his “resolved” conflicts as they rage on. He also repeatedly mentioned nuclear weapons.

“I rebuilt our nuclear … I call it the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

Several officials called Trump’s speech truly disturbing and evidence its speaker is unwell — “even for Trump.”

After bragging earlier in the day that he could and would fire “any officer” he “doesn’t like … on the spot,” Trump told assembled brass they were crucial in his fight against the “enemy from within.” Distilled, Trump said they would soon be fighting Americans.

Hyping the pitch, Trump claimed, “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” He then added ominously that “our inner cities” were becoming “a big part of war now,” and that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Using American cities as “training grounds” for Hegseth’s extra-legal “lethality” operations meant to “kill people and break things” is batshit Reichstag Fire lunacy.

If we had a functioning government, Trump’s speech would already have triggered his 25th Amendment removal for mental infirmity, and his declaration(s) of war against American cities would be adjudicated as “levying war” against the US, otherwise known as treason.

Silence isn't golden

CNN reports that Trump was thirsty for a reaction, but the brass sat quietly.

Trump’s frustration was clear, given that he had so successfully whipped up lower-ranking troops at Fort Bragg earlier in the year. In June, he shamefully got young enlistees to boo as he attacked Biden. This week, in front of a mature audience, he got crickets.

At one point, Trump implored the audience to applaud him, saying, “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before … If you want to applaud, you applaud.” He then attempted a joke, saying hey, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank. There goes your future.”

Hilarity did not ensue.

Instead of clapping wildly — or even at all — the Generals served up discipline, delivering the silent message that they took an oath to the Constitution, not to him.

Attendees were aghast at the whole affair. The Intercept reports multiple officials who called Trump’s speech “embarrassing” and criticized Hegseth for gathering top commanders from around the world for a speech that was just like “his social media posts.”

One officer called Hegseth’s address “garbage.” Another said: “We are diminished as a nation by both Hegseth and Trump.” Another called it disqualifying, adding that, “It shocks the conscience to hear Hegseth — he is no warrior — endorse bullying and hazing of service members. How dare this former National Guard major lecture our military leaders on lethality.”

Patriots worried about the Constitution should take heart. The disastrous spectacle delivered a silver lining that may well save the republic.

Generals know what they must do

The silver lining is that every high-ranking officer stationed everywhere in the world now knows, without a doubt, two crucial facts they may only have suspected before Quantico:

1. Hegseth plans to disregard the rules of engagement to deliver maximum “lethality,” regardless of domestic and international law; and
2. Trump is unwell, and mentally unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

Knowledge of those two facts will inform decisions on how to respond to illegal orders. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they are required to disobey illegal orders, including those that violate US law as well as the Constitution.

Having heard Hegseth’s criminal intent, and having experienced Trump’s insanity, the officers’ resolve to disobey any and all illegal orders will only strengthen.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing, getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics.

Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment. Having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them.

As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people.

That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused.

That party is dead.

Today’s Republican politician quite literally lies for a living, as you can see on any of the Sunday political shows or whenever a Republican is interviewed on CNN or Morning Joe. Consider just a handful of the pre- and post-Trump versions of the GOP.

Before Trump, Republicans largely only shaded the truth:

• Ronald Reagan repeatedly claimed his tax cuts “paid for themselves,” a misleading but not entirely fabricated notion since some revenue returned via economic growth, though far less than claimed.
• George W. Bush’s administration asserted “we know” Iraq has WMDs. The statements danced on ambiguous intelligence, carefully presenting suspicions as certainties.
• Their “War on coal” job-loss talking points made blanket claims that Environmental Protection Agency rules would “kill jobs” even though labor data and research consistently showed EPA regulations were a minor layoff driver relative to collapsing demand for coal in the face of a gas fracking boom.
• Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric was based on one egregious fraud case (Linda Taylor) but was then generalized to stigmatize all welfare recipients and wielded as a racialized caricature.
• Republican pitches for the Keystone XL pipeline claimed it would create “42,000 jobs,” but those were just short-term construction and support jobs; the long-run permanent jobs were only in the dozens.
• The Bush administration defined “torture” in legal terms that excluded waterboarding, technically denying “torture” while knowingly permitting harsh practices.
• Paul Ryan’s claims about Obama “raiding Medicare” to fund the Affordable Care Act gracefully omitted that Obamacare’s cuts were to overpayments, not to benefits.
• Sarah Palin’s “death panels” warning about Obamacare referenced end-of-life planning provisions, not anything like “death panels,” but skirted the border of outright fabrication.
• GOP messaging around the Clinton tax hikes of the 1990s predicted economic downturns, assertions based on selective economic forecasting, not contrary evidence.
• Republican officials regularly portrayed the estate tax as a “death tax hitting family farms.” Cases of family farms being lost were extremely rare, but not fabricated entirely.
• President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner described the end of major combat in Iraq, failing to clarify that significant fighting remained; it was misleading but not untrue.
• Claims that the ACA was a “government takeover of health care” overstated federal involvement but weren’t outright invented; private insurance remained intact.

But then Trump came into office and started lying on his very first day as president.

On Jan. 20th and 21st of 2017, he claimed as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration, far above all official estimates; lied that it never rained during his speech, though weather reports and visual evidence proved otherwise; accused journalists of deliberately misreporting on crowd size “to sow discord;” suggested a rift with the intelligence community that was not supported by evidence; and, most disgustingly, at CIA HQ lied about disagreements with the intelligence agencies and the number of times he had appeared on magazine covers.

As the Washington Post documented, during his first four years in office Trump told 30,573 verified lies, a record he’ll probably easily beat in his second term. And Republicans in Congress clearly got the memo. Lying was to be the GOP’s political strategy.

Consider their record with these Post-2016 direct, easily disprovable lies:

• Trump and top Republicans lied that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election even though there’s not a shred of evidence to supports the claim.
• Lies that Democrats want to “open borders” and “abolish ICE” are utterly false but have become standard Republican Party rhetoric.
• Lying that Biden had hired 87,000 “new IRS agents to harass you.” (This lie was often told using the phrase “jackbooted thugs,” compounding the damage to the agency.)
• Trump repeatedly lied that he “created the greatest economy ever,” contradicting all metrics.
• To this day they lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, a story invented out of thin air and repeatedly disproven.
• Repeated lies — now being used to push back against the government shutdown — that Democrats want to “give a trillion dollars to illegal aliens for health care” was invented without referencing a single actual legislative proposal or law.
• Lies of “total exoneration” by Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump’s many connections to Russia are easily contradicted by simply reading the actual contents of the report.
• Stating that windmills cause cancer and kill birds, coal is “clean,” and climate change is a “hoax” are all baseless lies presented as facts during speeches including Trump’s at the United Nations last week.
• Lying that COVID-19 was “totally under control” at the start of 2020, leading to the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, despite internal warnings and contrary facts.
• Lying that they “passed the Veterans Choice” law when it was enacted under Obama.
• Insisting Mexico would pay for the border wall when they knew full well that Mexico never agreed nor would pay a single penny.
• Trump, Republicans, and Fox “News” personalities repeatedly lied that “Dominion voting machines switched votes,” knowing there was no evidence; Fox hosts internally acknowledged the lies and it cost the company hundreds of millions.
• They repeatedly lied that “China pays the tariffs” when anybody paying attention knew import tariffs are always paid by Americans and American companies.

For reasons unknown, our mainstream media is allergic to using the words “lie,” “lies,” and “lied.”

They overlook the fact that telling lies is a classic fascist strategy to so confound the public that it becomes impossible to know what’s real and what’s not, causing people to check out of following politics or challenging them.

They also overlook the fact that the last time Democrats engaged in systematic lying was when LBJ got us into the Vietnam War. That burned the party badly, and they’ve largely kept to the truth ever since.

That’s not to say Democrats are perfect, blameless, or the solution to all our nations problems. But at the moment, they’re what we have. We need to push them hard.

Nonetheless, like the media, Democratic politicians until recently have kept talking about how their “friends on the other side of the aisle” are engaging in “falsehoods,” “deceptions,” or “misinformation.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke with that tradition, telling Joe Scarborough that Trump, Vance, Johnson, and other Republican politicians were “telling an e----- lie” when they said Democrats were filibustering the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open because Dems were demanding “trillions for healthcare for illegal aliens.”

Bravo, Chuck. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

Not only that, Republicans could pass their continuing resolution through the Senate and reopen the government today without a single Democratic vote. All they need to break the Democratic filibuster is 50 votes to change the Senate rules, which they have, and they’ve used that process to break filibusters and install judges (both Supreme Court and lower) and executive branch appointments in the recent past.

They’re pretending to be helpless because they think this shutdown theater will help them and gives them a great excuse to eviscerate our government.

It’s way past time that Democrats, our news media, and the rest of us start telling the truth about the nearly-continuous firehose of modern Republican lies.

Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.

Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.

It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, Agustin Pinochet, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo (among others).

And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech on Tuesday before our assembled generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.

“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”

And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:

“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats ... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.

• First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”
• Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.
• Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.
• Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.
• Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.

Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:

• Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.
• Declare political opponents enemies of the state.
• Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.
• Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with ----") that reality itself becomes negotiable.
• Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.
• Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.
• Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.
• Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.

There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.

His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.

Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.

And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to James Comey and Miles Taylor.

And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.

It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, 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.”

Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.

And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.

That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Trump or his henchmen.

When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.

Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.

The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November 2026 elections.

This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.

Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.

Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).

The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.

As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.

That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”

Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.

The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.