The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last.

Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933than it does Budapest circa 2015.

I debated in recent days whether this column should be written by our fearless foreign correspondent William Boot, who started satirically chronicling the backsliding of American democracy in January and the willful destruction of the federal government, but it seems more important to write plainly.

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is. They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation’s capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections.

The president’s military occupation of the capital has escalated in recent days into something not seen since British troops marched the streets of colonial Boston — even though precisely nothing has happened to warrant it, the Pentagon has now armed the National Guard patrolling DC and armored vehicles, designed for the worst of combat, are patrolling the capital, where they’re colliding with civilian vehicles because war transports are not supposed to be on civilian streets. (Why a 14-ton MRAP is in any way necessary for a domestic police mission is its own worthy line of questioning!)

Word came over the weekend that the president is now drawing up plans and explicitly threatening domestic political opponents like the governors of California and Illinois with similar military occupations — exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power.

Civilians who try lawfully to exercise their right to document the abuses of the regime are themselves arrested and charged with felonies through trumped-up charges teeming with official lies. The fact that this military takeover and federal occupation is being done to the city’s residents — and not on their behalf — is evident in how deserted DC has become as residents refuse to enter public spaces where they might have to interact with agents of the state.

America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.

It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting US companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.

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It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.

It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration. It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.

It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.

It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.

Just months short of the nation’s 250^th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• 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 obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• 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 transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

And so on.

One could say that Trump has blown through the nation’s constitutional and political guardrails, but a more accurate assessment is that both Congress and the Supreme Court — who have, as I wrote earlier this spring, effectively rolled over and played dead when it comes to their constitutional duty to exert checks and balances — removed those guardrails helpfully in advance.

In a dissent last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared the Court’s current approach, which has allowed Trump to streamroll past the normal constraints of the presidency through one procedural sleight-of-hand after another, to the game Calvinball, played by Calvin & Hobbes. “Today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. ‘[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,’ the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible,” she writes. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

The response, meanwhile, by Democrats has been unconscionably weak. It’s no coincidence that governors like Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker have been the leaders of recent days; they are clear-eyed about what is happening. As Greg Sargent writes, “Newsom shapes everything around the brute fact that Trump is serially breaking the law and using government sponsored violence and intimidation to entrench authoritarian power. He accepts this as the core fact of our moment.”

By contrast, I challenge you to find even a moderately tepid and clear-eyed statement from any national Democrat. National Democrats seem all invisible as the military takes over policing the streets of the capital and prosecuting its crimes. This should be a lay-up to oppose — the most basic duty of any congressional figure, and yet, “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with other senior Democrats, have not been a part of any concerted effort to voice opposition to the occupation.”

The Democrats is still a party paralyzed by their own creaking gerontocracy; DC’s own nearly ninety-year-old congressional delegate hasn’t been seen in public since the occupation of her city — and her statement protesting it was accompanied by a photo of her at a different, previous, unrelated protest.

There’s a story that I think a lot about — on September 29, 2008, I went to one of those friendly background lunches that reporters in D.C. do all the time with newsmakers. It was the heart of the financial crisis and a group of us were meeting with Rep. Eric Cantor, a rising star in the GOP and party whip. The House was about to vote on a bailout for Wall Street that effectively everyone agreed was necessary to hold together the global economy — President Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed chair Ben Bernanke, GOP presidential nominee John McCain (who had even suspended his campaign to focus on the crisis) and Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Cantor casually told us over lunch that his caucus was going to vote it down. We reporters, many of them far more experienced Hill veterans than me, were incredulous — all of his party’s leaders, the ones in the roles who knew the stake, the ones the party was supposed to listen to and follow, said this was critical — and yet the House GOP was going to let it burn?

Cantor was right — the House voted down the bailout and the stock market dropped 800 points. The end seemed nigh.

I remember walking out of that luncheon feeling like I had glimpsed something important. The beating heart of the GOP no longer cared about principles or policy. There was a nihilist wing in control that scared me; they were happy to let it all burn.

For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power — some incident that would bring party leaders to their senses, some principle or red-line would be unwilling to trade or cross in pursuit of furthering Trump’s agenda. Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.

It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years simply to please Donald Trump and avoid running afoul of his temper.

Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written. It will surely get worse — Trump’s push now is clearly focused on locking in an illegitimate claim to power. Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again.

GMG

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Source:

• Garrett Graff, America Tips Into Fascism, Doomsday Scenario, 25 August 2025. To subscribe to Doomsday Scenario, click here.

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And Just Like That, A Dictator

Rick Wilson

27 August 2025

I’ve called Donald Trump many, many, many names.

A carnival barker, a gilded-age grifter, a pathetic, pasty-faced fraud. I’ve said he’s a malignant narcissist with the impulse control of a toddler and the attention span of a gnat on amphetamines.

Only rarely have I said he’s already a dictator.

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He’s certainly dictator-curious, to borrow a phrase. He’s nearing the end of his apprentice program at Dictator Technical School. His lust for it is seething, ugly, and constant. Now that he’s feeling the icy finger of death tapping his grotesque cankles, he’s pushing harder and harder for the Big Job.

He’s wanted the scope and impact of dictatorial power for his entire life, the power to turn whim into law, to permanently turn the spotlight of all attention to himself, to finally be the richest man in any room, to crush enemies and reward friends.

And now, the final guardrails of a fading American order have been swept aside. The trial run is over. The curtain is up.

At first, let’s call it the 2017-2020 period, he wasn’t and couldn’t be a dictator. Oh, the craving was there, like a junkie gurning for a fresh fix, but so were the guardrails of the old order. We had people even in his inner circle who counseled restraint, a few adults who still remembered concepts like the rule of law.

Men like Jim Mattis, a Secretary of Defense who believed in the Constitution more than he believed in the Commander-in-Chief, or Rex Tillerson, a corporate titan who somehow thought the State Department was something more than personal Welcome Wagon for Vladimir Putin.

We had courts who still believed the law was superior to Trump’s whims and dictates, and a bipartisan congressional establishment, flawed as it was, that hadn’t yet been entirely consumed by his political death cult.

The failed coup on January 6th, and the weeks leading up to it, was the ultimate litmus test for the old order, and for all its flaws, it held, but not enough. It failed the test of convicting him in his second impeachment, an act of moral cowardice that earned Mitch McConnell a swift trip to whatever hellish political afterlife awaits him when the Reaper knocks.

But that was then.

The old guard is gone, replaced by a new collection of yes-men and sycophants. The institutions have been hollowed out, their foundations chipped away by a thousand tiny hammers of avarice, incompetence and malice.

A cult, however, is a prerequisite for a one-man-rule operation, and though his cult is cracking, aging, and under stress from the slow realizations that their man is a degenerate predator covering up the Epstein matter, and is going to die soon, his cult is still the largest single political cohort in America. It’s a group willing to believe, no matter how outlandish the lie, that he is a savior, and that their enemies are his. The groundwork has been laid. The MAGA media and political incentives are as perverse as Ghislaine Maxwell.

The first step in any coup, soft or hard, is the collapse of the law. You don’t need a single, dramatic act. You need a slow, insidious process. Both the Federal Courts, from SCOTUS down, have increasingly rubber-stamped Trump’s policies, accepting his absurd claims of unilateral power and immunity.

The slow, but relentless, chipping away at judicial independence echoes the sort of institutional decay seen in many aspiring autocratic states. Look back at the 20th century. While not a direct parallel, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s audacious attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937, though it failed, showed a presidential willingness to directly challenge the judicial branch for political ends. FDR wanted to eliminate the judicial roadblock to his New Deal.

Trump, being a man of more primal instincts, just wants all roadblocks eliminated, period. He wants to be able to have executive orders have the full force of settled law; witness his year-in-jail idea for flag-burning.

His Department of Justice is now fully, openly, and noisily his personal attack squad, a collection of ideologues and toadies, sending agents to kick down the doors of anyone who ever held Trump to account. Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and everyone who works for the DOJ and the FBI can choose to be fired, or become badged bootlicker terrorizing Trump’s enemies.

The next thing they need is enablers, and yesterday’s edition of The Bachelor, White House was a spectacle for the ages. His cabinet is the largest collection of ass-kissers, incompetents, suck-ups, fools, kleptocrats, and snakes in any American government and makes the Harding Administration look clean by comparison. The Harding administration, and its infamous “Ohio Gang,” was the gold standard for brazen corruption. The Teapot Dome scandal saw Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall go to prison for accepting bribes to lease Navy oil reserves. The head of the Veterans Bureau, Charles R. Forbes, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government. Harding’s cronies, from his Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty to his personal staff, were embroiled in schemes involving graft, bribery, and fraud.

They were amateurs.

This Trump cabinet is a professional-grade operation of political parasitism, where the kleptocrats are so proud of their work, they practically sell tickets. They’re not just taking bribes; they’re using the entire apparatus of government to enrich themselves and their friends while simultaneously dismantling the very institutions they swore to serve.

Of course, they also need a compliant media. And QED, Fox. But while Fox is the prime example, the ecosystem of disinformation has expanded to include a constellation of right-wing grifters, podcasts, and digital outlets that echo and amplify the party line. This isn’t a new phenomenon.

The rise of yellow journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with figures like William Randolph Hearst using his media empire to sell wars and manipulate public opinion, showed that a powerful media can be a weapon. But the modern-day version, where the truth itself is considered a partisan attack, is far more sophisticated and chilling.

They need control over the economy, the one institution that can’t be bullied by a tweet. Trump’s Fed takeover play, using illegally obtained mortgage information from his housing secretary (a man who sells schlock, trash-scale developments, but enough about things that trigger my aesthetic outrage), is a clear sign. It’s not just about policy; it’s about subverting the foundational independence of the central bank to give Trump a political credit card. “The rate is 1% because vibes” is not the core principle of central banking.

This isn’t just Gilded Age robber barons making shady deals; it’s a new, more dangerous form of state-sanctioned crony capitalism to award their backers, financiers, and followers. The goal is to make all economic activity subservient to the whim of a single man.

Finally, they need the military on the streets and in your face.

Trump’s fantasies of using the military to quell protests and his attempts to purge the top brass with loyalists are a page taken directly from the aspiring dictator’s handbook. He understands that control of the means of coercion is the last, and most important, piece of the puzzle.

Like many, I still felt like the full descent wasn’t here yet.

I was wrong.

Yesterday’s three-hour-plus spectacle wasn’t a bold declaration of martial law (that’s coming), or a Nuremberg Rally (that’s coming), or a Reichstag Fire Declaration (that’s coming).

It was just the shocking normalcy of Trump’s utter control over every major institution in the country. It was him being able to just do it, without consequences, without a single functioning guardrail left to slow him down.

We’re now in a race between Trump’s mortality and his desire for un- and anti-American power and control.

And with every passing day, the finish line for his ambition gets a little closer.

Now comes the ugly, messy part, and God help us all.

P.S. I know this is a grim piece. I know there’s not a lot of hope and uplift, here. It’s dark. Saying, “The Democrats will save us all” has been a bad election bet for some time now, and I’m still not seeing the fire and bloody-mindedness required.

Oh, well. I’m here in the fight until they carry me out feet-first.

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Source:

• Rick Wilson, And Just Like That, A Dictator, Against All Enemies, 27 August 2025

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