This isn't a warning. It’s an obituary for democratic complacency. In the US, we are on dead ground!
Brent is right to draw the Erdogan parallel, but let’s stop whispering about what’s coming and start saying it with our full chest. Trump is not flirting with fascism. He is engaged, ring on finger, planning a wedding at Mar-a-Lago, and every Republican with a shred of spine is either RSVP’ing yes or mysteriously missing.
What we are seeing, in Istanbul, in Trump’s America 2.0, in the MAGA-run state houses, is the erasure of accountability. The playbook is ancient. Strip legal protections. Criminalize protest. Target the opposition. Control the media. Rebrand loyalty as law. And when that fails? Write a new Constitution. One that legalizes the crime scene and punishes anyone who dares to remember what came before.
Trump isn’t joking about 2028. That was the test balloon. The merch is real. The immunity plans are in motion. And with Pete Hegseth salivating over the prospect of turning the military into a presidential enforcer squad, we’d be fools to pretend the guardrails are going to hold. Because they didn’t in 2020. They held just enough. And Trump has been planning revenge ever since.
Letitia James is the beginning, not the end. Prosecutors, governors, judges, journalists, all are on the chopping block once Trump consolidates power. The apparatus for mass criminalization already exists. ICE. CBP. Fusion centers. Unmarked vans. He doesn’t have to build a secret police. He just needs to rebrand what’s already there.
And don’t count on the Constitution to save us. The Constitution is just paper if the people sworn to uphold it treat it like toilet tissue. Trump doesn’t need a legal right to a third term. He needs enough chaos and enough cowardice. That’s it. That’s the game.
So what do we do?
We stop acting like pots and pans will save us. They won’t.
We stop pretending institutions will self-correct. They won’t.
We stop wringing our hands and start organizing. Voting. Striking. Whistleblowing. Leaking. Resisting.
Loudly. Publicly. Permanently.
Sun Tzu understood the terrain of power better than most generals understand the ground beneath their feet. Dead ground — where retreat is impossible — forces soldiers to fight like hell. That’s where we are now. No escape. No delay. Just the clarity of survival through collective, unrelenting resistance.
No doubt there are those who'll see this piece as excessively alarmist. I'm not among them. Neither our constitution nor our 250 years of democratic stability immunize us against authoritarianism, including its worst manifestations as described here. And clearly nothing Trump has done or said thus far suggests he has any ideological aversion to it...quite the contrary. What's more, the protests roiling the country will eventually beget at least some violence...they always do...providing a perfect excuse for deploying our military and other heavy handed tactics against his own people. That said, protest we will until our own crisis reaches Turkish proportions, at which time I suspect we'll turn to some sort of "virtual" resistance, national sicks outs or something else that someone much more clever and than I am will devise.
Relying on Congress to “do something” that stops, or at least slows down, The Regime is a waste of time and energy. Most of “our Representatives” have too much to lose personally (read: financially) if they were to opposed The Regime. So they either support it outright, or go along with it quietly while they tell their constituents that there isn’t much they can do. The Courts are trying to slow down The Regime with rulings against it, by its demonstrated its willingness to throw the country into a Constitutional crisis by ignoring such Rulings. That leaves us— The American people — to take a page out of our historical past and revolt against tranny. Are we ready? Increasingly so but it’s slow going. The Resistance needs to start thinking of itself as The Counterattack. Transition from individual protests and boycotts to a holistic General Strike (generalstrikeus.com). That will get The Regime’s attention…just like it has in other authoritarian states around the world. And what we have here that other countries don’t necessarily, is a rapidly growing independent media that can and will report on any state-sponsored violence, which will only grow The Counterattack movement. Don’t let the bastards grind you down!
Terrifying, and every day is more so. Hard to believe now a short few months after Trump took office that the Democrats' strategy was to wait quietly and let Trump self destruct. We've got to yell, video, and call and call our representatives - especially the Republicans.
This isn't a warning. It’s an obituary for democratic complacency. In the US, we are on dead ground!
Brent is right to draw the Erdogan parallel, but let’s stop whispering about what’s coming and start saying it with our full chest. Trump is not flirting with fascism. He is engaged, ring on finger, planning a wedding at Mar-a-Lago, and every Republican with a shred of spine is either RSVP’ing yes or mysteriously missing.
What we are seeing, in Istanbul, in Trump’s America 2.0, in the MAGA-run state houses, is the erasure of accountability. The playbook is ancient. Strip legal protections. Criminalize protest. Target the opposition. Control the media. Rebrand loyalty as law. And when that fails? Write a new Constitution. One that legalizes the crime scene and punishes anyone who dares to remember what came before.
Trump isn’t joking about 2028. That was the test balloon. The merch is real. The immunity plans are in motion. And with Pete Hegseth salivating over the prospect of turning the military into a presidential enforcer squad, we’d be fools to pretend the guardrails are going to hold. Because they didn’t in 2020. They held just enough. And Trump has been planning revenge ever since.
Letitia James is the beginning, not the end. Prosecutors, governors, judges, journalists, all are on the chopping block once Trump consolidates power. The apparatus for mass criminalization already exists. ICE. CBP. Fusion centers. Unmarked vans. He doesn’t have to build a secret police. He just needs to rebrand what’s already there.
And don’t count on the Constitution to save us. The Constitution is just paper if the people sworn to uphold it treat it like toilet tissue. Trump doesn’t need a legal right to a third term. He needs enough chaos and enough cowardice. That’s it. That’s the game.
So what do we do?
We stop acting like pots and pans will save us. They won’t.
We stop pretending institutions will self-correct. They won’t.
We stop wringing our hands and start organizing. Voting. Striking. Whistleblowing. Leaking. Resisting.
Loudly. Publicly. Permanently.
Sun Tzu understood the terrain of power better than most generals understand the ground beneath their feet. Dead ground — where retreat is impossible — forces soldiers to fight like hell. That’s where we are now. No escape. No delay. Just the clarity of survival through collective, unrelenting resistance.
No doubt there are those who'll see this piece as excessively alarmist. I'm not among them. Neither our constitution nor our 250 years of democratic stability immunize us against authoritarianism, including its worst manifestations as described here. And clearly nothing Trump has done or said thus far suggests he has any ideological aversion to it...quite the contrary. What's more, the protests roiling the country will eventually beget at least some violence...they always do...providing a perfect excuse for deploying our military and other heavy handed tactics against his own people. That said, protest we will until our own crisis reaches Turkish proportions, at which time I suspect we'll turn to some sort of "virtual" resistance, national sicks outs or something else that someone much more clever and than I am will devise.
Relying on Congress to “do something” that stops, or at least slows down, The Regime is a waste of time and energy. Most of “our Representatives” have too much to lose personally (read: financially) if they were to opposed The Regime. So they either support it outright, or go along with it quietly while they tell their constituents that there isn’t much they can do. The Courts are trying to slow down The Regime with rulings against it, by its demonstrated its willingness to throw the country into a Constitutional crisis by ignoring such Rulings. That leaves us— The American people — to take a page out of our historical past and revolt against tranny. Are we ready? Increasingly so but it’s slow going. The Resistance needs to start thinking of itself as The Counterattack. Transition from individual protests and boycotts to a holistic General Strike (generalstrikeus.com). That will get The Regime’s attention…just like it has in other authoritarian states around the world. And what we have here that other countries don’t necessarily, is a rapidly growing independent media that can and will report on any state-sponsored violence, which will only grow The Counterattack movement. Don’t let the bastards grind you down!
Terrifying, and every day is more so. Hard to believe now a short few months after Trump took office that the Democrats' strategy was to wait quietly and let Trump self destruct. We've got to yell, video, and call and call our representatives - especially the Republicans.
What a model to which to aspire!