Jonathan Toews Returned to Chicago to an Unbelievable Ovation

CHICAGO (AP) — Jonathan Toews exhaled and then laughed and shook his head in disbelief as the standing ovation continued for four-plus minutes. “All right, all right,” he said before taking another lap in front of the cheering crowd.

Toews returned to Chicago on Monday night with his hometown Winnipeg Jets, but it was clear that his first NHL city still counts him as one of its own. Toews waved and patted his heart as he was showered with cheers and chants of “Jonny! Jonny!” during a timeout in the first period. It was his first game at the United Center since he signed with the Jets on July 1.

The 37-year-old center spent his first 15 seasons with the Blackhawks, winning three Stanley Cup titles. “I tried to do my best to take it all in and really savor it. To really appreciate the love from the fans,” Toews said. “Obviously, I spent some special years here in Chicago and that’s what made playing for the Blackhawks so great. Winning championships and all of that stuff aside, just playing for a sports team in this city and calling this home for as long as I did was just incredible. I can’t thank them enough. It will always be home and has a special place in my heart.”

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TOEWS gets EPIC ovation in return to Chicago

"Candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination will face a Herculean task but also an enviable opportunity"

It is no secret that a group of Democrats have their eyes on a 2028 presidential run. The many capable governors (e.g., JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California, Andy Beshear of Kentucky) are obvious contenders. But, just as no one had paid much attention to Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, or Barack Obama two-plus years prior to their successful presidential runs, there are contenders not presently on anyone’s radar screen who may vie for the nomination.

Whatever their name ID, 2028 contenders should spend their time wisely. That will require more than merely speaking out against the mad wannabe king’s domestic and international outrages or preparing (as Obama and Zohran Mamdani did) to viscerally engage the public, create a volunteer army, and activate people previously never political. Rather, 2028 hopefuls should start refining their vision if they want to run credible campaigns. Several big challenges deserve serious, extended reflection before announcing.

What to do about accountability: The failure to prosecute Trump criminally in time to avert his return to power does not mean Democrats must ignore the trail of corruption, constitutional outrages, and rank illegality he will leave behind. The 2028 contenders should start thinking now about how they want to handle Trump and his cohort of lawless democracy vandals.

Options from criminal to civil liability (including recovering ill-gotten gains) to court martial to disbarment should be on the table. But candidates should not get bogged down in prescribing the prosecutions and penalties to pursue against specific MAGA offenders. 

Pledging to engage a special prosecutor or series of prosecutors, tasking inspectors general with full reviews, and empaneling an esteemed commission of historians, lawyers, and former government officials to create an official account of the Trump-era outrages would be preferable (and not prejudge prosecutions). Thinking now about that serious challenge would help clear the decks for candidates’ campaign messages and governing agendas.

What to do about democracy: Running to “restore” democracy is the wrong approach. Trump has broken our Constitution and shown its fault lines. Considering a rebirth of (as Lincoln did at Gettysburg) or reinvention of democracy should occupy 2028 contenders’ time. With the aim of making our system more democratic/responsive and less captive to oligarchs, candidates might consider a game plan for each branch of government. (Fixation with the current filibuster as an excuse for not pursuing these items makes evident a refusal or lack of readiness to reinvent our democracy.)

The Supreme Court has disgraced itself and lost the public’s confidence. Nevertheless, institutional changes can repair it (e.g., expanding the court, setting term limits, installing an inspector general, instituting a mandatory ethics code, eliminating the shadow docket except in limited cases). The president, with help from Congress, can return the Court to its appropriate role to check the other branches and defend of our constitutional rights.

Candidates must also consider curbs on executive power — not a popular idea with presidents of either party. These can include (ideally, by legislation to make permanent) eliminating many “emergency powers,” limiting the Insurrection Action, putting teeth into both the Emoluments Clause and the Hatch Act, requiring financial disclosure for the president and vice president, abolishing recission authority, bolstering the independence of agencies (e.g., the NLRB, FTC), prohibiting political interference with the Justice Department, and strengthening the Freedom of Information Act.

The nominee will have to develop specific immigration policies but should not miss the opportunity to pledge wholesale reorganization/dismemberment of the Department of Homeland Security, which has bureaucratized the national security structure and created rogue, lawless immigration enforcements that have devolved into fascist street thugs. This should be a mainstream position. (Keep the Education Department, Dismantle DHS!)

The next president, aside from a policy agenda, will need to prepare massive democracy enhancement legislation. That can include updating/reinstituting the Voting Rights Act, setting up independent commissions to prevent gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting, re-establishing workable causes of action (so-called Bivens cases) to hold federal officials liable for constitutional violations, imposing strict campaign finance rules (let a new Supreme Court revisit Citizens United), criminalizing phony elector schemes and other efforts to subvert elections, and granting statehood to D.C. The next president should not throw up his or her hands because of horrendous Roberts’ Court decisions. Pass the laws, litigate the cases, and push for a reformed court to overturn ill-conceived precedent.

What to do about foreign policy: One can only imagine what will remain of U.S. alliances and international stature in 2028. Contenders without extensive foreign policy experience should start traveling, studying, and planning for restoration of American leadership. Convincing allies ever to trust us and aggressors to ever respect us will be an uphill task but the 2028 nominee should be ready with an agenda that limits foreign adventurism, eschews imperialism, re-emphasizes international law, and repairs the post WWII world order. This will be a multi-decade process but has to begin somewhere. A good start: Immediately lifting any remaining Trump retaliatory and nonsensical tariffs, getting out of Venezuela, and recommitting to NATO.

What to do about oligarchy/concentration of wealth: American have never objected to getting rich. But they do object to billionaires getting wealthy at average Americans’ expense and using vast fortunes and outsized power to control government. Thinking through ways to empower workers and promote opportunity (e.g., subsidize childcare, remove barriers to unionization, increase minimum wage with a COLA) and devise an agenda for shared prosperity to appeal to a broad swath of Americans must be a high priority for 2028 contenders.

A good starting place would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech at the National Press Club calling that Democrats “acknowledge the economic failures of the current rigged system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big, structural change.” Warren is correct that there is no shortage of good ideas (universal childcare, tough anti-trust enforcement, crackdown on corruption, a fair taxation system, etc.). And while each contender will have specific proposals, the eventual nominee will need to convey their determination, as Warren put it, to “build an economy for everyone.”

Democratic candidates should embrace Americans’ ambition to get ahead and not be shy about celebrating the benefits of a well-regulated market economy. However, they must commit to ending the kind of predatory, crony capitalism that has made it harder and harder for average people to attain the American dream.

In short, “Democrats need to earn trust — long-term, durable trust — across the electorate,” as Warren put it. Trust, in this case, means demonstrating that they “actually understand what’s broken and … have the courage to fix it — even when that means taking on the wealthy and well-connected.”

Bottom Line: Candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination will face a Herculean task but also an enviable opportunity. To be ready, they need to prepare now and start accumulating a brain trust to help them think through not only an election but a path to a renaissance of democracy.

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-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation efforts, and keep the opposition movement motivated and engaged into 2026, please join the fight as a free or paid subscriber.

 (Illustration Credit: Vitalii Abakumov) 

"A fundamental safeguard against abuse of power"

 

Trump’s bellicose posture toward Greenland is absolutely unacceptable. Are we to live in a world where a powerful nation can declare, “It is in our national interest to take your resources, and because we have the power to do so, we are entitled to take them”? That logic is nothing more than a return to crude imperialism, dressed up in the language of national security. It undermines international law, disregards the sovereignty of smaller nations, and normalizes coercion as a legitimate tool of statecraft. If adopted broadly, this worldview would erode the foundations of global stability and replace diplomacy with raw force.

When a president openly advances such reckless and destabilizing ideas, it is reasonable and necessary to consider the constitutional mechanisms designed to protect the country from dangerous leadership. In theory, the United States is not without safeguards. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare a president unfit to serve, temporarily transferring power to prevent further harm.

This mechanism exists precisely to address situations in which a president’s judgment, temperament, or conduct poses a serious threat. In practice, however, it is clear that Trump’s cabinet is the last body we can rely on to restrain him. Its members have consistently demonstrated personal loyalty, political calculation, or fear of reprisal rather than an independent commitment to constitutional duty. Expecting this group to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is therefore unrealistic. That reality leaves impeachment and removal from office as the only viable constitutional remedy.

Impeachment is not a partisan weapon; it is a fundamental safeguard against abuse of power. When a president signals contempt for international norms, threatens the sovereignty of other nations, and treats power as its own justification, Congress has an obligation to act. Removal from office is not about punishing a personality or settling political scores; it is about reaffirming that no president is above the law and that the United States does not endorse governance by intimidation or force. Failing to act in such circumstances risks normalizing dangerous behavior and weakening the very democratic institutions meant to prevent it.

-Martin Tracy

“We are all witness to a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency,” said the leader of Amnesty International USA

 

Exactly a year into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, a leading human rights group on Tuesday released a report cataloging the administration’s rapid escalation of authoritarian practices—and outlining the steps that can and must be taken in the US to halt Trump’s attacks on immigrants and refugees, the press, protesters, and his political opponents.

Amnesty International’s report, titled Ringing the Alarm Bells: Rising Authoritarian Practices and Erosion of Human Rights in the United States, details interlocking areas in which the president is “cracking the pillars of a free society.”

The group has documented human rights abuses and the patterns followed by authoritarian regimes around the world and has found that while the rise of autocratic leaders can happen within numerous contexts, the similarities shared by authoritarian escalations include the consolidation of government power, the control of information, the discrediting of critics, the punishment of dissent, the closure of civic space, and the weakening of mechanisms that ensure accountability.

Those patterns have all been documented in the US since January 20, 2025, when Trump took office for a second time. “We are all witness to a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “By shredding norms and concentrating power, the administration is trying to make it impossible for anyone to hold them accountable.”

The areas in which Trump is eroding human rights and accelerating toward authoritarianism, according to Amnesty, include:

-Targeting freedom of the press,

-Targeting freedom of expression and assembly,

-Targeting political opponents and critics,

-Targeting judges, lawyers, and the legal system,

-Undermining due process,

-Attacking refugee and migrant rights,

-Scapegoating populations and rolling back non-discrimination policies,

-Using the military for domestic purposes,

-Dismantling checks on corporate accountability and anti-corruption measures,

-Increasing state surveillance, and

-Undermining international systems that protect human rights.

Amnesty emphasized that the authoritarian tactics are “mutually reinforcing,” with Trump cracking down on protesters early in his term—targeting foreign-born students who had organized protests against Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza and revoking thousands of student visas, hundreds of which were revoked after the administration began monitoring foreign students’ social media and accused visa holders of “support for terrorism” under a broad federal statute.

In recent months, Trump’s attacks on refugees and immigrants have gone hand in hand with his militarization of law enforcement and targeting of First Amendment rights.

The president has deployed the National Guard and sent thousands of armed, masked federal agents into communities including Chicago; Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis; in the latter city, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a woman who had come out to help protect immigrants in her neighborhood earlier this month.

Masked agents have “seized migrants, asylum seekers, and US citizens” as they have searched for people to arrest to fulfill Trump’s campaign pledge to ramp up deportations. Those who have been detained are being held in facilities like Camp Montana East in El Paso, Texas, which recently recorded its third detainee death in less than two months, and “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, where Amnesty last month documented treatment that amounts to torture.

The report also details Trump’s attacks on the press, with the president hand-picking outlets that are permitted to cover the White House and barring the Associated Press from “restricted spaces” in the government building because of its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name, the “Gulf of America.” 

The Pentagon also demanded that journalists sign agreements waiving their First Amendment rights, resulting in reporters walking out and turning in their press badges, pledging to continue covering the Department of Defense without the administration’s approval.

A White House official also aggressively attacked a journalist last week for asking about an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, accusing him of being a “left-wing activist” who was posing as a reporter when he did not accept the administration’s claims that the agent had shot Good in self-defense.

The report also details the Department of Justice’s efforts to investigate groups it deems “domestic terrorist” organizations "while moving toward classifying the filming of immigration arrests—a constitutional right—as domestic terrorism. 

Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ against his political opponents including New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey; his executive actions targeting law firms that represent individuals and groups that challenge the government, which resulted in some firms acquiescing; and his abandonment of due process, including through his ”extraordinary“ use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers to an El Salvador prison known for torture.

“Trump’s attacks on civic space and the rule of law and the erosion of human rights in the United States mirrors the global pattern Amnesty has seen and warned about for decades,” said O’Brien. “Importantly, our experience shows that by the time authoritarian practices are fully entrenched, the institutions meant to restrain abuses of power are already severely compromised.”

The report warns that “the Trump administration has moved swiftly—oftentimes outside the bounds of the law—to trample on rights and dangerously consolidate power,” and calls on institutions to take decisive action to respond to the “alarm bells” detailed in the report.

“We know where this path leads, and we know the human cost when alarm bells go unanswered,” reads the report.

Recommendations for the US Congress include:

-Strengthening guardrails against the domestic use of the military for law enforcement and prohibiting finding for “militarized protest suppression that violates human rights standards,”

-Conduct oversight of discriminatory press restrictions,

-Pass legislation to develop national guidelines on respecting and facilitating the right to peaceful protest and for all law enforcement agencies to review their policies and the equipment used in the policing of demonstrations,

-Conduct oversight of immigration agencies including through “unannounced inspections of detention facilities and immigration enforcement,” and

-Decriminalize migration and establish a pathway to citizenship for people within the US.

The group also called on international leaders to continue scrutiny of human rights developments in the US, oppose US reprisals and sanctions against international courts and investigators, and mitigate humanitarian harms where US assistance is abruptly withdrawn by coordinating support for affected communities and frontline organizations.

Kerry Moscugiuri, interim chief executive of Amnesty International UK, called on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “use every tool at his disposal to confront Donald Trump’s seemingly out of control anti-rights agenda.”

“A year into Trump’s second term and it’s never been clearer: this is a pivotal point in world history,” said Moscugiuri. “Starmer must also speak out on the US government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

Failure to oppose and stop the genocide has led us all to where we are now. Silence and inaction as the global human rights architecture is dismantled is not an option. Leaders across the globe must wake up to the world they seem to be sleepwalking into—before it is too late.”

O’Brien added that “authoritarian practices only take root when they are allowed to become normalized. We cannot let that happen in the United States.” “Together,” he said, “we all have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to rise to this challenging time in our history and to protect human rights.”

-Julia Conley, Common Dreams

Well, what do we think about president djt?

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you!

President DJT

“One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations ('Complete and Total Control'). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many 'written documents' establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia…”

-The Atlantic

 “[He] wears ill-fitting suites and takes over the Kennedy Center instituting a culture of vulgarity and casually tells Norway he will pursue Greenland because he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be easy to dismiss him as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, creates a Gestapo-like personal police force that is unaccountable, and has elevated staggering levels of inequality and white supremacy into core principles of governance. At the same time, he funds the genocide in Gaza and buddies up with war criminals. He only appears to smile when he is insulting people and inflicting pain and violence. He is symbolic of an ugly ideology dressed in an equally ugly aesthetic. And in ugly times, such symbols are not incidental; they are warnings.” 

-Henry Giroux

"As on every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we honor the legacy of peaceful protest"

Sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, commemorates the Children’s March

Theophilus Eugene Connor, better known by his nickname, Bull, was the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama—the head of the police—for the better part of three decades, until he was forced out in 1963. The first line of his obituary in the New York Times when he died in 1973 reads, “Eugene Connor, the Birmingham Police Commissioner who used dogs and fire hoses to break up civil rights demonstrations in the early nineteen‐sixties, died here today.”

On May 2, 1963, over one thousand Black students left their schools and gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church to march. They marched because their parents couldn’t; they risked losing their jobs if they did. So the children, many of them marching even though their parents forbade it out of concern for their safety, stepped up.

Hundreds of them were arrested. But they kept marching. Until May 10. Bull Connor ordered the police and fire departments to blast the children with high-pressure fire hoses, club them, and use police dogs to attack them, as depicted in the sculpture above. The images were shown on television and in newspapers around the world, triggering widespread outrage. Part of the legacy of the children’s sacrifice—many of them spent days in jail in cold, unhygienic conditions with inadequate food—was change. They made the difference. They were part of the spark that changed the course of history.

Today, as on every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we honor the legacy of peaceful protest that this great man inspired and led. This year, it’s more important than ever, as Donald Trump lines the streets of Minneapolis with ICE agents using tactics that would have put even Bull Connor to shame. I have been rereading his Stride Toward Freedom, a memoir of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycotts, where he wrote, “True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.”

We must overcome, because permitting what has been happening to continue is intolerable.

Birmingham resident Terry Collins recalled the March in an interview with NPR. The Morehouse Graduate became a foot soldier, and still educates people about the struggle for civil rights. He was 15 when the March happened. He explained that there was “meticulous organization behind the Children’s Crusade, including classes in nonviolence. If you could not refrain from retaliation when faced with force, he says, they would find another role for you - perhaps making signs.” And the children were prepared, prepared for the attacks that came and the prospect of going to jail.

“Normally, people run away from being arrested, but we ran to it. Even though we might have to suffer brutality, we were going through that anyway. The threat of jailing us - so what? We were already in jail, even in our neighborhoods. There was just no fence.”

In November 1957, Dr. King delivered “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon he preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.”

“Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future.”

Friday night, in Tincher v. Noem, Minnesota federal Judge Kate M. Menendez ordered agents not to: Retaliate against, arrest, or detain peaceful and unobstructive protestors, including people observing ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. Use pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against people engaged in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity. Stop or detain drivers and passengers in vehicles absent reasonable suspicion they are forcibly obstructing or interfering with federal agents,

My shorthand: the order says, “please don’t kill any more innocent people.”

The Judge explicitly pointed out that “safely following Covered Federal Agents at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop.” Her order applies to six individual Plaintiffs and “to all persons who do or will in the future record, observe, and/or protest Operation Metro Surge and related operations that have been ongoing in this District since December 4, 2025.”

It’s hard to imagine the Justice Department objecting to this order. Arrest people exercising their First Amendment rights? Pepper spray peaceful protestors? Stop cars without a legal justification? DOJ doesn’t do those kinds of things, at least not a “normal” DOJ.

So today, DOJ filed a notice, appealing Judge Menendez’s order to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is fully Trump’s DOJ, part of his personal apparatus. DOJ has stopped being the independent gem in the crown of the American rule of law. Now, it’s just Trump’s law firm. He’s finally found his Roy Cohn, a number of them.

In the meantime today, Nick Schifrin, the foreign affairs correspondent for PBS NewsHour, reported that he received multiple copies of a message from the U.S. Government to the Danish Prime Minister, addressed to different ambassadors, advising them that “President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state].”

Here’s the message: “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Set aside for the moment that it’s a Norwegian group, not a Danish one, that awards the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a temper tantrum thrown by a petulant toddler who didn’t get his way. A man who would throw aside our allies to pursue policies that only Putin, not the American people, benefit from. A man who couldn’t be any further from Dr. King.

Bull Connor’s ghost is walking the streets of America in the guise of Donald Trump and others around him, Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan, people who reject country and Constitution. People who have no appreciation for our system of government or our rule of law, but who think only of themselves.

We don’t talk enough about how not-normal this is. We all know it, it’s become an accepted truth. Let’s honor the legacy of peaceful protest by speaking that truth to power. Because we love our country. And we intend to take it back in this election year.

Thank you for being here with me at Civil Discourse. Your paid subscription makes this possible—independent, informed analysis that connects the dots between law, politics, and the truth. In a moment when noise drowns out reason, your support ensures facts and context still have a home. Join a community that refuses to give up on democracy—or on understanding it.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

The Subversion of the Next Election

 

Trump’s threat to cancel the midterm elections is not a feign. He attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and said he would not accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term. He is determined to retain absolute control — buttressed by an obsequious Republican majority — in Congress. 

He fears, if he loses control of Congress, impeachment. He fears impediments to the rapid reconfiguration of America as an authoritarian state. He fears losing the monuments he is building to himself — his name emblazoned on federal buildings, including the Kennedy Center, his scrapping of free entry to National Parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and replacing it with his own birthday, his seizure of Greenland and who knows, maybe Canada, his ability to put cities, such as Minneapolis, under siege and snatch legal residents off the streets.

Dictators love elections as long as they are fixed. The dictatorships I covered in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans staged highly choreographed election spectacles. These spectacles were a cynical prop whose outcome was preordained. They were used to legitimize iron control over a captive population, mask the enrichment of the dictator, his family and his inner circle, criminalize all dissent and ban opposition political parties in the name of “the will of the people.”

When Saddam Hussein held a presidential referendum in Oct. 1995, the only question on the ballot was “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?” Voters marked ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The official results saw Hussein win 99.96 percent of some 8.4 million votes cast. Turnout was reported at 99.47 percent. His counterpart in Egypt, the former general Hosni Mubarak, in 2005 was re-elected for a fifth consecutive six-year term with a more modest mandate of 88.6 percent of the vote. My less than reverential coverage of the elections held in Syria in 1991, where there was only one candidate on the ballot, President Hafez al-Assad, who reportedly got 99.9 percent of the vote, saw me banned from the country.

These spectacles are the model, I expect, for what comes next, unless Trump gets his deepest wish, which is to emulate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia — whose security detail assassinated my colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and hold no elections at all.

Wannabe president-for-life Trump floats the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, telling Reuters that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When President Volodymyr Zelensky informed Trump elections were not held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump gushed, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.

Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.

Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process in the name of protected speech under the First Amendment. It ruled that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is an application of the people’s right to petition their government.

Our most basic rights, including the freedom from wholesale government surveillance, have been steadily revoked by judicial and legislative fiat.

The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke.

There are few substantial differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They exist to provide the illusion of representative democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity, and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society — especially immigrants and the phantom “radical left” — as scapegoats. But on all the major issues — war, trade deals, austerity, militarized police, the vast carceral state and deindustrialization — they are in lockstep.

“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin noted in his book “Democracy Incorporated,” “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism.” It paid outward fealty to the façade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, while it allowed corporations and oligarchs to effectively seize all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.

The emptiness of the political landscape under “inverted totalitarianism” saw politics merge with entertainment. It fostered a ceaseless political burlesque, a politics without politics. The subject of empire, along with unregulated corporate power, endless war, poverty and social inequality, became taboo.

These political spectacles create manufactured political personalities, Trump’s fictitious persona, a product of “The Apprentice.” They thrive on empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. The vapid, issueless and celebrity-driven presidential campaign of Kamala Harris was a sterling example of this political performance art.

The assault on democracy, carried out by the two ruling parties, set the stage for Trump. They emasculated our democratic institutions, stripped us of our most basic rights and cemented into place the machinery of authoritarian control, including the imperial presidency. All Trump had to do was flick the switch.

The indiscriminate police violence familiar in poor urban communities, where militarized police serve as judge, jury and executioner, long ago handed the state the power to “legally” harass and kill citizens with impunity. It spawned the largest prison population in the world. This evisceration of civil liberties and due process has now been turned on the rest of us. Trump did not initiate it. He expanded it. Terror is the point.

Trump, like all dictators, is intoxicated by militarism. He is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to be raised from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. Congress, in passing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, has allocated more than $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE over the next four years. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined.

“When a constitutionally limited government utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive power, subsidizes their development, and becomes the world’s largest arms dealer,” Wolin writes, “the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”

He goes on:

That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budget means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from government. Thus, the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate. Similarly, in his/her new status as imperial citizen the believer remains contemptuous of bureaucracy yet does not hesitate to obey the directives issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the largest and most intrusive governmental department in the history of the nation. Identification with militarism and patriotism, along with the images of American might projected by the media, serves to make the individual citizen feel stronger, thereby compensating for the feelings of weakness visited by the economy upon an overworked, exhausted, and insecure labor force.

The Democrats in the next election — if there is one — will offer up least-worst alternatives while doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward authoritarianism. They will remain hostage to the demands of corporate lobbyists and oligarchs. The party, which stands for nothing and fights for nothing, could well hand Trump a victory in the midterms. But Trump does not want to take that chance.

Trump and his minions are energetically closing the last exit built into the system that prevents absolute dictatorship. They intend to orchestrate the sham elections familiar in all dictatorships or abolish them. They are not joking. This will be the death blow to the American experiment. There will be no going back. We will become a police state. Our freedoms, already under heavy assault, will be extinguished. At that point, only mass mobilizations and strikes will thwart the solidification of the dictatorship. And such actions, as we see in Minneapolis, will be greeted with lethal state repression.

The subverting of the next elections will offer two stark choices to Trump’s most vocal opponents. Exile or arrest and imprisonment at the hands of ICE thugs.

Resistance to the beast, as in all dictatorships, will come at a very high cost.

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