"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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"Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?"

 

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet. “The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, and the mayor of Minneapolis. And any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles: Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents’ group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out. “You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet. Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet. Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia State Policeman because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes: “The activist, Barbara Wien, has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town: “They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.” 

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Donald Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As The New York Times reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.” True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.” In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian: “It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night. But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Steven Miller posted last night about Minneapolis: “Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king: “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly. But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal. They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes. Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them. And then, of course, it’s too late…

Louise’s Daily Song: “A Fearful View of Freedom”

Listen now · 3:09

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Ozymandias

 

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Aug. 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822)

                       

Rejecting U.S. Claim to Greenland

 

It’s not often that Europe speaks with one voice – or responds with such urgency. But US President Donald Trump’s announcement Saturday of sanctions against several European countries that reject any US claim to Greenland, a Danish territory, was one of those moments.

EU ambassadors are holding an emergency meeting in Brussels on Sunday in response to Trump’s threat, which he made after an estimated quarter of the population of Greenland’s capital Nuuk joined protests against any potential annexation.

Across the continent, among allies that usually tread carefully in responding to utterances from the White House, the response was immediate and emphatic, and recognized an existential threat to the transatlantic alliance.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has tried to cultivate a good personal relationship with Trump, led the charge – describing the threat of tariffs as “unacceptable.”

“No intimidation or threat will influence us – neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations,” he said on X. “Europeans will respond in a united and coordinated manner should they be confirmed. We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer chimed in, saying in a statement that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong.” Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has typically had positive relations with the US President, described the move as an “error” in a handout video from a state visit to South Korea.

Revealing she had already had a phone conversation with Trump, Meloni said she “doesn’t agree” with the idea of imposing tariffs against countries that contribute to Greenland’s security. Eight European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and France, issued a joint statement Sunday saying that, “tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response.”

Trump, in a lengthy social media post Saturday, said the United States needed possession of Greenland to counter Chinese and Russian threats in the Arctic and develop what he has called the Golden Dome to protect North America from ballistic missiles.

Experts say that the US does not need to own Greenland for the Dome to be effective, thanks to a 1951 agreement that gives the US the right to build defense facilities on the island. The Pituffik Space Base, which US Vice President JD Vance visited last March, is focused on missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command and control missions.

European politicians said Trump’s unilateralism over Greenland, and his treatment of long-standing allies, was playing into Moscow and Beijing’s hands. “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among allies,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took a similar line. In an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, he said any military action ‍by the U.S. against Denmark’s vast Arctic Island would damage NATO and delight Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would make Putin “the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy,” Sanchez warned.

“The measures against NATO allies announced today will not help in ensuring security in the Arctic,” said the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola on X. “They risk the opposite, emboldening our joint enemies and those who wish to destroy our common values and way of life.”

One casualty of the tariff threat may be the US-EU trade deal agreed last year, which the European Parliament was set to debate this week. The leader of the largest group in the assembly, Manfred Weber, said on X that “given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage.”

There have been plenty of occasions during both Trump administrations that European governments have reeled in shock at the rhetoric from the White House and then embarked on careful damage limitation. But many Europeans recognize in the second Trump administration a far more strident tone, beginning when Vance excoriated Europe as woke, soft on immigration and anti-democratic in a speech at the Munich Security Conference last February.

Trump’s National Security Strategy in November doubled down on the scorn. “It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” two decades from now, it said. The document sneered at what it called the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, claiming “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

And earlier this month, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

“For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States,” Miller added. Essentially, in this White House, a strong transatlantic relationship is no longer thought critical to US national security or its dominance of the Western hemisphere. But strong words from the capitals of Europe are just that: The challenge is to build greater self-reliance in defense and security, a process that takes decades rather than months.

In the meantime, some may recall then UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s exasperation over the planning for D-Day, the operation that would liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them,” Churchill said later.

Analysis by Tim Lister, CNN

 

"Much to his credit, Aaron James pointed this out..."

Almost everyone now knows that Donald Trump is an asshole. Much to his credit, Aaron James pointed this out in Assholes: A Theory (Anchor Books 2012) well before Trump took center stage in American politics. In his new book, James sets out to develop this idea in greater detail. According to the back cover, the book does not ask whether Trump is an asshole. This much is assumed. Instead, it raises the further question: What sort of asshole is Trump? As such, the book is presented as a contribution to what the author calls “assholeology”.

Readers will quickly learn that the book covers much more than this. Only the introduction and the first chapter are, properly speaking, exercises in assholeology. Even the first chapter, “The Ass-Clown and Asshole”, is more about offering a general theory of Trump’s person than a strict examination of his assholery, and the final three chapters not only ask whether having an asshole like Trump for president is a “sound proposition”, they also point to the larger problem of what James calls “asshole political capitalism”.

James begins the work by recapping the definition of the asshole he developed in his first book. On this view, the asshole has three essential features: First, he – James notes that assholes are mostly men – “allows himself special advantages in social relationships in a systematic way”; second, he is “motivated by an entrenched (and mistaken) sense of entitlement”; and third, he is “immunized against the complaints of other people”. 

Although James presents these as three separate yet equal features of the asshole, the entrenched sense of entitlement seems to be the causal mechanism behind the asshole’s systematic privileging of himself as well as his immunity to the criticisms of others. So understood, an asshole might simply be someone with an entrenched sense of entitlement.

James claims that Trump is – like Ted Cruz – an asshole in this sense, but “being an assclown is Trump’s distinctive style of assholery”. According to James, the assclown “is someone who seeks an audience’s attention and enjoyment while being slow to understand how it views him”. Much like a man who chases women to flatter his own ego, Trump chases the electorate “to affirm his worth by being seen as powerful, the center of attention”. To win the affections of this lover, Trump must become a showman. Like a clown, he seeks to entertain, but like an ass, Trump fails to understand that he is the clown. For these reasons, James classifies Trump as an assclown.

Although there are good reasons for thinking that Trump is an asshole so defined, two aspects of James’ analysis seem to conflict with this generally agreed upon premise. First, despite the common term “ass”, assclowns and assholes appear to be distinct and mutually exclusive types. Whereas the asshole’s immunity to criticism implies that he has little concern for the opinion of others, the assclown seeks the affection of others and so seems to lack the asshole’s innate sense that he is something special. 

Second, James eventually backpedals on his promise – implicit in the title – to offer “a theory of Donald Trump”. Because Trump is so many things – showman, bullshitter, racist, sexist, civically oblivious, authoritarian, demagogue – James concludes that there is no “real” Trump. But if there is no “real” Trump, Trump cannot really be an asshole. In contrast, the various aspects of Trump’s person that James identifies seem to be explained by a single fact: he really is an asshole!

Chapter two, “A Force for Good?”, raises the question of whether an asshole like Trump is really good for our democracy, and James presents the interesting thesis that many value Trump as an über-asshole capable of managing all the other assholes – like Ted Cruz and Chris Christie – that inhabit the political sphere. Nevertheless, James proceeds to claim in chapter three, “The Strongman”, that an asshole president “will only further unravel the soft fabric of cooperation upon which our experiment is premised”, and he devotes the final chapter, “Saving the Marriage”, to exploring ways that we might rescue our democracy from the proliferation of assholes.

There is much in James’ work that will interest the philosophically inclined reader, and he should be applauded for bringing philosophical theories to bear directly on contemporary issues. However, readers may question some of the specific moves James makes along the way. For instance, he often appeals to Hobbes and Rousseau to unpack a number of his ideas but in ways that do not always fit his argument. 

On the one hand, James claims that the aforementioned “strategy of asshole management” can be traced back to Hobbes. However, there seems to be an important difference between a proto-fascist über-asshole and Hobbes’ absolute sovereign: whereas the former rises to power by crushing opposition and promising benefits to a certain in-group of supporters at the expense of others, the latter is largely established through a consensual and mutual transfer of rights for the benefit of all.

On the other hand, James’ claim that the asshole suffers from an inflamed sense of Rousseau’s amour-propre seems to be misguided. Whereas amour-propre instils in us a burning desire to appear well and be regarded as superior in the eyes of others, the asshole, again, is not particularly concerned with how others regard him. This is because he recognizes himself as superior and treats others accordingly. If anyone suffers from amour-propre in James’ analysis, it seems to be the non-asshole who resents the way in which the asshole refuses to recognize him or her as a person worthy of equal respect.

In the end, there is much to be said for a central thesis that runs throughout the final chapters of James’ work: the ethos of capitalism breeds a culture of assholes that, in turn, threatens the moral and social fabric essential to a healthy democracy and a well-functioning economy. Nevertheless, Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump is a work written quickly for a popular audience in response to current events, and so the aforementioned thesis deserves more serious reflection than this book provides. 

Although James covers some of this ground in his first book and I encourage interested readers to consult it, the history of philosophy may have more to say about the asshole than James’ writings thus far suggest. Critical treatments of asshole-like psychologies by Plato – the tyrant of Republic IX – and Aristotle – improper self-love in the Nicomachean Ethics – as well as arguably more positive assessments by Hume – “Greatness of Mind” in A Treatise of Human Nature – and Nietzsche – the “nobles” of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality – immediately come to mind, and we would do well to turn to these resources in thinking about assholes more generally and the ever-increasing threat that one particular asshole poses to our democracy.

The rise of the American asshole is a serious issue, and we should not only thank James for drawing our attention to it but also hope that his most recent work stimulates further conversation among both philosophers and the broader public alike.

Matthew Meyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton. He is the author of the recently published Reading Niezsche Through The Ancients (de Gruyter).