Once upon a time in America, an aspiring rightwing authoritarian publicly shared his supervillain’s plot to crush our fragile democracy, while the Democratic establishment spent its time courting billionaires and bullying progressives.
Donald Trump, the oldest man to be elected President, ramped up his threats to become “dictator for one day” and “terminate the Constitution” as his physical health deteriorated in plain sight.
On swollen ankles, Trump appeared with members of the National Guard that he deployed to patrol the nation’s capital on August 11. Even as staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned of possible Hurricane Katrina-level disasters as a result of Republicans gutting disaster response programs, six states, most of them formerly belonging to the Confederacy, sent members of the National Guard, whose job is to protect their own residents during emergencies. Trump’s underqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox television host who publicly supports white Christian nationalism, authorized the troops to carry weapons.
After Trump and his white nationalist adviser Stephen Miller, a budget Goebbels, had succeeded in normalizing this strategy by unleashing the military against the city of Los Angeles in June, they decided to attack more blue cities with Black mayors. It didn’t matter that Washington, D.C., posted its lowest crime rates in three decades, and that 79 percent of D.C. residents opposed being occupied by armed guards. It didn’t matter that red states like Louisiana had way more violent crime. All of this was an excuse to pave the road toward fascist rule.
Trump and MAGA found their Reichstag-fire moment with the help of nineteen-year-old Edward Coristine—a former employee of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and currently employed by the government in another capacity—who alleged that he had been beaten and nearly carjacked in the nation’s capital in early August. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump might be open to giving “Big Balls,” as Coristine is nicknamed, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proving yet again that America had surpassed the self-destructive antics displayed in the 2006 comedy/sci-fi film Idiocracy.
Less than a month later, Chicago, another frequent target of Trump and MAGA’s alleged “anti-crime” efforts, was named as the next city on the fascist hit list.
Although shocking, none of this should have been surprising to the citizens of the United States of Amnesia, considering that Trump had openly praised Hitler before the election and threatened to unleash the National Guard against “the people from within.”
In June, Miller used the word “insurrection” to describe the peaceful resistance to masked and armed ICE agents terrorizing Los Angeles residents. And earlier in the year, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the administration’s policy of kidnapping and deporting innocent immigrants, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, without due process.
When you’re the “King” and “Daddy” of MAGA like Trump, you can pretty much do what you want. After all, in 2021, Trump incited a violent insurrection against our free and fair election in 2020, and then pardoned the criminal perpetrators after he became President in 2025. And nobody stopped him.
His administration then gave a sweetheart deal to pedophile sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, moving her to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas this summer in an obvious quid quo pro deal.
Emboldened, his administration also began to purge law enforcement and other government agencies of anyone who wasn’t sufficiently obedient to him and the fictional reality that insulated him from criticism and reproach.
In July, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published a jobs report that revealed the disastrous effects on the economy of Trump’s reckless trade war, Trump replaced the qualified BLS commissioner with E.J. Antoni, a MAGA Reek who participated in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and uses Hitler’s favorite naval ship as his Zoom background.
Because he couldn’t fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, a man he appointed, Trump instead attempted to illegally fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman appointed as a Federal Reserve governor.
Even Republicans weren’t safe from Trump’s expanding Gestapo. Neocon war hawk and outspoken Trump critic John Bolton’s house was raided by the FBI. Trump also threatened former adviser Chris Christie because the President didn’t like one of his interviews on television.
To ensure Republicans would win the 2026 elections, Trump assailed mail-in voting and asked Texas Republicans to steal five U.S. House seats through gerrymandering. After they obliged, Trump asked Republicans in Missouri and other states across the country to follow suit and give the GOP a 100-seat majority.
A week after laying out the red carpet for indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin, Trump publicly mused that many Americans would “like a dictator.” While meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump remarked that it would be good if U.S. elections were canceled in three and a half years due to war. To avoid any subtlety and confusion, Trump later showed Zelenskyy and other European leaders his “Trump 2028” merchandise.
Unfortunately, Trump had already declared war against the American people and our democracy. Unfortunately, Democrats remained somnambulant and committed to playing from behind. California Governor Gavin Newsom received the memo late, but finally evolved and decided to fight back on social media, introducing his own plan for redistricting. As a result, he saw his polling numbers and popularity rise. Governors JB Pritzker, of Illinois, and Wes Moore, of Maryland, followed suit, but in a more timid fashion.
Meanwhile, powerful Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, used their privilege and platform to criticize Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, also of New York, Jeffries refused to endorse Mamdani despite his surging popularity. Instead, Schumer and other Democratic officials thought it would be a good look to take a photo with indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, during that country’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin promised to finally “fight fire with fire,” but aside from some milquetoast words, he didn’t promote a cohesive plan or inspire the masses.
Instead, the fight to reform our democracy and end fascism was left to the people, who were still the majority and refused to bend the knee to Donald Trump and his gang of hate-mongers, white nationalists, and extremists. Young people ran for office, and communities organized boycotts and protests. Independent and mainstream media journalists spoke truth to power, and Republican voters began calling out their corrupt and feckless politicians at raucous town halls.
Whether or not it was enough to stave off fascism remained to be seen.