Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth continue to violate the Constitution now using religion to justify the illegal war in Iran

Reprinted from The Other 98 percent social media page site here.
Article is at this site here.

28 Democrats just demanded an investigation into Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete) after hundreds of troops reported commanders pushing end-times Christian fascism as justification for the Iran war.
Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan led the charge, requesting DoD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III investigate reports of commanders "invoking religious prophecy and apocalyptic theology to justify the United States' military actions in Iran."

Lawmakers want to know whether Hegseth's "extreme religious rhetoric has metastasized into segments of the military chain of command" in ways that violate the Constitution and DoD regulations.

What triggered this? Over 200 service members across 50 installations and every military branch filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reporting that their commanders told them the Iran war is divinely ordained, that Trump was chosen by Jesus to bring about Armageddon.

Seriously❗

Hegseth sponsors a weekly White House Bible study and has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military. His monthly Pentagon prayer gatherings have featured Doug Wilson, a far-right Christian nationalist who has defended slavery and called for America to become a theocracy.

The Democrats laid out six specific areas for investigation, from whether commanders violated DoD religious neutrality policies to whether whistleblowers faced retaliation. The Pentagon offered no direct response when asked about the complaints.

The Constitution is crystal clear: service members swear an oath to defend a secular republic, not to carry out anyone's end-times fever dream.

If the Secretary of Defense is turning the world's most lethal fighting force into a Christian dominionist project, that's not just a policy failure, it's a national security crisis, potentially even a global one.

Maine Writer Response: This radical religion strategy failed during the Crusades, Hitler invoked this as justification for the “final solution” and he failed, the Spanish Inquisition built a torture campaign around this myth but think about how many thousands of lives were lost to prove this strategy is never going to work❓ 

Meanwhile, the whack-a-mole reason behind this war changes with the ocean tides. Was the purpose regime change❓ Is this the fulfillment of Netanyahu’s long wished for war❓ Is the purpose to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or is the purpose to bring Christianity to this eons old Iranian civilization❓ Multiple choice! Just my opinion❗

Donald Trump and dangerous maga Republicans must resign because they are creating a Nazi "Mein Kampf" government

Echo opinion: FIRST HAND ACCOUNT: WORSE THAN HITLER AND THE NAZIS (Letter to the editor, Portland Press Herald)

Comparison between Trump administration, Nazi regime is chilling❗

I am a 94-year-old Jewish American ✡️who still has fire left in the belly. I enlisted and served for three and a half years in the United States Marine Corps. My father was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and my mother was born in a small village near Moscow. 

She was persecuted by pogroms, they emigrated to Canada and then the United States. Many of my father’s family perished under the Nazi regime.

When I see, hear and read about the immigrant policy under the current presidential administration, it is — without a doubt — a carbon copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” from the 1930s, and ’40s in Nazi Germany. However, the present seizing of immigrants and racially profiled citizens has become worse than the Gestapo “rounding up” the Jews. 

The systematic, dehumanizing process employed by this cruel Donald Trump administration far surpasses Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

My hope and wish is that the American people will wake up, see through this sham, and take appropriate action before we soon become a fascist state and lose our precious democracy. 

God bless America. - From Ed Fraktman, in Scarborough, Maine

Nazism and Trumpziism are both rooted in Fascism- an echo opinion published in The Guardian

Echo opinion published in The Guardian, "History teaches us that authoritarians use any excuse to seize power", by Judith Levine

Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag blaze to justify snuffing out civil liberties. In the US, the Trumpzi calls for crackdowns have already begun.

On the night of 27 February 1933, six days before a national elections, the German Reichstag (in Berlin, Germany) was set on fire. 

Firefighters and police discovered a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene, who confessed to being the arsonist. The Nazi Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, soon arrived, followed by the future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, who had been dining together.

Two competing, still unresolved, conspiracy theories would circulate about the real culprit: the Nazis, with van der Lubbe as front; or a communist cabal. But the three men had no doubts. Göring pronounced the crime a communist plot. Hitler called it “a God-given signal”, adding: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

On 10 September 2025, within minutes of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, before a suspect or a motive had been identified, a cacophony of voices – from neo-Nazi influencers to Republican members of Congress – were blaming the left for the murder of the hugely effective far-right political organizer. (Maine Writer note here: But, before Kirk's tragic killings, frankly, I and many thousands of others had never heard of him or his "free speech" ideologies.)

Donald Trump amplified the indictments. “Radical left … rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he said, in a televised address from the Oval Office that night, pointedly omitting examples of violence against progressives or Democrats.

Is Kirk’s assassination Trump’s Reichstag fire?

There are major differences between Germany in 1933 and the US in 2025. Germany’s democracy was but 14 years old at the time. Created amid the privation of the postwar depression and attended by popular ressentiment at the country’s defeat, the Weimar Republic was unstable from the start. And simultaneously, out of those same conditions, the Nazi movement was born and gained strength.

Hitler’s attempted coup d’etat of 1923 – the beer hall putsch – failed but brought him national attention. 

During what the Nazis called the “time of struggle” between 1925 and 1932, stormtroopers and assorted thugs committed nearly continual acts of terrorism and violence toward political foes. Jews, and other minorities. The conflagration of 27 February 1933 burst from tinder ready to combust.

The Nazis in the German government fomented the Kristallnacht riots on November 9-10, 1938. SA storm troopers forced Jews to march through the streets carrying a Star of David. Hugh Greene reported in the Daily Telegraph on November 11, 1938, that "mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction.

Today, by contrast, US democracy is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. It has weathered division, corruption, and violence – and, in many instances, stood stronger, better governed, and more just in their aftermath. Today – despite attacks on the press, boldly partisan gerrymandering, police brutality against peaceful protests, and the rightward lurch of the judiciary – Americans still have civil liberties, however frayed and endangered. That is more than Germans had after the Reichstag fire. But it is becoming clearer that, without widespread popular resistance, it will not stay that way.

Important differences notwithstanding, this moment in the US contains many parallels with what happened in Germany over 90 years ago. American history is full of injustice and repression – from the dispossession of Indigenous people’s lands to the permanently heightened surveillance of everyday life since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the scale and scope of Trump’s assaults on democracy are unprecedented. We need to learn from the past to recognize how dangerous a moment we are in, and where we might be going.

Within hours of the Reichstag fire, German president Paul von Hindenburg signed an emergency decree “for the protection of people and state” that snuffed out civil liberties, including the freedoms of speech, association, and the press and the rights of due process. A massive repression ensued, including thousands of arrests of communists and Social Democrats, trade unionists, and intellectuals on a list compiled by the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers or SA). The first night, 4,000 people were taken to SA barracks and tortured. The violence did not let up.

On 23 March 1933, with almost all opposition members prevented from taking their seats, the Reichstag passed the statutory partner of the 28 February decree, the Enabling Act, which permanently suspended civil liberties and assigned all legislative power to Hitler and his ministers. Just weeks later, the first concentration camp, Dachau, opened. Accelerated by the blaze in Berlin, German democracy was reduced to ashes.

Now the Trump administration is using Kirk’s assassination, as the Nazis used the fire in Berlin, to instigate its own massive repression. Trump has not blocked Democrats from taking their seats in Congress nor arrested opposition members en masse yet. But he is using the instruments of government to bring to heel anyone who speaks the mildest ill of him or his friends.

In just the last few days, the FCC chair threatened Disney, ABC and its affiliates with punitive action if they did not cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live after the host made a joke in which he implied that Kirk’s killer was one of the “Maga gang”. The companies caved and Kimmel’s show was indefinitely suspended. Autocrats are not known for gracefully taking a joke.

Assigning blame for Kirk’s murder on the entire American political left came not just from extreme-right podcasters, influencers and militia leaders. Republican representatives, administration officials, and White House advisers loudly, almost triumphantly, joined the fray.

“The Democrats own this,” congresswoman Nancy Mace, of South Carolina, told NBC News, calling Kirk’s then-unknown killer a “raging left lunatic”.

“EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS,” Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna posted on X. “You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals … Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.”

Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s closest allies, chimed in: “Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” she wrote. “I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.” (Maine Writer:  This is bullshit❗💩💩💩)

Of course, the bully at the bully pulpit spoke loudest. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity & to other political violence,” Trump promised, “including the organizations who fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Taking over as host on Kirk’s radio show Monday, JD Vance vowed to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence” – which he also called “left-wing lunatics”. Of these, he named the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, the latter run by George Soros, the progressive, pro-democracy philanthropist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, who has long been the subject of neo-Nazi vitriol. Vance also threatened to investigate the non-profit status of the venerable leftwing publication the Nation.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff , also on the show, added: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, homeland security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these [radical left] networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

Stephen Miller is the reincarnation of the Nazi Joseph Goebbels

After Trump was confronted by protesters who chanted “Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!” in a Washington DC restaurant, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said on CNN that he might investigate them as “part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States”.

The president more recently told reporters he conferred with US attorney general Pam Bondi about bringing federal racketeering charges against these “agitators” and would support designating “antifa” as terrorists.

In many senses, the crackdown on dissent has been under way for months. Trump began his second term implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, punishing professors, students, whole college departments, and anyone accused of “antisemitism”– defined as criticism of Israel – with names supplied by Zionist informants. The witch-hunt is expanding.

All of this, along with Trump’s earlier moves, recall senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communists and other alleged subversives in the 1950s. McCarthy instituted loyalty oaths for government workers, and many states followed suit. Failure to sign meant resignation or firing. In June, a plan to test potential federal employees for fidelity to Trump’s mission was dropped after criticism, but employees and higher officials have since then been regularly fired for failure to demonstrate it, or just for telling a truth inconvenient to the president. The FBI director, Kash Patel, published a list of traitorous “deep state” figures and has already punished a third of them. He denies it is an “enemies list”, referring to the list McCarthy claimed to have.

Donald Trump has toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act amid protests against immigrant roundups. He has declared a spectral “crime emergency” as a pretext to send troops into Washington DC and other cities, and ordered the formation of a federal “quick response force” for “quelling civil disturbances”. He has deputized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to terrorize and brutalize brown, Spanish-speaking people its agents assume to be undocumented immigrants, a policy of racial profiling and a violation of the fourth amendment against illegal search and seizure, which the US supreme court has allowed.

Before the National Socialists became Germany’s one, murderous ruling party, Nazism was a popular movement. But movements and parties are not separate entities, and governments need to mobilize consent – or squash opposition – to survive. Our lawless government supports and is supported by a lawless movement. “It is shocking how day after day, naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appeal quite undisguised as official decree,” the German Jewish philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer wrote on 17 March 1933. The same could describe the US under Trump.

The criminal president has criminals at his back. One of the provisions of the Enabling Act was a grant of amnesty to anyone who had committed a crime “for the good of the Reich during the Weimar Republic”.

“He who saves his country does not violate the law,” Trump posted, quoting Napoleon a few weeks after pardoning all the January 6 rioters, including those who had assaulted and killed police officers. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he said in a 2016 presidential debate. He is now hinting that it’s time for them to act.

The challenges are enormous. But in addition to the resilience and longevity of US democracy, there are reasons to hope that a resistance movement can survive and win this time around.

Repression is quickly metastasizing. But the same social media that polarize opinion, spread disinformation, and abet government surveillance enable political organizing, foil censorship and substantiate truth, and link global networks to elude repressive laws, such as the feminist cells distributing abortion pills into red states.

The country seems hopelessly divided. Yet the same federalism that gives the states the right to gerrymander and enact undemocratic legislation is useful to states that are intent on governing well, providing for their residents and sheltering them from the abuses of Washington.

The Democrats in Washington are clueless, but local progressive candidates are winning elections. Law firms and major media companies are surrendering to Trump’s extortion without a fight. But the ACLU still exists, as do independent news outlets.

And try as Trump may to erase America’s histories of oppression and of the liberation movements against it, they are not forgotten. We know what capitulation and passivity lead to and what the struggles for peace and justice can ultimately achieve. It is easy to feel defeated, but we cannot give up now.

Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism

When Donald Trump talks about people who he claims are using "hate speech" is he looking in the mirror?

Memo to Donald Trump from Andy Borowitz: 

Sorry, Loser!

As long as there's a First Amendment, I plan to enjoy it.
Dear Donald Trump, So, if you want people to stop comparing you to Hitler, stop doing such Hitlery things.

For example: stop demanding that employers fire employees for exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s positively Hitlertastic.

According to Trump and his toadying henchmen—Justa Dick Vance, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller aka Pee-Wee German—it is now a crime in America to make any comment about Charlie Kirk that does not compare him favorably with Gandhi.

As far as I can tell, though, Trump needn’t worry about a flurry of Kirk-bashing from the abject quislings of corporate media. They’ve been all too compliant in portraying the far-right influencer as a tireless free-speech crusader.

The journalist Jeff Sharlet set the record straight last week. (Tellingly, he made his comments on a non-corporate media outlet, Democracy Now!) “He was an opponent of free speech,” Sharlet said. “There’s no other way to cut it, for a man who created something called Professor Watchlist, School Board Watchlist, to name and frighten people from teaching, who advocated restrictions on what school teachers could teach, who called for—and there’s a clip you can see online—who called for the televised public executions, and he had a pretty broad category in mind. But what was really chilling was he wanted this to be required viewing for children. And you can look at this clip, and you can see his colleagues. They’re sort of trolling, but Kirk, again and again, pulls it back to seriousness, and he says, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t a joke. This has to be a holy experience, a teaching experience for children, watching enemies be killed.’ That is not a champion of free speech.”

As for corporate media’s reflexive and lazy deification of Kirk, the comedian W. Kamau Bell isn’t having it: “I certainly won’t be gaslit into performatively pretending that Charlie Kirk was some sort of saint in death when he was actually just a truly awful person in life.”

As corporate media continues to bend their knee to our senile wannabe dictator, I have never been more grateful that I don’t work for one of these craven companies. I work for you.

Onward.  

P.S. "Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the biggest liar of them all?"

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are hypocrites about Russian agression: Genuflecting to Putin is shameful appeasement

Echo opinion published in the Mississippi Daily Journal by 

Mussolini, Hitler and (interpreter Paul Otto Schmidt) British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain September 29, 1938

Genuflecting to Putin is shameful By Dick Polman 

It comes as no surprise America’s mutation of Neville Chamberlain spit in the face of our national honor during his meetup in Alaska with his Russian master, sucking up so shamelessly that any second I expected him to drop to the carpet and lick the mass murderer’s shoes.

Trump’s been doing this since forever. 

What’s just as detestable is formerly tough-on-Russia Republicans have mutely indulged his perfidies, and that oblivious Americans have rewarded him with ever-higher vote totals in three straight elections.

I hate to write this. I’ve spent the summer boating, biking, and hiking, and the last thing I want to do is stew anew about the Putin appeaser, the consummate fraud, the poster child for weakness. But “we are at a perilous moment without equal in the history of this nation, and Trump is demonstrably incapable of confronting it."

I wrote that seven summers ago, when Trump was preparing to meet Putin at a summit in Helsinki. And when they met, Trump told the world that Putin had more credibility than America’s intelligence agencies. In the end, “Helsinki proved that when the stakes are highest, when the nation’s security is threatened by a seasoned enemy standing a few feet away, Trump cannot bring the requisite A-game. And the Republicans who revered Ronald Reagan as The Great Communicator, as the stalwart foe of an ‘evil empire,’ are saddled with a president who verbally waffles in defense of his country.”

Just as Hillary Clinton did during the final campaign debate nine years ago when she stated that Putin “would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

What the puppet did in Alaska – rolling out the red carpet, clapping like a cheerleader with pom poms, surrendering to the war criminal’s stance on Ukraine – was merely consistent with his long-established misbehavior. Like in 2016, when he publicly pleaded for Putin to hack Hillarys’ emails (“Russia, if you’re listening…”). Like in 2018, when he trashed the federal indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents who’d meddled with our 2016 election on his behalf (he called the indictments a “rigged witch hunt”). Like in 2022, when he praised Putin for invading Ukraine (“This is genius…He’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper”). Like when he lauded Putin’s “great charm” and boasted how much Putin “liked me.” 🙄

We may never know whether Vladimir Putin is blackmailing his pathetic supplicant or whether he’s just masterfully exploiting Trump’s grand canyon of neediness. We’re collateral casualties of his mission to reward Putin for the original sin of waging war on an independent nation.

It’d be nice if Democrats could manage to craft a relentless 24/7 message about his soft-on-Russia weakness and the MAGA GOP’s appeasement. 

But somehow that’s too heavy a lift for the perpetually supine blue team. Suffice it to say that if the situation was reversed — if, say, Barack Obama had ever clapped like a trained seal after luring the murderer to American soil — Republicans would already be screaming about treason and citing Article III of the Constitution, which in part defines “Treason against the United States” as “adhering to (our) Enemies, giving them 

Aid and Comfort.” (Maine Writer: In fact, a "dropped microphone" report put President Obama on the media hot seat when he told Russia about how he would have more leverage after his re-election- that made the news cycle for about a full week see New York Times:  "Microphone Catches a Candid Obama")

And, the Grand Old Party (now extinct) Republicans would’ve been right.

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia

Republicans are stuck in their own racist rhetoric and they cannot get out! BTW Puerto Ricans are American citizens!

Echo report by Dave Goldiner published in the New York Daily News:

Outrage was spreading Monday over racist gibes aimed at Puerto Ricans, Blacks and others by speakers at former guy President DonOLD Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.

About Description On February 20, 1939, a Nazi rally took place at Madison Square Garden, organized by the German American Bund. More than 20,000 people attended, and Fritz Julius Kuhn was a featured speaker. Date: February 20, 1939  Arrests: 13.

A parade of Democratic leaders and A-list celebrities denounced the Trump campaign and comic Tony Hinchcliffe for calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the packed Sunday rally, which included crude attacks on Latinos and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“There was nothing that’s an accident about what was said. … It was an authentic depiction of what Donald Trump thinks about Puerto Rico,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx, Queens) said Monday. “This is what these people believe, and it’s not a joke.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) trashed Republicans for “[inviting] this filth into our community.” Gov. Hochul said the hatefest amounted to an “ugly, divisive, and racist” closing message by the Trump campaign.

“To the Daily News, is it a racist rally if a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaks at that rally?” Donalds said. “I don’t think so.”

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, an endangered first-term Long Island Republican, said his mother is Puerto Rican and urged GOP voters to “stay on message.”

“The only thing that’s ‘garbage’ was a bad comedy set,” tweeted D’Esposito, who is locked in a tough reelection battle in his Democratic-leaning district.

Even the Trump campaign, which rarely gives any ground to criticism, took the highly unusual step of walking back the “island of garbage” remarks, though critics noted that the gibes appeared on a teleprompter and were approved by the Trump campaign.

“This joke does not reflect the views of former President Trump or the campaign.” said Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.

New city Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos, who is Puerto Rican, said in a statement that “the hateful language we heard this weekend has no place in our city or our schools. Every community targeted this weekend has worked too hard for too long to create their place in the American Dream to be disrespected and degraded with such language. … Our tiny but mighty island has produced scholars, scientists and artists who have made great contributions to both the American and global communities. When you live in New York City, your neighbors are the entire world. We are a great city because of our diversity.”

TV host Geraldo Rivera, a former friend and political ally of Trump, urged Latino men to vote against the former president.

“A vote for Trump is a vote against self-respect,” Rivera tweeted.

It remains to be seen whether the remarks will cost Trump at the ballot box.  But with polls showing a dead-heat race, Democrats hope they could persuade some undecided Latino voters not to vote for him.

Latinos are a key constituency in several battleground states and make up 4% of registered voters in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most critical of the seven battleground states

About half of those Latinos are of Puerto Rican descent. They normally vote strongly Democratic, but some polls have shown Trump winning a greater share of support this year compared with the 2020 and 2016 races.

Georgia, which Trump lost by just 11,000 votes in 2020, also has a large Puerto Rican community.

Even before the ugly MSG rally, Trump had made controversial moves that alienated Puerto Ricans, especially his paper towel-tossing stunt in 2017 as the island battled devastation from Hurricane Maria.

As president, he also mused about selling Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, or trading it for mineral-rich Greenland.

Ironically, the speech at the Garden took place hours after Vice-President Harris campaigned at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and outlined her program for the island, which does not get a vote in presidential elections.

“Trump is the same old, tired playbook: Divide and demean,” Ian Sams, a Harris campaign aide, said Monday. “It’s a stark reminder of who he is.”

Senator Angus King extends to Ukraine a strong statement of bipartisan support

Echo statement from Maine Senator Angus King:

"Nearly two years ago, on February 24, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in a heartbreaking, unprovoked attack on a democratic nation. He thought the war would be over quickly and that the free world would watch and do nothing.

He was wrong❗

President of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine on April 21, 2019.

"The Ukrainian people came together to bravely hold the line against Putin, and America and our allies around the world stood strong alongside them.

"Together with the Ukrainians and their brave and impressive President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, we sent a loud and clear message that we will stand united against authoritarians who threaten democracy anywhere in the globe.

"Two years later, we are still fighting a battle for the soul of democracy in the world.

"That’s why I recently voted in support of a bipartisan bill to aid Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan in defending themselves.

"Let me be clear: Authoritarian tyrants like Putin must be stopped, not appeased. 

"If history has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot simply walk away from the battle for freedom and democracy. Remember when Hitler swept through Europe, and the free world waited too long to stop him?

"If we allow Putin to overtake a sovereign nation, do we really expect him to stop there? Or continue eastward in a bloody campaign against a NATO nation when America would be compelled to send our men and women into a fight?

"We know Putin is out to remake the Soviet Union in his image — we know this because he has said so! Abandoning Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty would be one of the biggest mistakes our country could make. It’s something that would haunt us for generations.

"That’s why I remain more committed than ever to working toward bipartisan efforts to confront authoritarianism and defend democracy. This war is costing America only arms and ammunition; it’s costing Ukrainians the lives of their loved ones.

"Thank you for being a part of this fight. Together, we can continue the work of helping the Ukrainian people defend themselves and uphold democracy across the globe."


— Angus 💙💛

Republicans must face the dangerous reality about nominating a deranged Donald Trump

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: 

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Robert Kagan.

In fact, a clear path to dictatorship is a stark possibility in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.

Vote Blue 2024!  Vote Democrat!

In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. 

In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. 

The idea that (the evil one tRumpzi) is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. 

The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become dangerously irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, American Republican voters have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. 

Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. 

Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. 

Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the (wrongminded❗)presumptive Republican nominee for president. 

When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

(Ohhhh Paleeeze❗)  - God Forbid!:  All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. 

Danger!💀  The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. So, the next phase is about people falling into line.

In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.

Defies common sense, but the rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow - like lemmings going off a cliff. 

Republicans falling off a cliff like lemmings to follow the corrupt tRumpzi

Indeed, Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump, if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. 

After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.  (❗yeeeeouzzzzaaaa❗)

Republicans who tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. 

As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then? 

Will the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump, continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting, only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in the world is going to attract support no matter who they are. That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.

But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving its own interests, will help him do it.

Trump will thus enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party. 

Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him? Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high, continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already launched, respectively, third-party and independent campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left. The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.

Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term, the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? 

Donald Trump is dangerous

Regardless of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents. 

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. 

In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. 

At that time, the German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.

Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. 

On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.

And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. 

The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.

I mention all this only to answer one simple question: Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting panic about its prospects.

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. 

A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?

Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?

A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy, but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. 

And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as (God forbid❗)president.

Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.

It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. 

As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020, election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the January 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Representative Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. 

Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”

It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual “sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.

So, the (revenge driven ❗)Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. 

Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.

And then, who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? 

A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.

Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. 

Nevertheless, in a (retaliation❗) regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.

So, how will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.

Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress, they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. 

That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge once Trump regains power.

But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate, peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action? What would that look like?

Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the price for every transgression ever committed against the laws designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.

Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them. But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.

And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief? Do we even want the military to have to make that call? 

There is every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs” supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.

Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find out.


Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection.

Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.

This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.

What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. 

If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?

Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.

Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. 

Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.

A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. 

By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?

We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.

Opinion by Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for The Washington Post.