Then-Senator John F. Kennedy gave a speech in 1959 in which he said
“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters — one represents danger and one represents opportunity.”
While Kennedy’s generalization about Chinese calligraphy was slightly off, his description of “crisis” perfectly represents where we are right now:
— Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who’s studied strongmen her entire career and wrote a brilliant book about them, calls this “late-stage radicalization,” the dangerous phase when a weakened autocrat purges wafflers from his regime, strengthens his loyalists, and lashes out at anybody who may oppose him.
— Obama advisor Robert Pape, who runs the University of Chicago’s project on political violence, just said that the next eight weeks until Democrats are sworn will be the most dangerous weeks of our entire lives.
— Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist who’s a regular guest on my program, made a similar warning based on Trump’s twisted psychology, telling The Independent newspaper about Trump’s affection for talking about using nuclear weapons:
“[Trump] is extremely attracted to them without understanding their ramifications: for him, they are just bigger bombs. However, there is no scenario in which the use of nuclear weapons would not lead to a catastrophic end to life as we know it. Unless he is contained, he could be driven to use them now, rageful as he is about his defeat against Iran, and desperate as he will be to salvage his image from being a ‘loser’.”
She added: “We have a truly narrow window between his defenses being low and his ‘recovering’ himself to attack even more vehemently.”
She said that just before Trump had appointed Stephen Miller to be his Chief of Staff, the guy who essentially runs the presidency, indicating that Trump is now in the “recovery” mode of moving toward full-on tyranny.
I’m familiar with Dr. Lee’s “window” — when Louise and I started and ran a community and school for severely abused children in the late 1970s, we worked with numerous abusive families. The most deadly moment in the relationship is when the abused spouse (typically the wife) finally decides to leave; that’s when most spousal and even whole-family murders happen, and is why shelters go to such lengths to remain anonymous.
Perhaps most ominously, this weekend Trump posted on his Nazi-infested social media site that Democratic members of Congress “are extortionists and they should be imprisoned” and ordered the Justice Department to investigate them. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Blanche flat out if he’d go after members of Congress, he said, “It depends on what’s said, so yes, there could be [pursuit of criminal investigations].”
When Bash asked him about Trump and him throwing Democratic members of Congress in prison, he replied, “It depends on what the crime is and what they’ve done.”
The “crimes” they were discussing were Senator Elissa Slotkin telling college students they might want to think twice before going to work for this regime, and Congressman Robert Garcia telling Trump’s people to “lawyer up.”
That’s it. Our acting Attorney General is saying — like with Comey’s picture of seashells spelling out 8647 — that speech that offends the president is now a potential felony that can lead to years in brutal federal prisons or, at the least, “investigations” that can break an average person financially and destroy their retirement savings in legal fees.
I wrote about this moment at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, noting that oligarchy — when the morbidly rich take control of government and turn its power toward enriching themselves and their buddies — is always a transitional form of governance that typically lasts less than a generation.
The reason why is simple, and we’re seeing it played out in this past election and the No Kings marches. When people realize that the government has been taken over by criminals and grifters, they rebel and demand a return to honesty and transparency.
At that point the ruler faces a stark binary choice: Either come down with an iron fist, as the Chinese did at Tienanmen Square and Putin did in the early 2000s, or back off and go back to running their businesses and let the people have their government back, as happened here in the US after FDR came to power and called out the “economic royalists” who “hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”
Trump initially, Tuesday night, told Fox “News” that he’d work with Democrats, but since then he’s brought in Stephen Miller and started talking about imprisoning the Democrats who’ll be investigating his family’s criminal syndicate and his and Miller’s violent abuses of our Constitution and law.
In choosing Miller to be his alter-ego and essentially run the Executive Branch, Trump’s clearly chosen the iron fist strategy.
As The New York Times reported Saturday, Miller:
— pushed the murderous war crimes of striking civilian boats in the Caribbean;
— helped turn the prosecutorial power of the federal government against political opponents and universities;
— oversaw the federal military occupation of Washington, DC;
— circulated Trump’s draft executive order to restrict mail-in voting;
— and openly discussed invoking the Insurrection Act when the people of Minneapolis came into the streets to protest the ICE murder of two of their citizens.
Miller called Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the local VA hospital, a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin”: Pretti had been holding a phone.
If Trump decides to go full-Putin, the machinery for such a crackdown was put into place late last year with his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which directs the FBI, Treasury, and IRS to treat “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as “indicators of domestic terrorism.”
It’s already been used; in June eight people who supported a 4th of July demonstration outside the Prarieland ICE facility in Texas were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison.
The one guy who shot and wounded a police officer got 100 years in prison, but under the terrorism conspiracy rubric the other seven got 30 to 70 years in prison each; Daniel Estrada, who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines.
This is Putin’s “iron fist” now carved into American law and already executed at least once, probably as a test case; Trump and Miller appear ready to push it as far as they can, meaning anybody who opposes this regime is at risk. Miller was reportedly pushing this weekend for journalists to be thrown in jail, just like in Russia.
The New Republic recently reported that Trump is pressing for the still-Republican-controlled House and Senate to jam through an appropriation of $166.1 million for 328 new positions, including 130 special agents, to more fully implement NSPM-7 through a new Joint Mission Center drawing in ten federal agencies.
And acting Attorney General and Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche said that Trump himself has a “right” and a “duty” to order federal investigations — including into politicians and writers who oppose him — and boasted on NewsNation that he’s installing “roadblocks” inside the DOJ so Trump himself can never be prosecuted after he leaves office.
That’s the “danger” aspect of Kennedy’s quote. The “opportunity” side is the power that House and Senate Democrats will have in another two months. A handful of Republicans may join them, as several called Miller’s appointment a “horrible decision” and one called him a “megalomaniac” on the record.
The margins in this election bring to mind the vote in April in Hungary, where Trump’s closest European ally and fellow Putin-suckup Viktor Orbán lost so badly that he had no choice but to step down and allow a democratic transition in that nation. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, the strongman’s playbook has no chapter on how to lose.
So, here we are, presented with both great danger — Trump could do just about anything, including provoking a world war and declaring a national emergency to prevent Democrats from being seated in January — and great opportunity for a cleansing and democratic renewal like we last saw in the 1932-1981 New Deal era.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is a probably-apocryphal quote attributed to Jefferson, but it perfectly describes this moment and the next two years. And that vigilance is our job.
Stay updated, reach out to your elected officials (202-224-3121) and let them know you support accountability and the rule of law, and help keep friends and family awake. Share this message and others that promote the ideals of our democracy rather than Trump’s and Miller’s thuggish worldview.
Tag, we’re it.
