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A dear friend recently texted me while clothes shopping with her preteen daughter. The girl, an aspiring gymnast, spotted a glittery American flag shirt and pleaded with her mother to buy it. Where the kid saw Simone Biles, her mother, a brilliant brand designer, saw complications and gave it a hard pass.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. She’s one of the kindest people I know and a great mom. I stared at my phone for a while, drafting replies I didn’t send. The silly uncle: I get it, but there are worse fashion choices a kid can make. The trite-but-true op-ed: Well, the flag belongs to all of us. But it’s not my place to give parenting advice, nor was this dog dad asked for it.

I don’t have to manage the loaded perceptions of other kids at school or the cocked eyebrows of their parents at Little League. My choices don’t decide the friends and foes an eleven-year-old makes. Refraining from wearing the flag is, by traditional flag-code standards, the more respectful move anyway. John Prine was right that your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore. But I couldn’t stop turning over the fact that the piece of cloth we were made to pledge to every morning has failed at its only real job: to unify us.

There was no period in my life when the flag was more omnipresent than in the months after 9/11. Twenty-five years on, according to Gallup, patriotism among women and young Americans sits at an unprecedented low.

Every 4th of July, oodles of articles get written about the paradoxes of patriotism. They tend towards listicles of America’s contradictions, how the country is the best and worst of its past and its people, before closing on the reassurance that we are, all of us, Americans. The rest are eulogies. This year skewed heavily toward eulogy. I don’t know whether I read them out of hope or longing, or if I’m just a sadist with a screen addiction. They’re so thick with cliché that even the ones written decades ago would trip an AI checker for robotic prose.

The flag belongs to all Americans. True. But the right claimed the merch a long time ago. Since Vietnam, its rightward lean has been broadly accepted; study after study finds that even liberals who self-identify as patriotic view Old Glory as symbolically conservative. One “study” tried to claim that merely being in the presence of a flag would make you more conservative. It failed to be replicated. But J.D. Vance's presence has been known to make some Americans more liberal.

Liberals who abandoned flag-waving years ago, some rejecting patriotism outright, still embrace national unifying iconography. They stick national-park decals on their Yeti mugs and Subarus, tote NPR and PBS bags, and get Rosie the Riveter tattoos.

Others build alternatives. The Pride flag has been amended four times toward greater inclusion, to the point that the current design is so cluttered it looks like the work of a straight plumber named Mitch, the one guy it doesn’t represent. A few years back, the suburban-mom resistance seeded lawns everywhere with “In This House We Believe” signs — multicolored font on black pressboard, meant to unite the multicultural America they live in, and functioning, unmistakably, as an anti-MAGA marker.

We had one in our yard. I hated it — not the message, but the naive smugness of it, the little slogans I had to walk past every time I came home. But a friend had asked us to put it up, and I couldn’t bring myself to wound her positive intent over a lawn sign, so I left it there until the sun bleached it gray and it began to disintegrate on its stake. I’d hoped it might at least deter the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It didn’t. Nothing works as well as opening the door and rotating your head a full 360 degrees.

Some liberals still wear the flag, though class, fabric, and hue quietly sort their merch from the conservative majority’s. The man in the Uncle Sam top hat and flag overalls pleasuring himself at Trump’s Great American State Fair — conservative, however liberated he felt. The fit L.A. bartender in a stars-and-stripes Speedo, sipping a mango White Claw poolside at the Ace in Palm Springs — undeniably liberal. There are prep libs in knit Rowing Blazers sweaters, hipster libs in retro Olympic tracksuits, Americana libs drifting through Buc-ee’s with their papys’ bronzed flag belt buckles. If you spot a garish car wrap, a button-up with a scowling eagle, or a cotton pullover with what looks like an entire aisle of Party City hot-glued to it, you’re almost certainly in the presence of a conservative.

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Yet even the most devout MAGA is at least subconsciously aware that owning the most flag merch isn’t the same as owning the flag. The flag doesn’t hold their ideals alone. They’d never admit it. But you can tell by their compulsion to hoist a Trump or a Let’s Go Brandon flag right beside Old Glory on the back of their F-250s.

Despite all of America’s wrongs, I have a sense of patriotism for America’s professed ideals. I’ve just never looked good in red, white, and blue — not for lack of trying. I was once a kid in the flag tee myself. On the 4th of July, sitting in a lawn chair in my grandmother’s driveway, I caught my first glimpse of the difference between performative patriotism and living those ideals. I had no sophisticated analysis, just a fleeting hunch that something was off. Then I went back to enjoying the colorful explosions in the night sky.

My uncle was a small-town cop, estranged from us now — the kind who flips on his lights and siren to blow through town on a coffee run. He was also a volunteer firefighter, and he threw the best 4th of July parties on the block. Every June, his unit would catch some immigrant dairy farmer or aging hippie with illegal fireworks and confiscate the lot. Come dusk, he and his posse of public servants would break out their stashes of Ladyfingers, Roman candles, and M-80s. My uncle would hold bottle rockets in his hand and laugh at the printed instructions telling him not to as he lit the fuse.

A child subjected to copious amounts of D.A.R.E. propaganda, I was acutely aware of the law and terrified of breaking it. Their unspoken justification was that they were the law. They knew how to put out fires, and we had paramedics on site who, despite being a few beers in, assured us they could patch anyone up who lost an eye or hand. One tried to convince me that he had sewn someone's head back on. By their own reckoning, that made them the only ones fit for such spectacular displays of patriotism.

Not far from where we celebrated sat a small airfield, part private landing strip, part hub for Cal Fire’s aerial operations. I’d fallen in love with planes there at seven, when a family friend took me up in his two-seater Cessna and cruised the jagged coast. The summer I was nine, I got smuggled aboard a Cal Fire tanker to drop retardant on a redwood forest fire. My seat was a stack of catalogs duct-taped into a cushion, my grasp of danger iffy at best. After that, I was certain I’d be a pilot. With movies like Top Gun permeating pop culture, I papered my walls with military aircraft—F-15s, stealth bombers, anything that moved fast and repped the flag. Then came the Gulf War.

One afternoon, I came home from school to find my mother had taken the posters down. She was worried I couldn’t tell the difference between flying and war. Perhaps I couldn’t. As I looked up at the open wall, the hairline cracks spidering out from the thumbtack holes in the plaster, I felt I had just been kicked off Team America. I’d never been more American in my life.

Middle age finds you quickly. You accept it or get weird. One day, you’re a kid wearing R2D2 pajamas; the next, you’re chasing a delivery robot blocks past the sandwich shop you ordered from because it glitched and skipped your office. Time will tell if the Force is strong with you. Your knees will…

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Authoritarian consolidation runs on spectacle. The image of power is substituted for power itself until the image is all that many see (they hope, anyway). Putin’s shirtless horseback rides and judo demonstrations reduced a surveillance state to a personality cult. As people loved or mocked the photo op, the scaffolding went up. Orbán raised a football …

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“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is the threat of someone simultaneously auditioning for the History Channel and the Book of Revelation. It was a threat as empty as Trump’s moral code — the very lack of which made the world watch and wait under the possibility that he might follow through purely for the infamy.

If I…

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Part 2 of 2 on political linguistics

It’s a clear October night, the air hangs like a held breath. In the distance, a low orange glow stretches for several miles and melts into the horizon. It’s not a river of fire, but close. As it weaves toward Chicago, torch-lit shadows of thousands of young men— all radical Republicans— dance across apartment facades…

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If you’re interested in more video content, I’ve launched a YouTube channel!

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A crypto deal signed with an Abu Dhabi royal days before Trump’s inauguration, the Qatari plane gifted to Trump, Nvidia chips approved for sale to the UAE, Don Jr. and Eric Trump’s investments in an Israeli AI drone company, K…

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The morning after Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, thousands of mourners gathered in Tehran’s Enghelab Square and towns throughout Iran, Iraq, India, and Lebanon. In Pakistan, protesters stormed the U.S. consulate, leaving at least 21 people dead. There’s a peculiar sadness in public tears for a theocratic tyrant. A conditioned lamentation on which decade…

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If in the early 2000s you found yourself in Arcata, California, when collegiate dreads bounced along to hacky sacks and drum circles made every hangover feel like your first—I may have poured your coffee at Sacred Grounds.

Our custom La San Marco espresso machine was built to the mid-1940s spr…

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Bloggers and independent media mocked it for what it was—a farcical stunt to promote a presidential run. Phangoria was the largest Greek colony in the Black Sea region. Archaeologists surveying the area for years only found shards. Putin denied it was staged, claiming the urns had been waiting for him since the 6th century, as if predestined. State media used the discovery to depict Putin as a brave explorer capable of unearthing greatness in Russia. Two months later, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted it was a setup. It was obvious—how could anyone believe otherwise? It was done for a “good cause,” to promote Russian archaeology, tourism, and history. Peskov portrayed critics as cynical and unpatriotic, scolding them for obsessing over “insignificant details.”

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If there’s a kernel of truth in every lie, as the idiom goes, what do you call it when there is not? Dostoevsky called it Vranyo. The goal is not to deceive. Vranyo is intentionally and blatantly untrue. The liar knows he’s lying, and he knows the audience knows he knows.

This is nothing new for Russians. Putin simply updated it for the 21st century. When troops lacking insignia invaded Crimea, Putin denied they were Russians despite the fact that they were speaking Russian, driving Russian vehicles, and carrying Russian-made munitions. For a decade, Putin and his officials, including Sergei Lavrov, denied any connection to the Wagner Group. After all, private military companies are illegal under Russian law. Peskov said it was total “madness” to even speculate Russia would invade Ukraine. On all accounts, Putin and his officials eventually, and matter-of-factly, claimed responsibility.

Well before his first term, Trump embraced vranyo. It started with birtherism. Once elected, the blatant falsehoods snowballed. There was Sean Spicer debasing himself over the inauguration crowd size, Sharpiegate, Trump’s “perfect call” shaking down President Zelensky, the 2020 claim Covid was “going to disappear”, and the “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election, just to name a few.

In Trump’s second term, he was “elected by a landslide.” As with Putin, the vranyo began with petty ego-inflating fictions. With a cabinet of loyalists, it was weaponized as “justification” for policy, such as Trump’s tariffs. It spread over the body politic like gangrene. Soon, funds appropriated by Congress were denied by the executive in clear violation of the Constitution. ICE became a masked secret police, given the power of warrantless search and seizure. The vranyo expanded militarization. Lies about crime rates and protests, contradicting mountains of photos and videos, were used to deploy the National Guard and Marines to cities, against mayors’ and governors’ wishes.

With the recent public murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE, the administration told Americans not to believe what they can see with their own eyes in multiple videos from multiple angles.

Ashli Babbitt, who violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election, was given full military funeral honors. Good, unarmed, and sitting in her car, was gunned down and called a “fucking bitch,” by an ICE officer, outrightly ignoring protocol. Less than 2 hours after the shooting, Kristi Noem began the spin. The administration framed her as a “domestic terrorist.” J.D. Vance took to defaming Good, something he told the public to report to people’s employers if they did so about Charlie Kirk after he was murdered. The subtext is that there are different laws for those who accept the administration’s “truths” and those who do not. If you are not one of them, they can kill all of yours.

The absurdity has entered the world stage. We were told the U.S. was bombing Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean because of drug trafficking to the U.S., despite no evidence. If there were drugs on the vessels, it would most likely be cocaine headed for Europe. When the strikes were accused of being illegal in accordance with both domestic and international law, Trump invoked the laws of war. If it had been an act of “law enforcement,” then killing 123 people without due process might be illegal. But since it involved war and national security, he claimed it fell under executive authority. When the U.S. led an assault on Venezuela and captured Maduro without congressional approval, let alone consulting them, he claimed it was an act of law enforcement. It didn’t matter that these claims were incompatible.

Once Maduro was removed, he stated that the real goal of U.S. intervention was the imperialist seizure of oil. Although Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, its oil is heavy crude, requiring extensive refining. Tens of billions would need to be invested in new infrastructure, and it could take at least a decade of stability before seeing any return on investment (ROI). It’s possible the administration is making claims about oil, just as it forced Ukraine to make a “deal” for rare earth minerals (which would also require a stable nation and years before any ROI), simply to create an illusion of economic gain where there is none.

Trump has claimed we need to take control of Greenland for national security. While other administrations have expressed concern about the potential threat posed by Chinese and Russian ships transiting through the region, Greenland is a Danish territory and a member of NATO. It hosts a U.S. base. It’s already a secured area without the U.S. “owning” the state of Greenland. If the U.S. wanted to pursue other security options to keep Russia and China from “Taking Greenland,” it could. The real threat may be the opposite. If Greenland were a post-NATO U.S. province, who would stop the Trump administration, which has sided with Russia even over its own intelligence agencies, from allowing Russian ships to pass through?

Examples of U.S. Vranyo are plentiful. But what’s the advantage for leaders to construct a culture of verifiably false narratives? Some people will believe the lies. But that’s a bonus, not the intention. Officials taking to the podium and parroting obvious falsehoods demonstrate loyalty. Without it, the regime would fall. People with a greater loyalty to verifiable truth out themselves as the enemy. That polarization is fuel for autocracy. At this stage, they want the opposition to loudly voice how mind-boggling and outrageous their claims are. It’s a necessary first step towards silencing them. The algorithms rejoice in the fear and anxiety. Tech billionaires and crypto bros rake in the Benjamins. The White House ballroom gets funded. Loyal citizens get further radicalized. In a world where facts are reduced to picking a side, the more aggressive the oppositional response, the easier it’s dismissed by loyalists as emotional, irrational, unpatriotic, and deranged. That’s ambrosia for trolls. The lies waste journalists’ time and energy by forcing them to address the nonsense. The more time journalists spend debunking a firehose of falsehoods, the more newsworthy topics go unmentioned. In response to the accusation of lying, the administration engages in “I know you are, but what am I?” antics, making claims that the critics are just the “fake news,” suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The truth gets fuzzier and less sticky under the parade of gaslighting, even for those striving to reveal it.

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Then there are those who know the lies aren’t true, but are willing to play along. They’re the model citizens of illiberal states. In the USSR, Khrushchev would announce to the world that they had surpassed U.S. agriculture production by wildly absurd numbers. Taking his orders, central planners would demand that farmers meet the impossible production targets. While standing in food lines, malnourished farmers would lie to reporters with tales of their abundant crops. Leadership would claim victory. Rinse, wash, repeat. This very cycle played out in Maoist China, leading to the Great Famine, in which estimates of 30 million Chinese starved to death. Authoritarians know they have a lock on the population when they play along.

Most significantly, Vranyo gives the administration an illusion of everything Stephen Miller champions: strength, force, & power. Bending the perception of reality can make weak, unpopular leaders appear stronger than they are. It’s a show of power. The administration may even appear to have the upper hand, at least in our mind’s eye. That’s far more real to the vrun-in-chief than what your eyes see.

Friday, Jan. 2, a fire broke out at the 800 block of 10th Street in Arcata, California. Seven local businesses, apartments, and an art studio were destroyed. Half of the block is now gone. One of the businesses was Northtown Books, a sixty-year staple of the community. I worked there for eight years. It g…

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Burbank, August 2025 — at the Talleyrand, seven of us squeeze into a banquette booth and slather our bread with butter. This fine establishment was beloved by the most golden of Californians, Huell Howser. The menu boasts a thumbs-up icon next to the hot turkey sandwich; make no mistake, it’s dripping with a glorious yellow gravy and Huell-approved. It’s Thanksgiving every day here. There’s also a full bar. The waitress, armed with a sass only found in those who got into the biz when regulars could enjoy a smoke with their omelet, informs us that the bartender pours generously. With a wink, she tells me she might sip our drinks before bringing them to the table to prevent spills.

Such uniquely American charm should not be wasted on unappreciative souls. Thankfully, my present company values brows low and high. It’s one of many things I love about them. They’re also funny as hell. The high school art teacher at the table scrolls through his phone, pulling up pictures his students drew of him while quoting their unfiltered trash talk: “Mr. Robbins, you don’t work out, do you?” We laugh. We toast the recently engaged couple, who I was confident would take the plunge. Just as we silenced our phones, we try to tune out the relentless chatter drifting through the dining room. “Trump,” this. “Trump,” that. For a brief moment, an unspoken glance circles the table as we contemplate the political leanings of the other diners. It’s good for all Americans to bump elbows where meals are shared. But is everyone safe?

It’s been two weeks since we’ve seen the street vendor who, for years, sold hot dogs and agua fresca on a corner not far from here. We heard he was thrown to the ground, brutalized, and detained by ICE agents. They hid behind masks, dehumanizing themselves so they could dehumanize others. We don’t know his citizenship status. It doesn’t matter. Did he get due process? It’s unlikely. For months, people across the country have been denied their rights regardless of citizenship status. Was he deported to a foreign prison? Is his family okay?

A blitzkrieg of headlines trudges through my skull. But soon, the world beyond our table falls under it like a napkin from a lap. I return to tales of weddings and the couple’s plans. We share what we love about our partners. The married couples recount what’s kept their relationships alive through good times and bad. This isn’t social media. We’re free to be vulnerable. We smile. We laugh. We raise our glass to love. Hugs are exchanged, a group photo is taken, and goodbyes are said.

Not long into the drive home, the headlines push on to the front of my mind. A tinge of guilt and helplessness surfaces as they contrast against a beautiful night of normalcy. It’s integral for moments of joy to leave unpleasant facts in the shadows of our shared humanity. It’s that very humanity which brings me back to face them.

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I’m trying to be clear-headed about this American moment. Hyperbole is for clickbait and algorithms. Before Trump’s first term, I was a guest lecturer on Middle Eastern autocracy and the Syrian Civil War. I was also helping a family who had escaped the fascism of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad open a restaurant. One of the cooks had been brutally tortured as a teen, forced to eat human feces mixed with smashed glass. He was fortunate to be released from the notorious Sednaya prison and escape to America. However, his survival required the removal of half his stomach.

Assad, with the aid of Russia and Iran, leveled his country. Between 700,000 and 1 million people were killed. Roughly 14 million Syrians were displaced. For much of the 2010s, I interviewed survivors of war, torture, and the trauma of living in a country where, if a neighbor wants to get rid of you, all they have to do is tell the Mukhabarat (secret police) you said the leader’s name in a negative tone. That kind of fear doesn’t just change what you say or who you talk to; it changes how you think.

America isn’t there. So where are we? There are many steps along the path from a constitutional democracy to a totalitarian state. With each one, it feels like a volume knob is being turned up on an old car stereo. Everything gets louder as we progress from 1 to 11. Is the dial set at a democratic republic, illiberal democracy, a hybrid government, competitive autocracy, kleptocracy, or full-blown fascism? Are we somewhere in between? Can Americans identify the differences? Is it reaching a level where we can no longer hear each other? How do we turn it down? From the back seat, we shout, Are we there yet?!

For many Americans, regardless of political affiliations, it feels as if there’s a weighted blanket over our society. If you’re like me, it’s hard to sleep when you’re too hot. Concerns about affordability, career prospects in the age of A.I., social hostility, distrust, political violence, polarization, income inequality, misinformation, and social isolation are common topics of conversation. Everything is politicized. Uncertainty and fear are being amplified and exploited for profit and power. This isn’t new, at least not for all of us.

No matter what form of government you live under, not everyone experiences it equally. America, the “land of the free, home of the brave,” the “shining beacon on the hill.” But it’s here where Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five wrote, “All men are created equal,” while owning slaves and denying women voting rights. It’s here where the natives were slaughtered, the Japanese interned, and Jim Crow was the law of the land. In 1935, the Nazis looked to America’s history of racial litigation as inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship and made interracial marriage illegal.

For some Americans, the idea that we were ever a democracy seems absurd. There has always been discrimination and efforts to enshrine unequal rights in favor of contingencies who feel threatened by the pursuit of our founding ideals. Those ideals have yet to be fully realized, but progress has been made. The greatest thread throughout American history is the collective effort and hard work that has bent that moral arc towards justice. The Trump administration is bending it back.

Since the end of World War II, sociologists and political scientists have developed statistical models to determine the conditions under which democracies backslide (transition from democracy to autocracy). By most accounts, the U.S. should be well-protected against democratic backsliding. Three factors commonly considered are the longevity of a democracy, the state's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and income inequality.

Renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the late 20th Century, made a case for what he called the “Two-Turnover Test.” His thesis was that if power had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, and then back again, that democratic state was less likely to backslide. In terms of time, the Two-Turnover Test spans 10 to 20 years. Even if we grant that the U.S. wasn’t a democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his benchmark of stability has been met. The January 6th attack on the Capitol and the legislative attempt to delegitimize the 2020 election muddies the waters. More significant is that Huntington’s argument applies more to 20th-century revolutions and coups than to the gradual erosion of norms that has been prominent in the global rise of 21st-century autocracies.

According to Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi’s research in Democracy and Development, no democracy richer than Argentina in 1976, with a per capita GDP of $19k in today’s U.S. dollars (AFI), has backslid. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in Tyranny of the Minority, Hungary backslid with a per capita GDP of $21k (AFI). The per capita GDP of the U.S. in 2024 was $86k. While a robust economy still seems to be preventative, it’s not a rule.

As University of Chicago professor Susan C. Stokes argues in her Princeton Press book, The Backsliders, income inequality provides a leverage point for backsliding. Across several states that have experienced backsliding in the 21st century, as income inequality rose, political polarization followed. Trust in institutions eroded. As this happens, cracks in the system emerge that aspiring autocrats can exploit to dismantle it further under the guise of reform. They then break down the system from within to enrich themselves and their cronies, while finding scapegoats to blame when they fail to deliver results for citizens. The Gini Coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) shows that the U.S. has experienced a rapid increase in income inequality along with increased political polarization.

Both Brazil and Poland experienced backsliding even as income inequality declined. However, Brazil’s judiciary and Poland’s record-breaking civic mobilization halted their democratic backsliding. There’s not enough data to be conclusive, though it’s possible that lower rates of income inequality played a role.

While the longevity of U.S. democratic institutions and the strength of per capita GDP may make the U.S. appear safeguarded against backsliding, the ongoing trends of rising income inequality and political polarization suggest a greater potential for backsliding.

Bret Stephens at the New York Times, along with contributors to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review, have argued that America’s “guardrails” will protect it from backsliding. The U.S. Constitution is often cited as a bulwark of democracy. Yet nearly every Latin American country that’s based its constitution on it — including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela — has experienced repeated cycles of democratic backsliding. The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, heavily borrowed from the Constitution, even directly copying sections of it. That didn’t prevent backsliding.

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Throughout history, most governments have been autocratic. There are currently between 65 and 81 autocratic countries. The number is rising. This trend doesn’t always make the news when it lacks the media appeal of violence. Most modern constitutional democracies don’t transition to autocracy through tanks and troops; they do so through lawyers and legislation. According to the study "Keeping the Democratic Facade” by Anna Luehrmann and Staffan Lindberg, since 1990, 70% of democracies that have backslid have done so through legal means. Half of those expansions of executive power were achieved through reinterpretation of existing laws.

When Trump descended on the golden escalator, left-leaning voters saw him as an easily beatable carnival barker. His autocratic ambitions were visible to people who’ve studied autocracies or lived in one. Still, it was hard to imagine a man so unfit would be elected by the American people. Yet they did. Strong baffoonish vibes aren’t unique to Trump in the halls of aspiring autocrats. Many tyrants of the past were seen as quasi-cartoon characters.

Throughout his first term, using words like 'authoritarian' to describe Trump was seen by the majority of Americans as an overreaction. If you’re caught up in the daily news, it’s easy to forget how bad things were during that first term. When he wanted to shoot peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, it didn’t happen; there were “adults in the room” like General Mattis. Nearly a year into his second term, that’s no longer the case.

As of this writing, half of Project 2025 has been implemented. Nearly a decade into Trump’s dominance of the news cycle, pointing out his desire to be a dictator feels cliché. He’s pointed it out himself. It’s important to remember that autocracy is cliché. Autocrats would rather you see it as nostalgia. After all, rarely is what they present in the media original. Trump proudly taunted a 3rd term while wearing a hat that reads, “Trump was right about everything.”

It’s a joke, his loyalists say. Never mind how much he lies and is glaringly wrong. Never mind that instead of coming up with his own slogan, he plagiarized Mussolini, who proudly embraced the catch phrase, “Mussolini ha sempre ragione” — Mussolini is always right. Autocracy is cliché.

I could list an overwhelming number of actions this administration has taken to erode our democracy. There will surely be more by the time you’re done reading this. For the sake of brevity, if prominent examples don’t quickly come to mind, Professor Christina Pagel and her team at University College London are keeping a detailed record.

The Trump administration is historically unpopular. He’s the first president in modern history not to crack 50% approval. They’ve tried to consolidate power much faster than figures like Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary. This has fueled increased resistance. When scholars of 1930s fascist movements are asked why people accepted autocracy, a common quote often attributed to Mussolini is offered: “The trains run on time.” This was mostly propaganda. But enough people bought the illusion of safety and order. The Trump administration has tried to pull the same rabbit from its Mussolini hat. While they have managed to deceive some Americans regarding crime and even propagated the outright lie that Trump won the 2020 election, they are struggling to convince the majority that the economy is strong when it contradicts their daily experiences. While income inequality may be their opening, it could also be their undoing.

Unlike dictators who seize power in their prime, Trump’s health and mental acuity appear to be declining as quickly as his approval ratings. It’s unclear he’ll make it through this term, let alone be coherent enough if his administration finds a way to subvert the 22nd amendment so he can run for a third. Our elections may remain secure despite attempts to undermine them. The 2026 midterms will be revealing.

Given the damage done, there’s a chance—if we can unify across our diverse ideologies to protect our democracy— we can come back stronger than ever. But who knows? I’ve yet to find a reliable crystal ball. Dictators don’t act alone. I’ve come across opinions suggesting that when a strongman falls, their autocracy collapses with them. I can point to several cases where that isn’t true, at least not for long. There are aspects of what we’re witnessing that are unique to the 21st century. The push toward kleptocracy on this scale has no clear historical precedent but is how mafia states, such as Russia, operate. So, while there are no MAGA predecessors who combine Trump’s media savvy and charismatic base appeal, this threat could very well last beyond Trump.

Authoritarians rule by taking away the future and replacing it with fantasy. They drain citizens of hope and a sense of direction. They want the headlines rolling through the streets of your mind, perpetuating feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. They require dependence and praise. They want “truth” to be a command. If we can’t accurately discuss the good and bad of the past, we lose our references. Reality becomes malleable. If we can’t imagine a better future, how can we build one?

So what are we to do? It could be putting your body on the line if it comes to that. But for now, speak up even when daily life feels normal despite knowing it’s not for people who may not look like you or have your income. If it feels cliché, don’t let that stop you. Now’s not the time to lose momentum. This administration has three years left. It ain’t over. Give your money to companies that refuse to bend to the state. Patiently talk with family who disagree or may not be politically engaged. Run for local office. Read. Vote. I’ll be facing it with my pen (well, ok, keyboard) in hand and a stack of books by my side. You can too. And never forget, there’s strength in simply letting others know they’re not alone. Meet your friends in person. Have dinner. Be sure to pass the bread. Give them hugs, take that group photo, and never hesitate to raise your glass to love.