A New Year Begins and the Trump Cartel Tightens Its Grip Through Wealth, Force, & Faith

Billionaire cash steers the agenda, military and police power set the boundaries, and religious messaging sells it as virtue, all while taxpayers fund the very system that excludes them…

The turn of the calendar is more than a ritual. It’s a reminder that democracy is not self sustaining, not guaranteed, and not permanent unless we choose it again and again.

If we want this new year to be about renewal rather than retreat, we need to give some serious thought to what it’ll take to reclaim and defend the democratic republic that generations before us fought, organized, and sacrificed to build.

The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years. Warlord kings. The morbidly rich. And theocrats.

The Founders knew exactly what they were fighting. They wrote about it constantly, in the Declaration of Independence and in decades of letters to one another. They believed those three forces were the natural enemies of freedom, and unless they were restrained, they would always claw their way back into power.

Today, every one of those tyrannies is back. And they’re not even pretending otherwise.

The first tyranny was the warlord king. For most of human history, power came from violence. Kings ruled because their ancestors slaughtered their neighbors, seized land, and enforced obedience at sword point. They claimed God had chosen them, demanded loyalty, and crushed dissent.

By 1776, monarchy was so normalized that the idea of overthrowing a king was considered radical, dangerous, and insane. But that was exactly what the American Revolution set out to do.

King George III ruled as all kings did. He taxed, punished, and occupied at will. He treated the colonies as property. Jefferson spelled it out in the Declaration, describing a ruler who had become a tyrant, “unfit to govern a free people.”

The Founders rejected that model completely. No kings. No thrones. No divine rights.

Fast forward to now.

We now have a president who openly admires strongmen and autocrats. He talks about ruling, not governing. He issues decrees like a monarch and demands personal loyalty and a constant stream of gifts and flattery.

He surrounds himself with suckups, fellow billionaires, and yes men. He’s reimagined the White House not as the people’s house but as a palace, complete with plans for a massive ballroom modeled after the gilded throne room of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

This is not just cosmetic: it’s symbolic, reflecting how kings think.

At the same time, this regime talks casually about seizing territory, controlling other nations’ resources, and using military and economic force to bend countries to our will. Greenland, Panama, and now Venezuela. That isn’t diplomacy: it’s warlord logic dressed up in patriotic slogans.

The second tyranny the Founders feared was the morbidly rich.

In the 18th century, they were called lords, dukes, earls, and princes. They inherited wealth they didn’t earn and used it to control governments. They owned monopolies like the East India Company, whose corruption and brutality helped ignite the American Revolution itself.

Jefferson and Adams wrote again and again about how wealth corrupts democracy, never mincing words. Rousseau warned that the central duty of a republic was to protect the poor from the tyranny of the rich. Jefferson agreed, writing that the rich prey on the poor like animals “devouring their own kind.” Adams warned that once wealth and power become hereditary, elections would collapse into corruption.

Look around today.

Trump is an oligarch who’s stocked his administration with oligarchs. Billionaires write this administration’s policy. Billionaires get tax cuts. Billionaires dismantle regulations that protect workers, consumers, and the planet. The morbidly rich now sit openly in the halls of power, not behind the curtain but right at the table, shaping an economy designed to funnel wealth upwards and lock it there.

This system Trump is reinventing is not capitalism. It’s aristocracy with better branding.

The third tyranny is the most dangerous of all, because it wraps itself in moral certainty. The theocrats.

The Founders knew them well. State churches. Mandatory tithes. Clergy meddling in lawmaking. Religious authorities insisting they spoke for God and therefore couldn’t be questioned.

Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to escape compulsory church attendance and taxes that funded the clergy. Jefferson and Adams spent years fighting off efforts to inject Christianity into our government. They were explicit, repeatedly arguing that religious rule destroys freedom of conscience and poisons democracy.

Today, the mask is off.

A sitting vice presidential candidate can stand on a stage and declare, “By the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation.” That isn’t faith; it’s Christian nationalism. It’s theocratic rule by another name.

Rightwing Christian leaders now openly argue that their particular church’s doctrine should override the Constitution. They demand control over our schools, courts, and bodies. They want public money for their religious institutions and the religious laws they dictate enforced by the state.

This is exactly what the Founders warned us about. Exactly.

And all three tyrannies are now working together.

A would-be king who demands loyalty. A billionaire class that bankrolls him. A religious movement that sanctifies his power and declares him “chosen” by their god.

This alliance has toppled democracies before. We’ve watched it happen in real time in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and beyond, and it always starts the same way. A strongman rises to power and brings along with him the oligarchs. He hands off power to theocrats in exchange for institutional church support. Elections are hollowed out and courts captured by big money. And finally, as he bleeds the country dry, dissent gets criminalized.

We are not immune. We never were.

So what do we do?

We do what the Founders did.

We remember the importance of democracy. We teach real history and real civics. We tell the truth about why this country was founded and who it was founded to resist. We make sure the next generation understands that freedom is fragile and must be defended.

We resist. In the streets, in town halls, at school board meetings, and at city councils. We call Congress at 202-224-3121 and keep calling. We make it impossible for them to pretend we consent to oligarchy, theocracy, or a wannabe king’s gilded rule.

And we reform. We get money out of politics. We overturn Citizens United. We make voting a right, not a privilege that can be stripped away. We break the grip of billionaires and corporations on our democracy and make them pay their fair share to maintain our republic rather than just running up our national debt.

This is the moment.

If we fail, two and a half centuries of struggle will slip away, replaced by a warlord/oligarchic/theocratic state dressed up in red, white, and blue.

If we succeed, we can finally finish the work the Founders began and build a nation that truly belongs to all of us. And that’s worth fighting for with everything we have.

See you in the streets…and on the air.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Trump Regime Tightens Its Grip”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social