Could This Be What the End of a Would-Be Dictatorship Looks Like?

The masks are off, the excuses are gone, and the regime is testing how much terror the public will tolerate. What happens when the public finally refuses to be afraid?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

They’re doubling down because they know their time is limited.

Their attempt to turn America into a Russia-like police state is suddenly failing, and a reckoning is coming. Trump and his lickspittles look at the horizon and see mushroom clouds rising against a red sky, suggesting their season of power and brutality is about to turn on them.

As Mike Brock notes over at his excellent Notes from the Circus newsletter:

“The United States is experiencing the greatest political emergency since the Civil War. Right now.”

Sunday, masked ICE goons were going house-to-house in Minneapolis kicking in doors without search or no-knock warrants in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, federal law, state law, and local law. When a woman — a US citizen — whose home was being invaded and was trying to protect her children from the assault asked the secret police who’d just destroyed her front door to show her a warrant, they shot her with a Taser and zapped her with tens of thousands of volts of electricity.

Just before that, they’d shot Renee Good three times in the face for telling another ICE goon named Jonathan Ross that she wasn’t mad at him but was just going to drive away. Trump regime officials blanketed the airwaves over the weekend claiming she was a “domestic terrorist” and they can kill anybody they want, whenever and wherever they want, as long as they say those two magic words. Now the DOJ is refusing to investigate the murder, causing four resignations in the Department.

Yesterday in Minneapolis, ICE goons stopped a man who was trying to drive to his home, causing the goons searching his neighborhood for brown-skinned people to think he was following them. They stopped him, confronted him, and demanded to know, “Did you not learn from what just happened?” in clear reference to Good’s murder, suggesting he could be next.

That was followed by a US citizen Hispanic couple being stopped by ICE in Minneapolis and, when the husband refused to show them ID because he’s a citizen and they had no warrant that named him and he’d not committed any crime or traffic offense, two ICE SUVs rammed his small car, disabling it, then fired tear gas at him when he got out of his vehicle.

They then snatched a US Marine veteran out of her car, beat her, laughed at her pain and screams, and told her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”

This is all criminal activity. As Malcolm Nance writes at his brilliant Special Intelligence newsletter:

“Minneapolis is quickly becoming the Boston Commons of a possible 2nd American Revolution, a peaceful one where we use people power to hit the streets.”

Calling the ICE surge an “unlawful federal invasion” that is “terrorizing Minnesotans,” Attorney General Keith Ellison (a regular guest on my show) yesterday unveiled a lawsuit against DHS and said simply, “This has to stop.” He added:

“The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota. People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted.”

Obviously, these are not the actions of a legitimate administration that is following the law and the Constitution. But more importantly, these are also not the actions of an administration that believes what they’re doing is right.

Trump, Noem, et al are freaking out right now, desperately hoping they can provoke somebody, anybody, to take a shot at or run over an ICE goon and create a martyr to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, which arguably could legalize much of this very behavior.

Hopefully, people will stay calm and not give them that excuse. But even if somebody does do something rash and stupid, America will see right through the pretext. Trump won’t get the validation or credibility that he so craves and believes he needs to survive politically.

Trump also knows his economy is falling apart. If you subtract the elder-care jobs that are being created by roughly 10,000 boomers a day aging into retirement, we’ve lost jobs every month since April 2nd when Trump declared his “Liberation Day” tariffs, with manufacturing being hit particularly hard (lost over 100,000 jobs) because of the increased tariff cost of raw materials. Fully two-thirds of Americans believe we’re now on the edge of — if not already fully in the midst of — a serious recession.

This has provoked Trump to the desperate move of threatening Fed Chairman Jerome Powell with prison if he won’t loosen interest rates, a move that would stimulate the economy over the short term (in time for the 2026 elections) but cause devastating inflation down the road. Powell, like Minnesota, isn’t taking it laying down, however; he called out Trump in a shockingly blunt (for a Fed chair) video yesterday.

On top of this, Trump is twisting in the wind around Venezuela and Greenland, the two foreign policy stunts he’s trying to pull to distract us from the chance that he was funneling young women and girls from Mar-a-Lago — and perhaps his teenage talent agency and Miss Teen beauty pageant — to his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein. Bondi and Patel are in full cover-up mode, but it’s not working.

In the past week Trump’s lost two big votes in Congress, one on ACA subsidy extensions and the other a procedural vote in the Senate setting up a bill that will limit his war powers. He’s threatened each of the “turncoats” with primary challenges and will probably follow through, but he’s sounding increasingly desperate.

Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI), the former Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a biweekly guest on my radio/TV program for years, pointed out last week that he knows of multiple Republicans who will be turning on Trump once they’ve made it through their primaries and he can no longer threaten them. They’re increasingly sick of him, his petty grievances, his gaudy gold geegaws, and his pro-Putin and world-destabilizing rhetoric.

The earliest 2026 congressional primaries are scheduled for March 3, and the last regular primaries are currently set for mid‑September, with June being the busiest month, so sometime mid-summer you can expect that Trump will lose a significant amount of the power he currently holds. And nobody is taking JD Vance (or whatever name he’s using by then) all that seriously as an heir apparent; the man is completely lacking in relatability and charisma.

None of this means that we’re home safe. Trump and his rightwing billionaire funders are still openly opposed to democracy, Red state governors are actively purging people in their Blue cities from the voting rolls with the approval of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and billionaire-owned and -run media operations from CBS to Fox to Sinclair daily sing his praises.

But there’s also an active and growing resistance across media, in local communities, and emerging within both parties. Even as Facebook and Twitter censor anti-Trump posts and armies of trolls and bots attack Democrats and progressives, average working-class people are waking up hard and fast from coast to coast.

History tells us that when dictators or, in this case, wannabe dictators find themselves backed into a corner they tend to lash out furiously, knowing things won’t turn out well for them if they can’t pull off a last-minute victory.

Trump is haunted by the fact that 69 of Richard Nixon’s closest associates (including 2 Cabinet members) were indicted for going along with his lawlessness, 48 were convicted, and 40 went to prison including his Attorney General, White House Chief of Staff, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, White House Counsel, Special Counsel to the President, Deputy Director of the Committee to Re‑elect the President, and Secretary of Commerce.

While Bondi, Noem, Patel, Bovino, Homan, ​and others involved directly in his crimes and coverups are probably confident they’ll get away with it all because Trump will pardon them, that’s not a sure bet and they’re all still vulnerable to imprisonment on state charges even if they do get pardoned. And, of course, there’s no doubt whatsoever that if Trump getting off scott-free means he has to throw them under the bus that he’ll do it, as he has done with almost every other aide throughout his life.

Given the stakes, then, it’s reasonable to expect that the whole bunch of them, Trump’s entire criminal enterprise, will be working with him to produce a Hail Mary of some sort to prevent Democrats from taking power this fall and office next winter. The Insurrection Act is a good bet, but they’re going to need a credible excuse, which may be why they’re going so far out of their way to antagonize the good citizens of Minneapolis.

But I don’t believe it’ll work; even his sycophants on the Supreme Court seem to be tiring of his toddler-like tantrums and repeated violations of US and international law.

In summary, we need to redouble our resistance and our vigilance as we enter these critical days and months. These are, as Thomas Paine noted, “the times that try men’s souls.”

But also, to quote Paine’s appendix to Common Sense:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. … The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “How Much Will You Take?”