Part IV: The Last American President

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"

The Last American President: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Part IV: The Last American President

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to
do nothing. —Edmund Burke

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the
darkness. —Desmond Tutu

May 2, 2025, was a bad day for the news. Trump proudly announced his executive order kneecapping NPR and PBS, both trusted sources of independent journalism, in a brutal rhetorical attack.1

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” he declared as he signed the order requiring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS.” And then came the slap, the insult that followed the injury, as he claimed that both outlets received “tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’ ”2

Trump’s message was clear: NPR and CPB had failed the sycophant test and were being used as a vehicle to indirectly threaten any other media outlet that was similarly independent.

This executive order followed, by just a few days, an attempt by Trump to fire three board members of CPB; the news organization fought back by launching a lawsuit to protect its funding and independence. But after lawsuits against all three major TV networks and MSNBC and CNN, along with an FBI investigation into the publisher of Politico for printing an article comparing Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, the message is unmistakable: speak out against Trump or his administration and there will be a price to pay.

You could call it democide by intimidation.

In the first three parts of this book, we’ve traced the making of Trump, including how his father and Roy Cohn taught him to be a “killer” with little regard for the rule of law. Billionaires, massive corporations, and dark money networks funded his rise, along with help from foreign governments hostile to democracy.

He rose to power by repeatedly appealing to the worst in us, including racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. And now, as dictators and wannabe dictators around the world enthusiastically watch, he’s taking steps to dismantle the social welfare state, legal institutions, and liberal democracy Americans of both parties have carefully built ever since the days of the Republican Great Depression.

So, now comes the work before us, the necessity of confronting the authoritarian playbook that’s worked so well in Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, and so many other countries around the world.

DOGE is deconstructing our federal government at the same time Trump is cozying up to some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. Senior officials in the administration defend indefensible practices like ICE agents hiding their faces, refusing to identify their agency, and arresting people without court-signed warrants.

But it’s important to realize that authoritarians fear the power of ordinary people more than they do armies, and that’s us, you and me. History shows that the fatal weakness of dictators and those who want to become dictators is their dependence on our silence, our compliance, and their ability to throw people into despair and silence.

Thus, there’s hope. From the streets of Seoul to the town squares of Santiago, from the Solidarity movement I met with in Poland in 2024 to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, we’ve seen democracy repeatedly strike back against what first seemed to be overwhelming odds.

Will we be the generation that watches democracy die, or the one who fights like hell to save it?