This Isn’t About Pocketbook Politics — It’s About the Survival of the American Ideal

Every failed democracy has one thing in common: the people assumed someone else would save it...

Donald Trump didn’t just try to overturn an election. He’s trying to overturn the very ideal — and reality— of what has historically made America great.

While the media fixates on trade, Epstein, and floods, we’re all missing the real story: Trump’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” campaign is a direct assault on everything that once made this country a global leader and a moral force.

His goal isn’t to restore American greatness: it’s to dismantle it, to trade it away to strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and to drag the United States into the emerging authoritarian axis that now includes Hungary, India, Turkey and others abandoning democratic norms.

Other than illegally and unconstitutionally refusing to spend money appropriate by Congress and shutting down congressionally mandated agencies, he’s really not running on ideas or solutions. He’s running on vengeance, his visceral hatred of checks-and-balances democracy and love of king-like autocracy by decree.

He’s flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against American citizens, and may well do so as we approach the 2026 elections.

He’s reinstated Schedule F, firing tens of thousands of competent, non-partisan civil servants and replaced them with unqualified MAGA loyalists.

He’s seized sweeping control over formerly independent agencies, effectively criminalized dissent within them, and six corrupt toadies on the Supreme Court have shield him from accountability for life.

This is not a platform to lead a constitutionally-limited democratic republic as our founders envisioned: it’s a roadmap to end it.

And this time, he’s surrounded by people who know exactly how to do it.

In 2017, Trump didn’t understand how government worked. But now he has the rightwing-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” and a cadre of true believers who’ve spent the past eight years learning the levers of power.

Their clear — and often explicit —goal is nothing less than the destruction of the New Deal and the postwar liberal order (both domestically and internationally, dismantling environmental protections, civil rights enforcement, and the rule of law itself, all while concentrating power in the hands of one man who brags that he is America’s new king, posting memes of himself wearing a golden crown.

Trump’s economic policies are gutting what’s left of the middle class. His tariffs on imports is not a tax on foreign countries; they’re a tax on American consumers, one that is driving up the cost of everything from groceries to cars as you read these words.

Like his 2017 tax cuts, his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is designed to benefit billionaires and corporate monopolies while sticking working families and our children and grandchildren with the costs.

It’s the same old story that Reagan pioneered with his trickle-down bullshit: punch down, enrich the top, and distract the public with rage and fear.

But now it’s also on the world stage where Trump’s actions have become truly catastrophic.

America once led the free world against the forces of tyranny and dictatorship. We defeated fascism in World War II, and a neofascist form of communism with the Cold War.

Trump wants to reverse all that. He’s openly threatened to withdraw from NATO. He told a crowd he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies that “don’t pay up.”

He praises Putin as “smart” and “savvy” and takes instructions from him almost weekly. He calls Xi Jinping a “brilliant” leader and gratefully accepts gifts from him like copyrights for his daughter’s business. He brags about his friendship with Kim Jong-un. And he dismissively treats Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine — the largest democracy in Europe that is under vicious attack daily — like a nuisance to be bargained away.

He said he’d end the Ukraine war in 24 hours but has repeatedly refused to arm our ally in any meaningful way that might cause Putin to back off or even force him to the bargaining table. He won’t say how, or whether he supports Ukraine’s sovereignty. In one interview after another, he dodges the question of whether he wants Ukraine to win.

In a Fox News town hall, he said he’d tell Zelenskyy, “No more. You got to make a deal.” But what kind of deal? Trump has never acknowledged that Russia invaded illegally, that it annexed Crimea and now occupies vast swaths of eastern Ukraine, or that Putin is committing war crimes.

Zelenskyy signed a deal to give Trump Ukraine’s minerals, presumably to be mined by Trump’s donors and cronies, and then Trump and Hegseth ignored the promised weapons and air defenses that were supposed to come in exchange.

He’s never once condemned Putin for his soldiers stealing over 100,000 Ukrainian children from occupied territories and transporting them into Russia — often as their parents screamed and begged — one of the few countries in the world were child pornography is legal. He refuses to even acknowledge the use of rape by Russian soldiers as a weapon of against the women and families of Ukraine, or Russia’s use of banned chemical weapons on the civilians of that nation.

Instead, he implies that a “deal” would mean pressuring Ukraine to give up land in exchange for so-called peace. That’s not leadership. It’s surrender.

And it’s part of a larger pattern.

Trump doesn’t believe in democracy, at home or abroad. He doesn’t admire freedom. Instead, he admires power and the men who brutally wield it. He envies them. He wants to emulate them. He wants to reinvent his administration and, ultimately, our nation in their image. And he’s moving rapidly in that direction.

He craves — and is increasingly seizing — the raw, unchecked power of autocrats who can silence the press, jail opponents, and rule by decree. That’s also the world he wants America to join; not the democratic alliance of free nations we’ve been a part of for 249 years and shed the blood of millions of our soldiers to defend, but the rising axis of authoritarian states, from Russia and China to Hungary and, increasingly, Modi’s India and Erdoğon’s Turkey.

Under Trump, the United States wouldn’t lead the free world. As European leaders and democracy advocates around the world are increasingly saying out loud, he wants to help dismantle it.

As the brilliant columnist Martin Wolf writes for the Financial Times:

“In just under six months, only an eighth of his term, Trump has made huge strides in his war on everything that made the US successful. Only the Maga base, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping should feel happy. The most coherent part of the programme is the attempt to turn the US into an autocracy.”

He is dismantling America’s scientific leadership, destroying our universities and public schools, gutting our social safety net, rigging our future elections, legitimizing corruption for himself and his high-level cronies, building a network of concentration camps across America, and has created a massive federal police force of masked, unaccountable agents with a larger budget than Russia’s entire military.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become a vessel for this neofascist, authoritarian transformation.

What was once the party of Eisenhower and Lincoln is now the party of Orbán and Putin.

Sniveling, cowardly Republican leaders like Mike Johnson and John Thune know exactly what Trump is doing. They’ve seen the damage. They’ve read the indictments and his multiple convictions and liability for everything from election fraud to sexual assault. They watched January 6th unfold in real time and once condemned it…for a few weeks. Now they celebrate it.

Because they’re too afraid to confront him, too hungry for power and the wealth that comes with it, too complicit in the lie. So, like Germany’s leaders in the 1930s, Russia’s in the early 2000s, and Hungary’s in 2012, they fall in line, endorsing and supporting a man — and the ass-kissers who surround him — who tried to overthrow democracy in 2020 and is promising to do it again, this time with far more efficiency.

We can’t count on the courts to save us; six Republicans on the Supreme Court have already committed their lives to this man and his cause.

We can’t assume the Constitution will defend itself. The Founders gave us a framework, but they assumed we’d have the civic courage to use it and that’s still an open question.

Democracy doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes. It crumbles through neglect, cynicism, and complicity. History is replete with the tragic stories of nations that sleepwalked into autocracy because their citizens assumed “someone else” would stop it.

We are not exempt from that pattern. If anything, with the cheerleading of billionaire-owned media (Murdoch-owned Fox “News” actually embedded giddy reporters into the massive assault on Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park), we are seeing it amplified daily.

Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s a product of decades of assaults on government by conservative billionaires and the think tanks and institutions they have structured, their twisting of facts, their use of the new tool of social media and subsidized podcasters to pervert what was once our shared truth.

He’s the culmination of a movement that wants to replace pluralism with hierarchy, accountability with loyalty, tolerance with hate, and cooperation with domination.

He doesn’t want to lead America; he wants to own it, and then trade it for a seat at the table with the world’s worst, most corrupt, and wealthiest dictators who are, at this moment, handing him hundreds of billions in Trump property construction projects and bitcoin bribes.

This generation’s protests are not about the price of eggs or gas, or even the cost of college or healthcare, as terrible as those are. They’re about whether we still believe in the American ideal as expressed in our founding documents and improved in every generation until now.

Do we still believe that government should be of, by, and for We the People and that we are the sovereigns, not some corrupt, orange-faced billionaire above us? That no man is above the law? That democracy, flawed as it is, is worth defending?

Or are we — particularly the white people among us — ready to give all that up, to join the new authoritarian order, and hope the strongman goes easy on us because of the immunity we believe we’ll get from the color of our skin? Like the “Good Germans” did in 1933”

Trump has told us what he intends to do and is already, at this early stage, well into a radical transformation of our republic. He’s not hiding it; indeed, he brags about it daily.

The question we confront today is whether we are seriously paying enough attention to the lessons of history, whether we care enough, and can gather enough people into the streets, whether we can mobilize enough voices in social media and the public square, and whether enough concerned citizens will show up at the ballot box and fight back against voter suppression, to stop him.

Because if we don’t, this won’t be another four-year detour like his last administration. It will be the end of the American experiment, and the beginning of something far darker.

Franklin’s warning still echoes: “It’s a republic, if you can keep it.”

The time to keep it is now, and the “Good Trouble” demonstrations on July 17th will be our next opportunity to demonstrate our will…or to shrug our shoulders in resignation.

Will we rise to the occasion? Will we turn back this terrible tide, like Mexico, Brazil, and Chile have taken steps to do? Like Greece and Spain did? Like South Korea did so recently when they impeached and imprisoned a president who tried to turn that nation into a dictatorship?

The world is watching and so too, perhaps from some distant place, are the people who birthed this nation. As are our children and grandchildren.

Let’s not fail them — and ourselves and our fragile planet — in this hour of crisis.

PS: My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.