Week to week is a mixed bag for the future of American democracy. Here are recent fact-based stories and editorials shedding light on how American came to embrace tyranny and fascism rather than government by the people for the people “with liberty and justice for all.” These are important stories for the historical record, as well as for those who want to stay informed and fight for a return to democracy, civil rights (without which no one is truly free) and the rule of law.
February 2026:
The Atlantic: The Murder of The Washington Post.
January 2026:
The Atlantic: ‘It’s a Five-Alarm Fire.’ Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey were on the scene in Georgia when the FBI confiscated 2020 election ballots on Jan. 28, 2026. At that moment, a giant pillar of democracy fell. “There could be few more well-trod hallmarks of authoritarianism than control over electoral processes to get the results that the ruler wants,” counterintelligence expert David Laufman told Sarah Fitzpatrick and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez of The Atlantic. A Republican election official in Arizona told them, “It’s a five-alarm fire.”
The Atlantic: Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw. Anne Applebaum wonders how Congress can once again abdicate its oversight obligations as Trump threatens to take Greenland by force. “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him,” Applebaum writes. “… Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.”
Zeteo: Trump Has Exceeded Putin’s Wildest Dreams. John Harwood writes, “Trump has turned Russian dreams of eroding American supremacy into reality. None could script it better than for a mentally ill US president to unilaterally damage our economy, splinter our alliances, destroy our rule of law, and shred our moral standing while those who could stop him meekly step aside.”
ProPublica: We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing. “In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits ‘unless deadly force is authorized.’ About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. … We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled. This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.”
The Atlantic: ‘Aren’t We Supposed to Be the Good Guys Here? Senator Mark Kelly says that taking Greenland “would probably be the biggest mistake any president has made in the history of this country.”
The Atlantic: How the Supreme Court Broke Congress. John Roberts Court, Duncan Hosie argues, is radically refashioning the federal balance of powers: “When the Court claims exclusive authority over constitutional meaning while systematically weakening the federal institution most responsive to the people, it does not preserve the constitutional order. It ends it.”
The New Yorker: Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump. John Cassidy writes that Powell, the 72-year-old Fed chair, “put to shame the heads of law firms, universities, and public companies who have caved to the White House. He also demonstrated that, at least in the economic arena, there are still some institutional constraints that Trump cannot sweep aside, or not easily. Tragically, these guardrails are being trampled underfoot in other areas, including the streets of some American cities, where Trump’s immigration police are running amok. Compared with that outrage, a U.S. Attorney issuing subpoenas to the Fed may seem like a matter of minor import, but it’s part of the same larger phenomenon: Presidential abuse of power. And, in his own way, Jay Powell is standing up to it.”
December 2025:
ProPublica: Our Reporters Reached Out for Comment. They Were Accused of Stalking and Intimidation. This is a look at the difficulty of practicing professional journalism as democracy collapses, and as highly partisan government officials no longer feel accountable to “We the people” or reporters seeking truth.
October 2025:
ProPublica: More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”
The Atlantic: The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark. “Since 1776, Americans have promoted democracy just by existing,” writes Anne Applebaum. “Human rights and the rule of law are in our founding documents. The dream of separation from a colonial empire is built into them too. Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.” The corrupt, autocratic leadership Americans have now empowered will likely do immeasurable damage to our country and the world.
Vox: Can American Democracy Recover From Trump? Here’s What New Data Says. Democracies have come back from autocratic backsliding, but it’s not easy. “The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness,” writes Zack Beauchamp.
September 2025:
PBS: Trump’s moves against media outlets mirror authoritarian approaches to silencing dissent. One of Trump’s favorite hobbies is suing media outlets like the New York Times. Now his FCC Chairman has coerced Disney into cancelling comedian Jimmy Kimmel. Dictators do not allow questions, and especially hate ridicule. Here’s a look at how Hungary’s media landscape changed under Orban and how Trump seems to be using a similar playbook.
Plane to purgatory: How Trump’s deportation program shuttles immigrants into lawless limbo. The Guardian’s investigation of flight data reveals inhumane treatment of 44,000 immigrants sent on 1,700 national and international flights in 100 days. Here’s how Trump is shuttling immigrants around and outside the United States in illegal and unprecedented ways.
August 2025:
Kleptocracy Tracker Timeline. Journalist and ANF Agora Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins Anne Applebaum had created an ongoing public log of political self dealing by the Trump and members of his administration. The Institute is an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy. The timeline originated with Applebaum’s story for The Atlantic: Kleptocracy, Inc. and “builds on her reporting … to document a shift in American governance. Financial conflicts of interest are no longer hidden. They are accepted, promoted, and sometimes celebrated.” The timeline includes “foreign-sponsored events at Trump-owned properties, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and business ventures involving the president’s family. Together, these entries point to a pattern: the use of public office to advance private gain.”
Ms.: Democracies Die in the Shadows: How the Conservative Supreme Court Is Abusing Its Emergency Docket to Give Trump a Law-Free Zone. Stephen Rohde — who practiced civil rights and constitutional law for more than 45 years and hosts Speaking Freely: a First Amendment Podcast — explains how the Roberts Court is helping Trump implement executive orders that have been found unconstitutional by numerous federal judges.
ProPublica: DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family. This ProPublica investigation is important on many fronts; it explains how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency unlawfully and through brute force entered government buildings and computer systems, fired tens of thousands of federal workers and accessed and shared private information — some of it on social media. This spring, DOGE illegally entered and shuttered the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world. Here’s how DOGE subjected one contractor’s family to retribution by the Taliban.
Wired: Senate Probe Uncovers Allegations of Widespread Abuse in ICE Custody. Dell Cameron writes: “A United States Senate investigation has identified more than 500 credible reports of human rights abuses in US immigration detention since January, including alarming allegations of mistreatment of pregnant women and children.”
The Atlantic: Trump Is a Degrowther. As best we can tell, Americans ultimately voted for Trump because he convinced them he could fix their economic woes — most of which he literally caused during his disastrous first term and his chaotic handling of the COVID crisis that bruised the global economy. Trump conned Americans into thinking they would be better off economically ONLY if they voted for him. Now, we’ve hit the FAFO stage, where Trump is harnessing the presidency to enrich himself while simultaneously tanking the world’s greatest economy. “Americans, now and in the future, will be paying more and buying less,” writes Annie Lowrey. “Trump’s second-term economic ideology is not only one of protectionism, mercantilism, atavism, and cronyism. It is also one of degrowth. … At its heart, degrowth argues that people should not only tolerate, but desire a smaller economy … and everyone stands to be worse off for it.”
July 2025:
The Atlantic: The Supreme Court’s Liberals Are Trying to Tell Americans Something. Aziz Huq explains a close reading of dissents by Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson shows the justices believe their conservative colleagues are “no longer doing law as that term has come to be understood.”
May 2025:
The Atlantic: The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist. David Frum details how Trump is enriching himself via the presidency at a level never seen before in America. In case you need reminding: dictators are ALWAYS corrupt.
The Atlantic: The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History. House Republicans voted to advance a bill that would offer lavish tax cuts for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor. Jonathan Chait writes, “The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives, but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.” He concludes “what [Republicans] believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.”
Scientific American: Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading Toward a Dictatorship. “The United States is in a bad place and, scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse,” writes Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American.
The Atlantic: The End of the Rule of Law in America. We have indeed crossed the rubicon. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, writes that Trump has forever destroyed America’s status as a steadfast beacon of freedom to the world. American democracy is now in the hands of a man who not only thinks his is above the law, but believes he IS the law — in short, the precise notion our founders fought against nearly 250 years ago so American could become an independent nation based on the rule of law, rather than the whims of a tyrant. Luttig writes, “Thus far, Trump’s presidency has been a reign of lawless aggression by a tyrannical wannabe king, a rampage of presidential lawlessness in which Trump has proudly wielded the powers of the office and the federal government to persecute his enemies, while at the same time pardoning, glorifying, and favoring his political allies and friends—among them those who attacked the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection that Trump fomented on January 6, 2021. The president’s utter contempt for the Constitution and laws of the United States has been on spectacular display since Inauguration Day.” In this moment, Trump’s administration has crossed that final rubicon into lawlessness by arresting judges: Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in her Milwaukee courthouse on federal criminal charges for “obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” because she “invited an undocumented immigrant appearing before her on misdemeanor charges to exit her courtroom by way of the jury door rather than the front door of the courtroom.” “The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins,” Luttig writes. “The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.” As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day on July 4, Luttig notes, “As Trump turns the federal government of the United States against Americans and America itself, the bill of particulars against him is already longer than the Declaration of Independence’s bill of particulars against King George III and the British empire.”
Wired: Vought Won’t Shield Americans From Data Brokers. Welcome to the Surveillance State. Russell Vought, a self proclaimed Christian nationalist and an architect of Project 2025, is now acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in addition to being director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought has canceled plans to more tightly regulate the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal data. According to Wired, “Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information—often without individuals’ knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations and religious beliefs. This information is frequently resold for purposes ranging from marketing to law enforcement surveillance.” Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, told Wired, “Russell Vought is undoing years of painstaking, bipartisan work in order to prop up data brokers’ predatory, and profitable, surveillance of Americans.”
Committee to Protect Journalists: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy. “Journalists are always the first to be attacked when democracy declines, and the actions of the current U.S. administration should be ringing alarm bells for every single journalist, every single newsroom and every single person in the United States,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “This is not a time to be complacent, or to shrug off these behaviors. If we let the abnormal become normal, many more freedoms will be at risk –- no matter what your politics”. In its detailed report about Trump’s war on journalism, CPJ is calling on the public, the media, civil society, and all branches, levels and institutions of government to safeguard press freedom in order to help secure the future of American democracy. (Read the full list of CPJ’s recommendations here).
April 2025:
The Atlantic: A Ticking Clock on American Freedom. “Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should,” writes Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. “Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.” LaFrance also warns social media, once a beacon of hope and freedom, is harming us. “The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.”
Why America’s Oligarchs May Regret Their Obedience. Writing for The Atlantic, Anastasia Edel explains how Russia’s oligarchs learned very quickly that enabling a dictator meant they could keep their wealth (and maybe even their lives) only if they blindly supported everything Putin did. America’s tech bros and other billionaires who backed Trump will learn the same lesson.
The Guardian: Republican senator claims video floating killing of journalists was a ‘joke.’ Oklahoma’s U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin downplays comments he made suggesting lawmakers could shoot journalists over disputes. Former MMA fighter Mullin made the “joke” at a time of escalating verbal attacks by far-right politicians and increasing threats of violence against journalists. Trump has called journalists “Enemy of the People” and has strong armed media moguls, including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who agreed to stop fact-checking Facebook posts in an effort to slow the spread of hate speech and disinformation.
March 2025:
U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog. “If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year’s] data,” said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. The Varieties of Democracy project includes 31 million data points for 202 countries, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 attributes of democracy. “If it continues like this, [American] democracy will not last another six months.”
Inside DOGE’s Plan to Invade the Treasury—and Throttle USAID. Wired is on fire right now. The tech journalism site/magazine is reporting on DOGE’s unparalleled (and likely illegal) access to every nook and cranny of our federal government — including its complex accounting and payment systems. (Wired revealed in January that Elon Musk’s minions had taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology.) Wired reported former X engineer Marko Elez — who is said to now be among DOGE operatives infiltrating the Social Security Administration, even after the Wall Street Journal reported on his racist social media posts — “had read/write access to two BFS systems: the Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS)….[and] also had “read” access to Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP), an accounting system where federal funds are stored in pre-authorized accounts.” Trump has since signed an executive order stating that all federal payments should be consolidated within the Treasury, presumably making it easier to dismantle already-approved funds to federal agencies his administration plans to throttle or dismantle.
The Guardian: Sexual assault allegations seem to be a badge of honor in Trump’s America. Was #MeToo an epic failure? Carter Sherman, a reproductive health and justice reporter at Guardian US, explores why misogyny is such a part of MAGA culture, and how Trump and a whole generation of Trump bros are in part a backlash of the #metoo movement to make men accountable for sexual assault in America. The piece explains the fact that more American women are college educated, leaving men feeling farther behind and determined to make “your body, my choice” a real thing. Overall, this is a depressing but important read.
Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get? In her guest essay for the New York Times, the former Secretary of State doesn’t even mention the hypocrisy of Trump’s team refusing to take responsibility for sharing war plans over an unsecured app after she endured a decade of “but her emails.” Instead, she points out this Trump sequel is even dumber and more dangerous. “This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security,” she writes. “Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.” In other words, stupidity at the highest levels is making America weak, not great.
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot says a ‘Russian asset’ delivered the State of the Union. Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini writes, “According to the AI chatbot called Grok, which was developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, there is a “75-85% likelihood” that the person who delivered the State of the Union address on Tuesday night is a “Putin-compromised” Russian asset. … Grok said, ‘Weighing this, the financial ties (decades-long, opaque, and substantial), intelligence suggesting Russian intent, and Trump’s unwavering refusal to criticize Putin despite attacking allies tilt the scale.'”
Where Jeff Bezos Went Wrong. The actual title is: “Where Jeff Bezos Went Wrong with the Washington Post,” but I think this is better. Martin Baron, former executive editor of The Post, writes in the Atlantic that Bezos was a good actor and responsible — even courageous — media owner during Trump’s first administration. Now, he’s a shameless shill, mostly because Bezos and all the broligarchs make most of their money from government contracts that Trump threatened to end. “Federal contracts are key to the success of Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing division that has been delivering more than half of the company’s profits,” writes Baron, whose book on the Post’s coverage of Trump’s first presidency is now cringeworthy for it’s praise of Bezos — now one of Trump’s biggest enablers.
February 2025:
Trump’s Putinization of America. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser writes, “To hear Trump tell it, Ukraine might as well be bombing its own cities and killing its own citizens. He claimed that the United States had spent three hundred and fifty billion dollars helping Ukraine, and that Zelensky’s popularity had plummeted to just four per cent in recent polls—both statements so far divorced from reality that Putin himself might not have been brazen enough to make them.” Ultimately, Glasser says, “it’s no longer just Putin’s Russia that threatens the foundations of Western liberal democracy but Trump’s Washington.”
“The PayPal Mafia”: Meet the South African Oligarchs Surrounding Trump, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel. Democracy Now! talks to Chris McGreal, a former South Africa correspondent for The Guardian, about Musk’s pro-apartheid and neo-Nazi family history, which appears to form the basis of his far-right, white supremacy ideology (which has been embraced by the mainstream GOP). Trump’s targeting of South Africa is tied to Musk and a surprising number of wealthy U.S. oligarchs who grew up in South Africa — including German-born Peter Thiel (J.D. Vance’s mentor), who came of age in a South African colony where Hitler was celebrated; Cape Town native David Sacks, who is Trump’s AI and crypto czar, and Roelof Botha, the grandson of Pik Botha, the last foreign minister of apartheid South Africa.
The Outgoing Ambassador to Hungary Is Alarmed. U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman is a former assistant secretary of homeland security and a human rights lawyer who has had a contentious relationship with the Orban administration. As he prepares to leave his post, he sat down with the New York Times from Budapest to talk about his experiences, Orban’s relationships and policies and why what is happening in Hungary matters. “One of the things that is most alarming to me is just how easy it is to actually control people,” Pressman says. “It doesn’t take secret police. It doesn’t take guns. It doesn’t take gulags. The reality is that if you have the ability to overwhelm the media ecosystem with lies, you make the cost of engaging in public debate so high that it becomes an existential one.” Why should Americans care? “Hungary is a living example of how vulnerable democratic institutions actually are and how easy it is for ill-intentioned leaders to exercise control over citizens,” Pressman says. “And that’s on steroids when they control all of the media ecosystem. And how quickly a country and a people can be chilled into silence. When the political debate becomes so personal, so repugnant, so loud, the choice to engage in it, who wants to do that? And the moment you stop engaging, the moment you stop leaning in and you stop speaking up, the capture of the state institutions advances very quickly. Hungary is an embodiment of that phenomenon.”
January 2025:
The Guardian: Trump firing government watchdogs is ‘clear violation of law.’ U.S. Senators Adam Schiff and Lindsay Graham agree on one thing: Donald Trump broke the law when he recently fired more than a dozen independent federal government watchdogs, whose jobs are meant to stop government waste, fraud and abuse.
The Atlantic: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days. Here’s how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes — in one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes.
CNN: White Christian nationalists are poised to remake America in their image during Trump’s second term, author says. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” says Christian nationalism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy. “This is not a pluralist vision for all of American coming together or a vision for compromise,” says Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University in Michigan and a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, adding this will impact everything from religious freedom and First Amendment rights to public education and the structure of individual families. White Christian nationalists think families should only include a male patriarch and a “submissive” wife whose primary role is a mother and a homemaker. “Christian nationalism thrives on this us-versus-them mentality. This militancy is linked to always needing an enemy. And in Christian nationalism today, the enemies are internal. Historically the enemies of Christian America were secular humanists, feminists and then more recently Democrats and the woke. This language of an enemy within that caught some attention in the last week of the campaign, when Trump said those words that resonate deeply with Christian nationalists. That fuels the sense that we need warriors to fight to save your family and Christianity. And to save America, you’re going have to fight fellow Americans who are threatening those values.”
November 2024:
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky explains it wasn’t the economy, inflation or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post, … not CBS, NBC, and ABC.”
October 2024:
Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies. With early voting underway in many states, Donald Trump is escalating attacks on fellow Americans he calls “the enemy from within.” NPR has found that since 2022, Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents. In one recent interview, Trump said that if “radical left lunatics” disrupt the election, “it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” The former president has repeatedly indicated that he would use federal law enforcement as part of a campaign to exact “retribution.”
NPR: Trump’s restless week on the trail ends with a rally riff about Arnold Palmer’s manhood. Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “shit vice president” and implied that golfer Arnold Palmer was well-endowed during an increasingly rambling, bizarre campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump Is Using Tactics of a ‘Fascist Government.’ In a Guardian podcast, Nancy Pelosi said she agreed with Trump’s top general Mark Milley, who reportedly called Trump “fascist to the core.” Newsweek spoke to Jason Stanley, Yale University philosophy professor and author of the book “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” Stanley said, “I am relieved that, at last, and years and years past the time when it was already evident to many scholars (including myself), that our political leaders are finally correctly describing Trumpism as fascism.”
The Danger Is Greater Than in 2020. Be Prepared. In our post-January 6 world, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum is “absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins.” Which is why she offers this: A citizen’s guide to defending the 2024 election.
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is. On the eve of America’s presidential election, the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel concludes what’s happening in America is “something darker than a misinformation crisis.” With early voting already underway in many states, Warzel tries to get his mind around the fact that Trump and his minions are gleefully lying about FEMA’s swift response to aid hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Chaos and hate (of government, of liberals, of immigrants, of women, of anything not MAGA) seems to be Trump’s ENTIRE message, and if polls are correct, HALF of America’s voters are ALL IN with Trump’s cult of cruelty. “To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants,” writes Warzel, who concludes that America’s embrace of Trumpism “is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality.” See also: RECOGNIZING FASCISM (IT’S ON THE BALLOT)
September 2024:
Trump vows to seek criminal charges against Google if re-elected president. The Guardian reports Trump has threatened to weaponize the justice department and charge Google with a crime if he is elected president, because he said the company unfairly displays negative news articles about him and positive stories about Vice President Kamala Harris. In a Truth Social post this month, Trump also vowed to pursue criminal charges against any lawyers, donors or political operatives he believes engaged in “election fraud” against him. And, the Guardian reported that at a recent news conference, Trump said former House speaker Nancy Pelosi should face criminal prosecution for not preventing the January 6 Capitol attack (which was caused by Trump supporters rioting to stop the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election).
Elon Musk is debasing American society. Thomas Chatterton Williams of The Atlantic explains X (formerly Twitter) owner Musk is not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts. Amplifying far-left hatred, conspiracy theories and propaganda is a direct hit on democracy, which relies on an informed electorate that can recognize facts.
Is Jill Stein backed by the Kremlin? A recent interview of the Green Party’s presidential candidate, in which she refused to call Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal for invading Ukraine, has renewed questions about the reasons and financial backing behind her candidacy. In 2018, NBC News showed a photo of Stein at a 2015 Kremlin dinner with Putin and Michael Flynn, and said her name was part of a huge social media blitz by Russian operatives to to siphon support away from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and help Trump win the 2016 election.
Ex-Trump advisers help to grow pro-Russia website that spreads misinformation. The Guardian reports the far-right website, Intelligencer, “began as a way for TNT Radio to have a written publication.” Nearly half of Intelligencer’s board members are either former Trump aides, surrogates or fake electors for Trump’s previous two campaigns. The most well-known is George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Kremlin-linked professor who told him Russia had dirt on Hilary Clinton.
If Project 2025 is enacted, politicians censoring library books will go nationwide. PEN America’s James Tager says laws criminalizing librarians could become the norm during a new Trump administration if the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is implemented. Project 2025 seeks to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and hamper the freedom to read, learn and teach in America.
Millions Have Amnesia About the Worst of Trump’s Presidency. David Corn of Mother Jones talks to memory experts who explain how Trump is benefitting from the limits of our memory.
Donald Trump threatens to imprison Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and others. Experts are worried. USA Today reports Donald Trump posted recently on Truth Social that there was “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery” in the 2020 presidential election and warned “those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted.”
Judge Aileen Cannon Failed to Disclose a Right-Wing Junket. Propublica shows the controversial judge who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at paid seminars that could pose conflicts or influence her decisions. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has asked the court to remand Cannon’s decision and replace her. Special counsel Jack Smith has filed his argument urging the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Cannon’s surprise dismissal of the classified documents case. (Here’s a look at the entire timeline of the case by ABC News.)
August 2024:
The Real Numbers: Tracking Crowd Sizes at Presidential Rallies. Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation uses its Crowd Counting Consortium data on U.S. protest activity since 2017 to estimate and compare the average crowd sizes at political rallies for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and — since late July 2024 — Kamala Harris. Overall, they find Harris has been drawing larger crowds than Trump since her entry into the race.
July 2024:
These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers. Rolling Stone identifies nearly 70 pro-Trump conspiracists who are election officials in key battleground counties and “are poised to make a giant mess on Election Day.”
March 2024:
United States Democracy Center: More than 200 State Legislators in the ‘Fake Electors’ States Are Election Deniers. In the seven states at the center of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — 202 election deniers are currently serving as state legislators. The research was conducted with support from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University.
December 2023:
Washington Post: American democracy is cracking. These ideas could help repair it. Dan Balz concedes the problems with American democracy can feel overwhelming and intractable. But some citizens (including young idealists new to politics) are exploring solutions and having some success. Balz suggests solutions that could potentially become reality if ordinary citizens would engage.
November 2023:
Washington Post: Trump can appear on 2024 primary ballot in Minnesota, state Supreme Court rules. Minnesota’s state Supreme Court said Donald Trump can appear on the 2024 primary ballot, but left open the possibility that Trump could be struck from the general election ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Minnesota case is one of several legal challenges that Trump cannot serve again because of the so-called Disqualification Amendment — Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment — that bars insurrectionists from holding office.
October 2023:
Washington Post: Police officers recall Jan. 6 at Colorado hearing to kick Trump off ballot. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is suing to remove Donald Trump from Colorado’s ballot for his part in the January 6 insurrection. The U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Section 3 — also referred to the Disqualification Amendment — bars anyone from holding office who, having previously sworn an oath to the Constitution, engages in an insurrection. A Minnesota judge is scheduled to hear a similar lawsuit in early November.
August 2023:
The Guardian: Fury at Michigan officials charged in 2020 false electors scheme: ‘This isn’t who we are.’ Sixteen people in Michigan who signed paperwork falsely claiming they were electors and that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election have been criminally charged, and are now facing backlash as public officials in their local communities. Each of the fake electors was charged with eight felony counts, including multiple counts of forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit uttering and publishing, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, and election law forgery. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — a nonprofit that investigates and takes legal action against corrupt government officials — says the charges against Michigan’s fake electors provide a blueprint for accountability for electors in six other states who signed similar fraudulent documents intended to undermine democracy itself.
The Guardian: Kansas paper raid shines light on rising anti-media rhetoric in US. Trump’s fascist catchphrase deriding journalists as “enemies of the people,” has real-world consequences in Kansas, where police raided journalists’ offices and homes after local restaurant owner Kari Newell became upset that the Marion County Record was looking into her drunk-driving conviction and falsely accused the paper of identity theft. “There has certainly been an increase in hostility towards the press, driven by the rhetoric from presidential candidates and public officials, which then infect lower levels of government, including police departments, and that leads to instances like we saw in Kansas,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The story gets even more complex: Marion’s new Police Chief Gideon Cody, who led the raid of the newspaper along with his entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies, was also being investigated by the newspaper for his conduct at the Kansas City Police Department. And theWichita Eagle reported Kansas magistrate judge Laura Viar, who appears to have violated state shield laws by authorizing the police raid of the Marion County Record, was arrested at least twice for DUI in two different Kansas counties in 2012. There’s more! The owner/publisher’s 98-year-old mother — longtime journalist Joan Meyer — DIED shortly after the raid on her home, which she called “Hitler tactics.” The story is still unfolding as journalists around the globe take an interest in the small-town newspaper as an “unlikely symbol of the clash between free speech and creeping authoritarianism,” the Kansas Reflector noted.
June 2023:
The Atlantic: America Is Headed Toward Collapse. History suggests how to stave it off. Author Peter Turchin says, “The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.”
May 2023:
The Atlantic: An Ominous Warning to the E. Jean Carroll Jury. “Trump’s real, enduring legacy is his successful introduction of violence, the threat of violence, and targeted harassment into the dynamics of our political system, as if they were all just a natural extension of democratic disagreement,” writes Juliette Kayyem, who argues the Manhattan judge’s advice to jurors following the E. Jean Carroll trial reflects how the former president destroyed democratic norms.
Friends of the Court. ProPublica’s award-winning investigation delves into the finances of the judges on America’s highest court. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the Supreme Court.
January 2023:
New Yorker: When Americans lost faith in the news. “It was already clear, less than a month into the Trump Administration, that destroying the credibility of the mainstream press was a White House priority, and that this would include an unabashed, and almost gleeful, policy of lying and denying,” writes Louis Menand. Trump called the press the Enemy of the People, and his war on the media seems to have won. “Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media,” writes Menand. “Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent. If [the Washington Post’s slogan] “Democracy Dies in Darkness” seemed a little alarmist in 2017, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, made it seem prescient. Democracy really was at stake.” Menand explores press history and why it often fails to connect with the public.
November 2022:
New York Times: A MAGA America Would Be Ugly. Economist Paul Krugman writes, “If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention. …It’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. … If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.”
Washington Post: Twitter layoffs gutted election information teams days before midterms. Twitter had become one of America’s most influential platforms for spreading accurate voting information. With half of the company gone, political campaigns are gripped with anxiety over how to address election misinformation and potential threats. “The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the election, one former employee told The Washington Post.”
The Guardian: The US is on a knife-edge. The enemy for Trump’s Republicans is democracy itself. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland writes, “Most candidates from the GOP in these midterm elections refuse democracy’s most basic tenet: accepting the voters’ verdict.”
October 2022:
The Atlantic: A Political Party Unhinged From Truth. Robert Draper shares an excerpt from his book, “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind.”
The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward shares the full audio recordings of all 20 interviews he conducted with the then president. “Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward concludes. “When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the (COVID-19) virus to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job. He was largely disconnected from the needs and leadership expectations of the public, and his absolute self-focus became the presidency. … Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key Cabinet and White House posts. The record now shows that Trump has led — and continues to lead — a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy. Trump reminds how easy it is to break things you do not understand — democracy and the presidency.”
Prime minister Liz Truss’s downfall shows that British democracy is still working. American dysfunction is far worse. The Atlantic’s Brian Klaas writes, “Truss, for all her incompetence, was far from the malicious authoritarianism of Trump. She tried to usher in tax cuts for the very wealthy and her plans led to mortgage payments rising for millions, but she didn’t encourage a violent mob to descend on 10 Downing Street, praise racists and dictators, or get people killed with unhinged medical advice.” Why does democracy function better in the U.K.? Klaas cites more accountability. “In Britain, TV and radio are far more regulated and far more centrist. As a result, audiences hear more discussions of how to solve problems than arguments over whether a problem is real or not.” Also, because of unrepresentative gerrymandered voting districts in the United States, “88 percent of the members of the House have nothing to fear from voters, which is not only unhealthy for democracy but also ensures that those elected officials rarely turn on their own. Republicans fear losing a primary if they whisper the mildest criticism of Donald Trump. Tories in Britain feared losing their seats if they whispered praise of Liz Truss.”
On the Ballot This Year: The Ballot Itself. Republicans are trying to limit the use of citizen-initiated legislation in some states after years of progressive victories (from the New York Times).
Peter Thiel’s midterm bet: The billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracy. The Guardian examines the nearly $30 million that Thiel, a German-born tech entrepreneur, is investing into midterm races backing Blake Masters in Arizona to J.D. Vance in Ohio — as he simultaneously seeks a Maltese passport (which would be his fourth). The column notes Thiel “opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom,” and mentions even extremist Steve Bannon considers Thiel’s “idea of disrupting government is out there.” Chisun Lee, a campaign finance expert who directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government program, said, “Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now we’re seeing a troubling new trend … that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.”
September 2022:
‘Welcome to fascism’: Top Arizona Republican blasts Trump-backed candidates who might try to overturn future elections. Rusty Bowers, the outgoing Republican speaker of the Arizona House, says Trump-backed GOP candidates might send the country “back into the dark ages” if they win key midterm races and help enact laws to make it easier to overturn elections — which he said was tantamount to “fascism.” Bowers is no liberal; he was chief among the few Republican voices of sanity that prevented Trump loyalists from orchestrating a coup to overturn Biden’s election victory in Arizona.
60 Percent Of Americans Will Have An Election Denier On The Ballot This Fall. FiveThirtyEight has done the math, and it’s appalling. Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen will appear on ballots in nearly every state this fall. FiveThirtyEight draws on news reports, debate footage, campaign materials and social media and reached out to every single Republican nominee for the House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general to determine their position on the 2020 election. Some of these candidates would use their position to continue the coup against democracy. Included is polling information on how likely the candidates are to win — especially if only MAGA shows up at the polls.
Stephen Miller Spent the Trump Years Testing the Bounds of Executive Authority. Now He’s Testing the Legal System to Target Biden’s Agenda. Miller, along with Mark Meadows and Gene Hamilton (a former official from Trump’s Homeland Security and Justice departments who oversaw the attempted phaseout of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) created America First Legal to throw legal roadblocks at progressive victories. Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked Miller for years in its Extremist Files. Miller is known as the architect of the Trump Administration’s inhumane Family Separations Policy, where breastfeeding infants were literally pulled from their mothers’ arms. According to the Washington Post: The U.S. government separated more than 3,000 children from their parents along the Mexican border in May and June 2018, the peak of President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute adults for the misdemeanor offense of crossing the border illegally. DHS officials say more than 5,500 children were separated in all.
The New Yorker: Ken Burns Turns His Lens on the American Response to the Holocaust. Ken Burns’ new documentary on PBS examines what American politicians, journalists and civilians did and did not know about the Holocaust, and how they responded to it while it was happening and when it was over. “This new documentary lays bare how the United States government was mired by domestic politics during the war and how the American public was largely indifferent to the Holocaust at the time,” James McAuley writes. “It sets that indifference against a homegrown tradition of racism, tracing the xenophobia of the 1920s right up to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, in 2017, and the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.”
Dems push DOJ to probe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Politico writes “A core legal concern is whether migrants have given their consent to travel by plane to Massachusetts or bus to Illinois, New York or Washington, where migrants have also been transported.”
Gun culture is terrorizing our nation, even when there are no guns. Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak writes, “Besides the big ones that we know by one name — Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine, Uvalde — at least 311,000 kids have experienced gun violence in their schools since Columbine in 1999, according to The Washington Post’s database on school shootings. … But the actual gunfire and those 311,000 are just a small part of the way we have agreed to bathe our children in gun problems.”
Russia spent millions on secret global political campaign, U.S. intelligence finds. The Washington Post reports a new U.S. intelligence review found Russia secretly funneled at least $300 million to foreign political parties and candidates in more than two dozen countries since 2014 to weaken democratic systems and promote global political forces seen as aligned with Kremlin interests.
The Guardian reports Google faces a €25 billion lawsuit in the UK and the EU over “anticompetitive” practices in digital advertising. Google is accused of abusing its power coordinating the sale of online advertising space between publishers and advertisers. “Publishers, including local and national news media who play a vital role in our society, have long been harmed by Google’s anticompetitive conduct,” said Damien Geradin, of the Belgian law firm Geradin Partners, which is involved in the EU case. One of the many problems quality newspaper journalism in particular has faced in recent decades is the decline of ad revenue to tech giants such as Facebook and Google, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
The Washington Post confirms election denier Doug Logan of Cyber Ninjas repeatedly visited a Georgia county office at the center of a criminal probe in January 2021. Logan, an election denier, was hired by Republican Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to conduct the controversial “ballot review” of the 2020 election results in Arizona; he and Jeffrey Lenberg are also being investigated in Michigan for possible criminal misconduct accessing elections equipment in three counties.
A New Mexico judge has ordered a County Commissioner be removed from office, effective immediately, for being an insurrectionist. Couy Griffin participated in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which the judge found disqualifies him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The lawsuit was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. Griffin is barred for life from holding any federal or state office; he was convicted in March of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful entry on Jan. 6, 2021, and was sentenced on June 17 to two weeks’ time served in jail, along with a $3,000 fine and community service.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Litigation Tracker: Pending Criminal and Civil Cases Against Donald Trump. The former president faces dozens of lawsuits and investigations, including civil suits stemming from his pre-presidential business dealings, defamation claims from women he allegedly assaulted and criminal probes and civil actions that scrutinize his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Just Security, based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, periodically updates this list. The Guardian chronicled 19 legal cases against Trump here.
