The Coup This Time

A dictatorship is taking shape before our eyes.

As I wrote last week, President Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s first five days in office were a grim augury. It has only gotten worse in the ensuing three.

The most alarming incidents were the Friday Night Massacre of the critical mass of IGs, the suspension of virtually all foreign aid; and a freeze on all domestic federal funding, including monies already duly authorized by Congress. Like the previous week’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, all are deeply worrying, not just because of the specific policies in question (though those are plenty worrying), but because they represent a brazen power grab — that is, illegal attempts to vastly expand the power of the executive branch by fiat. They are also very obviously probes of our democracy’s beleaguered defenses to see if anyone — the GOP, Congressional Democrats, the judiciary (especially the Supreme Court), as well as the press and the general public — will push back in any substantive way.

So far, few have. More on that in a bit.

But we’ve seen this movie before, in country after country that has come under assault by aspiring autocrats. We know how it ends, and it’s a lot like Old Yeller.

We are in a crisis like none before in American history, not even from 2017 to 2021, when unprecedented national…