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And we’re back! Welcome to another brand-spanking new edition of F**king Mondays, the best roundup on the interwebs!
The end of democracy?
Andrew Sullivan has a terrifying piece out on what is happening to America under Trump 2.0. It spells out in unsparing terms the obvious steps Trump is taking to declare himself ruler for life — a classic autocratic coup.
One insight that hit me viscerally was Sullivan’s take on the anemic response to Trump’s decimation of liberal democracy:
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.
But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.
This is something that has struck me over the past 18 months — that so many Americans see what is happening, but just don’t care. It is as if the constant bombardment of misinformation, disinformation, and gaslighting has worn down their psyches to the point where their resistance to Trump has evaporated.
Those of us who do care look on in disbelief as the system is dismantled and rebuilt in Trump’s image. We shout and scream about the stooges he has running government agencies, the prosecution of his political enemies, and the use of tariffs to bully foreign allies and American corporations. But no one outside of our echo chamber can hear us. It is, to them, just liberal screeching. And so what if Trump tramples on a few irritating laws? We need the immigrants out. We need to flex our muscles around the world, and goddammit someone needs to take charge and be a real man.
Sullivan continues:
America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.
In my darker moments I worry that America will not come back from this. I genuinely don’t see how this ends well, at least not in the current political landscape. As Sullivan notes, “Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go”.
If he won’t let go, then only a reenergized public can make him. The signs thus far are not good, but that does not mean it is time to give up. If fighting is what it takes, then fighting is what must be done.
Trump doing favors for a convicted pedophile
Ghislaine Maxwell—the convicted sex trafficker who procured underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein—has been quietly moved to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, a minimum-security facility known as ‘Club Fed’ for its relaxed conditions. This is not a standard transfer — it is a blatant bending of federal prison rules—and it absolutely reeks of a deal made behind closed doors.
By Bureau of Prisons policy, convicted sex offenders are not eligible to serve their terms in minimum-security prisons. Exceptions are almost unheard of — yet Maxwell — one of the most notorious sex offenders in US history was given one. Why?
The intervention came after Maxwell endured a marathon nine-hour interview with Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General and someone who woule never personally handle routine prison assignments. Blanche also happens to be Trump’s hush money and 2020 election fraud defense attorney. Sound suspicious?
The DOJ claims Maxwell faced credible threats at FCI Tallahassee because fellow inmates saw her as a “snitch.” But if inmate threats were the real concern, she would have been placed in a higher-security protective unit. Instead, she was moved to the least restrictive federal facility available—a decision that only makes sense if the goal was to reward her.
The transfer came days after Maxwell’s DOJ sit-down, where she reportedly provided “information” on Epstein’s network and associates. The administration has refused to release details of that testimony, citing “ongoing investigations.” Members of Congress are being stonewalled, and the Bureau of Prisons has offered no serious explanation for waiving its own rules.
This is clearly a payoff. Maxwell is being protected because of who she could implicate — namely Donald Trump.
This is one of the only stories that could genuinely damage Trump, so my message to the media is simple: do not under any circumstances let this story die.
Inventing crime
Part of Trump’s strongman routine is to continually claim the country is under threat from external and internal enemies. He then takes draconian, unconstitutional action designed to amp up his base, and intimidate his political rivals.
Trump is now forcing Washington D.C to submit to his authoritarian fantasies by inventing a crime wave and threatening a federal takeover of law enforcement. As a pretext, Trump used the case of a former DOGE staffer who was injured in an attempted carjacking in D.C last week, claiming the city was in a state of emergency. “It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!!” announced on Truth Social.
But here’s what is actually going on in the nation’s capital (via the Washington Post):
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As you can see, crime in D.C is going down — and fast.
This is Trump’s superpower: the ability to invent reality and act on it without limits.
I’m in London right now, where the violent crime rate is about 673 per 100,000—significantly higher than D.C.’s 495 per 100,000. While London is definitely a rough city, it is certainly not one of the most dangerous cities in the world either. But this is Trump’s world, and we are all stuck living in it.
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