Democracy dies in darkness was a promise, not a warning.
That's how a Banana Republic functions.
I don't actually think he'll be able to end democracy, because I think a sufficient number of Americans (including in the military) will stand up to him, but I do believe he'd like to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/politics/trump-officia...
These aren't nobodies, they aren't the only ones close to him saying this, and that's before his public statements. The bulk of Project 2025 is a how-to guide for rooting out administrative disloyalty. I don't think he'll be successful but I don't want to deal with the shit he's going to cause in the attempt.
It would be really really easy to make everyone feel better by nominating literally anyone else, preferably a Moderate Republican. I'll personally go door to door campaigning for them if it means not Trump.
Like probably we’ll still have elections but you know, so do Hungary and Russia.
Trump withheld disaster aid from blue states: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-de...
Trump already punished Amazon for the Washington Post’s reporting: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/washington-post-endo...
And like, if you don’t believe any of that reporting, listen to the man himself? Like he regularly and personally advocates putting his opponents in jail. Either you’re saying he’s blatantly lying about his intentions or your entire defense of him is that he’s an incompetent nincompoop.
The problem is that because it’s probably true that we’re not going to all and up in prison camps on Inauguration Day, you can claim that things aren’t really bad, which is absurd. Like, lots of people have ordinary lives in authoritarian countries. Most of them are not in fact North Korea.
The US becoming far more authoritarian and cronyistic is still really bad.
To me, the US has become basically 1984 the last 10+ years but because of the "left", that has become so radicalized, that now everyone and everything to the right to Stanlin is labelled far-right/nazi/hitler/etc.
People as diverse and mutually antagonistic as George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and C.S. Lewis said that the outer elites -- the exact kind of people that inhabit HN -- were far more thoroughly propagandized than the working class and the poor. It's on full display here.