Trump Is Rewriting The American Story, Albeit Without The Democracy Part

It Is Happening Here

"Landmine Diplomacy" by Nancy Ohanian

Trump asking Texas Republicans to gerrymander their state’s congressional map to oust 5 Democrats so they could be replaced with Republicans next year isn’t the only example of Trump’s and the GOP’s increasingly authoritarian moves. Neither is his blatant revenge campaign against law enforcement officials who tried to hold him accountable for his crimes. And either is his ugly anti-union jihad. Nor his erratic, personalized disastrous— and pure fascist— foreign policy. 

The latest instance was the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the top Bureau of Labor Statistics official after the government published new data showing that U.S.hiring slowed sharply this summer.

Trump said BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer would be “replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” claiming in a social-media post the government’s jobs numbers have been manipulated for political purposes. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in a subsequent post. The White House declined to comment further. I guess that capitalization of "ME" says it all.

As everyone knows, with Trump every accusation is an admission and no one thinks Trump won’t try to manipulation the future numbers to benefit his political case. Justin Lahart, Alex Leary and Matt Grossman noted that “Michael Strain, an economist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote on social media that McEntarfer ‘has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased.’ The firing comes as Trump and his allies have made the case that independent agencies should be under the purview of the White House, part of a broader effort to consolidate power. He has for months criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in an attempt to get lower interest rates… Trump’s move throws the quality of America’s statistical apparatus into question. The immediate worry among economists and former officials following Trump’s move was that it opened the door for the economic data to be distorted for political reasons. Federal Reserve officials rely on U.S. economic statistics to make timely decisions on setting monetary policy, while investors and businesses depend on them to allocate capital efficiently.”

Zachary Basu described the reaction from the economic establishment as a five-alarm fire and noted that “It's just one glaring example from a week that bore many authoritarian hallmarks— purging dissenters, rewriting history, criminalizing opposition and demanding total institutional loyalty.” Basu was being cautious but we’ve seen this before. The early stages of authoritarianism don’t usually come with jackboots and torchlit parades. They come with bureaucratic purges. With loyalists installed in place of experts and with lies dressed up as official data. Gerrymandered maps, politicized prosecutions and the silencing of dissent fit right into the onset of the fascist project. First they discredit the facts. Then they fabricate their own.

In 1930s Europe, this is exactly how it began. Autocrats consolidated control by eliminating the independence of public institutions and replacing career civil servants with ideologues. They didn’t need tanks to dismantle democracy; they needed cronies in the civil service, partisan judges, corrupted police, and fawning media. Hitler and Mussolini both attacked unions, muzzled the press, vilified “traitors” within the system and rewrote the rules to ensure permanent dominance. Trump is following that roadmap step by step— loudly, brazenly, and with the full complicity of a Republican Party that now functions more like a cult than a political party.

Gerrymandering to eliminate opposition seats? That’s how Viktor Orbán destroyed Hungary’s democracy. Politicizing economic statistics? That’s how Erdoğan turned Turkey into a hollowed-out strongman state. Jailing opponents and persecuting prosecutors? That’s Putin’s playbook. And now Trump is putting the entire federal bureaucracy under his direct political control— something no president in American history has tried. It’s an unchecked, unaccountable and absolute power grab thanks to a completely treasonous Republican Party.

The American experiment has always depended on institutional integrity and a balance of power. Trump is burning through both like kindling. The alarm bells are not subtle anymore. The jobs numbers were never rigged— but the future under Trump will be. Soon enough we’ll all be waking up in a country where truth is whatever the man in power says it is and where elections are designed only to confirm what’s already been decided. Resistance? It will become increasingly criminal. The clock is ticking.

Do they still teach It Can’t Happen Here in high school? Sinclair Lewis warned us nearly a century ago that American fascism wouldn’t come draped in foreign symbols or stomping boots but wrapped in the flag, quoting scripture and smiling for the cameras. He imagined a populist strongman a Trump antecedent— Buzz Windrip— who rose to power by promising to restore greatness, punish enemies and speak for the “real” people. Once in office, Windrip dismantled democratic institutions, silenced the press, purged civil servants, jailed dissenters, and installed a regime loyal only to him. Is it too banal and predictable to note that the satire feels less like fiction now than foresight?

We all know Señor TACO is no reader of novels, but he doesn’t need to be. He’s re-enacting Lewis’s dystopia step by step, not out of intellect but instinct: purging experts, rewriting the rules, hollowing out truth, enriching himself and his cronies and demanding loyalty to himself above the Constitution. And like Windrip, he relies on a party too cowardly and too complicit to stop him. Lewis didn’t just warn us that it could happen here. He showed us how it would happen. How does it feel to you to be living in the sequel?