Donald Trump’s shock and awe campaign against American democracy is now in its eighth month. So much is happening, and so quickly, that even seasoned political experts are struggling to keep up.
Following his decision to federalize Washington, D.C.’s police force and to invoke Section 740 of the Home Rule Act to deploy the National Guard, ostensibly to fight crime, on Aug. 25 Trump signed an unprecedented executive order, which creates a “quick reaction force” within the National Guard that can be quickly deployed anywhere in the country in response to what the administration terms “civil disturbances.” Six hundred troops will be ready to deploy within an hour, half at a base in Alabama and the other half in Arizona. The order also commands the Army and Air National Guard in each state to develop forces that can be deployed across the nation to assist in “quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order.”
Christopher Purdy, an Army National Guard veteran and CEO of the pro-democracy Chamberlain Network, told NPR that the order “is quite expansive and quite dangerous” because it “retools both the National Guard and some federal agencies into a new type of law enforcement arm.”
At the same time, Trump has amplified his threats to essentially invade and occupy Democratic-led cities and other parts of the country. According to reports, Chicago is next on his list.
Pritzker was blunt in his assessment: “What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American…If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
At a press conference on Aug. 25, Ill. Gov. JB Pritzker gave a fiery speech warning Trump to stay out of Chicago and other blue cities and states. Pritzker called the president’s actions “the actual crisis,” differentiating it from the one Trump has “manufactured” around crime rates, which are at all-time lows. “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist,” he said, “that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.” Describing the administration’s deployment as “exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against,” Pritzker was blunt in his assessment: “What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American…If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
Trump’s threats to Chicago followed a surreal Aug. 26 Cabinet Meeting, which lasted over three hours at the White House. One after the other, Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials praised Trump’s greatness, while members of the press asked questions. The whole enterprise was like Pyongyang on the Potomac, televised live for all the world to see. That same day, a giant banner emblazoned with Trump’s face was unfurled on the front of the Department of Labor — next to the American flag and a banner of Theodore Roosevelt. In Trump’s mind and those of his followers, he is the Dear and Great Leader.
He has also escalated his attacks on the free press.
In a largely overlooked moment on Aug. 26, Trump threatened MSNBC, accusing it of being worse than the infamous transnational gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. The president, unfiltered, attacked the network and its employees as “Real scum, real scum — real dishonest people.”
In a series of Truth Social posts two days before, Trump went after ABC and NBC, threatening to take away their broadcast licenses, alleging the networks are “unfair” to Republicans and conservatives. He also said that the two networks should be forced to pay lots of money for access to the public airwaves. In a Truth Social post, he revealed the endgame: “THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC…I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!!”
The president, who swore on Jan. 20 to protect and defend the Constitution, including its First Amendment, has revealed himself as its chief enemy. He is clearly signaling his intention to use the full power of the state to silence the news media and free speech because they are part of a “criminal conspiracy” against him and the MAGA movement.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is attempting to gain access to confidential voter information in at least 21 states to combat “fraud.” Elections are administered by states; this move represents a sweeping — and likely illegal — expansion of federal power. In reality, there is very little voter fraud in the United States. The goal here is to nullify the votes of Democrats, especially in the so-called battleground states. This voting data could also potentially be used to punish those Americans who oppose Trump and the MAGA movement.
This much is clear: The president’s cruel, fascist theater isn’t a reaction or side effect. It’s the point.
On Aug. 28, two firefighters from Mexico were taken into Border Patrol custody on suspicion of being in the country “illegally” while they were in the middle of fighting an actual wildfire in Washington State’s Olympic National Forest.
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Over my nine years chronicling the Age of Trump and the erosion of American democracy, I’ve received countless emails from concerned citizens. They ask, “How did it come to this?” and “What can someone like me do?” They wonder, “Where are the Democrats? Why is the media so timid?”
My first response is usually some version of this: “Believe it or not, these are still the good times compared to what may come next.” I try to reassure those who feel disoriented that they’re not the ones who’ve lost touch with reality. It is the tens of millions of fellow citizens swept up in the Trump-MAGA authoritarian movement and its collective fever dream that fit that description.
But the advice I most provide — and rely on — is from the beloved Fred Rogers, who famously said to “look for the helpers” when you’re in trouble. In this context, the helpers I’m thinking of are those people, here in the U.S. and around the world, who have faced authoritarianism, endured it and ultimately helped defeat it.
In 2017, as the Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was tightening his grip on the country, the Guardian published an article titled “How to survive tyranny: 10 pieces of advice from Turkey.” Eight years later, we — the American people — need to closely follow this advice:
Spread facts — but stay safe
Assume everyone is lying to you — even your allies
Never assume democracy is the default mode — it needs constant protection
Respect for justice is sacrosanct
Do not wait for the tyrants to leave, because they won’t
Such advice is becoming more common. Sarah Sophie Flicker shared lessons from Denmark’s resistance to the Nazis during World War II in a recent essay for The Nation. “[A]s the fight against fascism commences in our homes and communities, each act of defiance is a grain of sand — enough grains can bring the entire machine to a halt,” she wrote. “When asked to betray your integrity: Hold fast to your ideals, gum up the works, disobey when able. Question everything, say nothing. Keep meticulous records. Leverage your advantages and harbor those who have none. Get in the way. Tell the story. Archive the truth.”
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After historian Marci Shore recently decided to leave her tenured position at Yale University and move to Canada, where she is now on faculty at the University of Toronto, she offered some grim advice to the American people during a recent interview with the Guardian: “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.”
In a sobering essay that merits being quoted at length, journalist and author Garrett M. Graff pondered the rapid collapse of American democracy that has occurred during this last week:
I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.
Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last.
Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.
Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written. It will surely get worse…But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again.
Graff’s elegy for America leads to a core question about moral accountability and complicity: When you look in the mirror each morning, who do you see? What type of human being are you going to be? These are the most basic questions that the American people must now ask ourselves as our ethics, character and humanity are being put so gravely to the test.
