Getty and Unsplash+.
It still feels a little paranoid to say it out loud: that the United States might be drifting toward something that looks a lot like Russia. Or Hungary. Or some unholy blend of theocratic nostalgia and corporate feudalism. But that gut feeling—the one that says something’s not right—is getting harder to shake. The signs aren’t exactly subtle, either. To anyone paying attention, they’re plenty loud. But they’re also easy to tune out, easy to dismiss as noise, as politics as usual. What’s harder to ignore are the rituals. The reverence. The worship. The way power starts to look like something owed.
We don’t usually start naming highways after sitting presidents—especially ones under multiple indictments, most especially ones wildly obsessed with power and openly musing about a third term. But here we are. A bill in Texas proposes to rename a stretch of I-35 the “President Donald J. Trump Highway.” It may not even pass, but that almost doesn’t matter. It’s one of a growing list of gestures aimed at deifying a man who, by any rational standard, should be facing serious consequences for his role in the January 6th insurrection—an attack on the peaceful transfer of power that many legal scholars argue should disqualify him from office under the 14th Amendment, if not result in criminal charges for inciting sedition.
Instead, we get a slow-motion canonization. Lawmakers have floated putting Trump’s face on currency, making his birthday a federal holiday, and renaming airports in his honor. Some supporters even want to carve his likeness into Mount Rushmore. Religious leaders compare him to biblical kings—chosen vessels, sent by God. This isn’t politics anymore. It’s mythology. It’s the construction of a parallel reality where Trump isn’t just a man, but a savior figure. The kind of figure who can do no wrong, whose followers speak of him in reverent tones, who must be protected at all costs.
This is how democratic values rot—not all at once, but through the slow normalization of idolatry disguised as patriotism.
But mythology only works if it can crowd out reality. Repression needs scaffolding—and no tool is more effective than confusion. The Trump administration doesn’t just clash with the press; it undermines the very concept of truth. “Fake news” isn’t a throwaway insult anymore—it’s a strategy. A sustained campaign to flood the information space and make facts feel optional.
Reporters who challenge the administration are smeared as traitors or “deep state” operatives. Trump still calls mainstream journalists “the enemy of the people,” echoing the language of the dictators and strongmen he seems to admire so much. Investigations are dismissed as partisan attacks. Whistleblowers are discredited before they speak. Independent newsrooms face lawsuits, threats, and coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to corrode public trust.
And it works. The more chaotic the noise, the easier it is to tune out the signal. Truth becomes something to argue about, not act on. And once reality gets slippery, everything else is easier to break. Books get banned. Curricula get sanitized. Judges face harassment for upholding the law. Ordinary people start second-guessing what they post, what they share, what they say out loud. It doesn’t take long for folks to forget what used to be obvious: opposition to authoritarianism is essential to a free society.
***
I live in Austin, Texas, a city that prides itself on being an outlier inside a state that loves to talk about freedom while quietly legislating the opposite. This is a state where “small government” somehow includes sweeping preemption laws, micromanaging what books kids can read, and controlling uteruses. The message is clear: freedom is fine—as long as it’s defined by those in power. Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country—providers can face life in prison, and even individuals assisting in abortion access risk legal consequences, even in cases of rape or incest. In public schools, Bible-based curricula are slipping into classrooms under the name of “values” or “patriotism,” incentivized by lawmakers. It’s not freedom—it’s state-mandated morality dressed up as tradition.
There’s a reflex in this country—maybe in every country—to label dissent as disloyalty. Criticize the government, and suddenly you’re “anti-American.” I don’t buy that. I love this country and the ideals it’s supposed to stand for. When I enlisted in the Army and volunteered for the infantry, I swore an oath. I’ve seen firsthand what it means to put your body on the line for a set of principles.
Sure, my war was Iraq. And in hindsight, it’s clear we weren’t exactly defending American freedoms by invading a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11. But the men I served with—some of whom never came home—weren’t there for oil or politics. They were there because they believed in service. Many had volunteered in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, willing to risk their lives to protect something bigger than themselves. They believed in the promise of liberty, accountability, and a system worth defending.
And some of them probably support President Trump. I don’t speak for them—and while I respect their right to that choice, I won’t pretend to understand it. But I do know what we all swore to uphold. Our oath wasn’t to a man, or a party, or even a flag. It was to a Constitution—one that’s supposed to hold this nation together. (1) That’s why this matters to me.
When I see politicians twisting those principles into tools of repression, I don’t call it patriotism. I call it what it is: a threat. And while there are many faces to that threat, perhaps none illustrates it more clearly right now than Elon Musk—a man elected by no one, yet handed more control over federal institutions than most cabinet secretaries. His financial influence didn’t just buy him a seat at the table. It bought him the table.
***
Elon Musk—billionaire, attention addict, CEO of everything—holds real political power now. Not metaphorically, not just influence-by-Twitter (or X, or whatever that ad-choked echo chamber is calling itself today). Trump brought him in early to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, which sounds like a joke until you realize it’s not. As a “special government employee,” Musk was handed sweeping authority to cancel contracts, slash programs, and restructure entire federal agencies. No election. No confirmation. No accountability—except to Trump and his inner circle.
Musk has used that power like a wrecking ball. USAID, gutted. The CFPB, gutted. The VA, slashed. Now the Department of Education is on the chopping block—literally. Trump already signed the executive order to begin dismantling it, with the justification that schools should be governed “locally.” But the fallout is anything but local. Teachers’ unions, the NAACP, and civil rights organizations are suing, warning that the move violates the Constitution and threatens to gut federal protections for vulnerable students. Meanwhile, DOGE’s attempts to access sensitive agency data have been blocked by federal courts, citing privacy concerns and executive overreach.
And like clockwork, Musk’s signature chaos-management style has followed him into government: mass firings with little discernment, followed by quiet attempts to rehire the very people dismissed—nuclear safety experts, pandemic response staff, oversight personnel—when it turns out gutting institutions has consequences.
Even Musk’s own support is starting to wobble. His approval numbers have slipped. Protests have spread. Tesla cars have been vandalized, and a whole side hustle economy has popped up to cash in—selling bumper stickers to owners who bought the car before they realized what kind of guy came with it. Movements like “Tesla Takedown,” built around public shaming and targeted boycotts of Musk’s brands, are picking up steam. Trump’s base still defends him, mostly—but they’re beginning to sour on Musk. The golden boy of techno-libertarianism now looks a lot more like a self-dealing billionaire with too much control over their lives.
Musk’s role in the administration isn’t just a weird twist of the Trump saga. It’s a symptom of something much deeper: the corrosion of democratic norms in real time. When unelected billionaires are empowered to disassemble the federal government and profit from the fallout, we’re not looking at innovation. We’re looking at privatized power in patriotic packaging.
Legal scholars are already sounding the alarm about a coming constitutional crisis. The rule of law is being selectively applied, courts are being ignored or sidelined, and the balance of power is being bent toward executive fiat. If the Constitution is a framework built on checks and balances, then we’re watching those supports be quietly removed, one by one.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening. And if it continues unchecked, we’re not just flirting with autocracy—we’re laying out a red carpet for it.
And it’s not happening in a vacuum. The courts have been methodically reengineered. Three Supreme Court justices were installed during Trump’s first term—after he lost the popular vote—with help from a Senate that represents a minority of Americans. Lower courts have been stacked with ideologues who don’t hide their contempt for civil rights. And then there are the laws—quietly passed, easily overlooked—that encourage citizens to snitch, sue, or surveil each other under the guise of morality or tradition. It’s not just policy anymore; it’s a culture shift. A moral panic turned into legislation.
***
None of this is new. We’ve seen this playbook before. Germany in the 1930s didn’t collapse overnight. It slid—through legal channels, institutional decay, and the slow boiling of norms. Russia didn’t need a coup; it had bureaucracy, media control, and just enough plausible deniability. Hungary rewrote its constitution and wrapped its authoritarianism in flags and hymns. The slogans vary—family, faith, purity, tradition—but the structure is the same: consolidate power, erode checks, rebrand repression as righteousness.
Here, it’s not boots in the street—it’s bans in the library. It’s teachers rewriting syllabi out of fear. It’s protesters labeled extremists, and voting rights treated like optional extras. The message isn’t “you can’t speak.” It’s “maybe you shouldn’t.” It’s the whisper before the silence.
I’m not a paranoid person. I have no patience for conspiracy freaks or tinfoil logic. I try to root my thinking in science and history—in what can be known, what can be verified. But even so, I’m not immune to the quiet worries that slip through the cracks. I’m writing this on a device connected to the internet. Nothing is truly private. Nothing online ever really disappears. That’s not a problem with this essay—I plan to publish it. But what about private messages? Notes? Conversations with AI?
Whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are becoming fixtures in daily life. People use them to draft emails, unpack personal dilemmas, or ask the kinds of questions they’re not ready to say out loud. But these aren’t confidants. They’re algorithms trained to guess the next likely word. No mind, no morals, no memory. Are they logging dissent? Mapping behavior? Storing keywords for some future review? Maybe not. Or maybe not yet. But let’s not underestimate the creativity of bad actors with power. The infrastructure exists. And if the political winds shift hard enough, all it takes is a flip of a switch.
When it comes to tech abuse, the current administration’s incompetence might actually be our last line of defense. These are, after all, the same people who planned a military strike in a Signal group chat—and accidentally invited a journalist. If Orwell wrote fiction, these guys are writing farce.
Jokes aside, the surveillance state doesn’t need to be competent—just connected. Metadata is already vacuumed up. GPS logs, browsing habits, biometric patterns—all cross-referenced with identities.
If this all sounds like dystopian fiction, that’s only because we’ve been trained to think of it that way. But it’s not fiction. The systems are real. The only thing missing is the right justification: National security. Public order. “Family values.” “Protecting the children.”
And then comes the refrain: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.
That’s how it always starts.
***
The threat isn’t abstract anymore. It’s not looming—it’s embedded. Not with jackboots and batons—though keep going down this road and we’ll get there—but with procedural language and patriotic branding. It waits for fatigue to set in. For outrage to give way to apathy. For protest to feel futile, and speaking up to feel like a risk.
We’ve been conditioned to treat comparisons to fascism as melodramatic. Alarmist. But sometimes, alarmist just means paying attention. When journalists are attacked, when courts are captured, when books are pulled from shelves and history is rewritten in real time, it’s not alarmist to say the house is on fire. It’s responsible.
Authoritarianism doesn’t need everyone to go silent—just enough people afraid of making noise. It thrives on hesitation. On people weighing the cost of resistance against the ease of going along. That’s the most dangerous part—not the censorship itself, but the internalized version. The self-editing. The second-guessing. The voice that says: Maybe just let it go. Maybe don’t post that. Maybe don’t write this.
But I’d rather name it now than whisper about it later. If this country is still salvageable—and I believe it is—it won’t be because we waited politely. It’ll be because enough people chose not to. Because silence isn’t safety. It’s surrender in slow motion.
***
To Those Who Still Support President Trump
Maybe you still support Donald Trump and his approach to governing. A lot of people clearly do. Or maybe you just choose to look the other way. Either way, ask yourself this: what happens when the next president isn’t your guy? When someone you don’t trust—someone you don’t like and didn’t vote for—inherits the same unchecked authority, the same gutted institutions, the same executive branch reshaped for loyalty over law?
To be fair, this didn’t start with Trump. The power of the presidency has been sliding in this direction for decades. But he sure as hell didn’t slow it down—he stepped on the gas. And that’s the thing about power: once it expands, it rarely contracts. The people who come next don’t give it back—they just find new ways to use it… to abuse it.
The Founders weren’t perfect, but they knew what concentrated power could do. That’s why they didn’t build a throne—they built limits. Guardrails. And we’re watching those get stripped for parts. You might like who’s driving now. But what happens when you don’t?
© Counter Punch
