That, and the fact that he can try, over and over and over and over again, dragging others through a living hell without any real consequences.
No dictator just poofs into existence. They work towards it in slow(ish), incremental steps. Grabbing a little more power as each day passes. Then, usually, there is a dramatic lunge when they seize complete power and everyone is well and truly fucked.
Trump is working on this very thing now and he is well on his way. The parallels in history are not hard to find or even uncommon.
Which stage in the incremental process is it where only a third of the population approves of his performance, the majority thinks his policies are hurting the country, and his own party is publicly breaking with him?
Call me when ICE goes home and leaves cities alone. Trump stops federalizing the National Guard, stops threatening to invade NATO allies to take their country (Greenland, Canada), stops kidnapping foreign leaders, stops shooting up boats and killing the people on them on the open ocean, stop capturing foreign oil tankers and taking their oil (and reportedly holding the millions in proceeds from those sales in a Qatari bank), stops threatening companies and law firms to do his bidding or else, stops using the DOJ to settle personal grudges and probably more. That is just off the top of my head.
Don’t get me started on what he has done to things like the EPA and Department of Education and CDC and FEMA and so on.
This one at least has already happened.
He was frustrated in his efforts and gave up. He’ll bluster but he lost that one already.
At the beginning of 2026, President Trump said he’s dropping — for now — his push to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, in the wake of repeated legal setbacks.
That doesn’t mean he’s done trying to find ways to be a dictator, but this particular angle seems over. Small comfort since you know he’s just going to do something else instead.
So long as they can play Candy Crush and watch Housewives shows, most of the public wouldn’t leave their house unless it was on fire.
Dropping for now does not equate to stopped.
Has anyone pointed out to Good’s wife that she is actually a winner?
I think he’s given up and just claimed it’s “for now” to not admit he lost. I don’t know what he’s going to do to get around the rulings that say he can’t nationalize without a real emergency.
Maybe he can get SCOTUS to intervene, but if so I don’t know why he hasn’t already done that yet.
No matter what has been ruled, or by who, do you think he has given up on harassing Hillary Clinton and threatening to put her in prison?
I’ve been told that he can just declare her a terrorist and insurrectionist and detain her indefinitely. I guess he must just not feel like it.
Exactly. Today.
Hell, Congress is probably going to press for her to go to jail over the contempt charge.
Naw…he’s not there yet. The Clintons are clearly white people and also quite wealthy. Trump can’t freak-out that group of people yet which is what that would do. Again, the road to dictator is incremental and takes some time to get supreme power but make no mistake Trump is working on it as should be obvious.
Have no doubt though that Clinton is on Trump’s short list of people he wants to get vengeance on.
And he’s failing at it. A dictator needs popular support and the ability to effectively suppress opposition, and Trump has neither.
He clearly had enough popular support to become the most powerful man in the country. Once in power, an authoritarian no longer needs people to like him, so long as they fear him.
And he clearly has suppressed dissent enough to stay in power. If that changes, the beatings will increase until morale improves.
Which we don’t.
Well, maybe some of y’all do, since you believe in a version of him that’s much more powerful and capable than the one who exists in real life.
And yet Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is much less wealthy and white, is a free man.
Then why aren’t there millions of people in the streets like Iran, despite the killing of over 2,000 demonstrators?
Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees, while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants.