Reach out to as many House reps as you can about the Epstein files. This is bigger than a “I only represent my constituents” issue.
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, and those in a committee that fits your topic. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly. We deserve better ❤️🩹🤍💙
A man with only the most rudimentary sense of humor like Trump doesn't really joke. Not in the way most people joke - which is looking for the juxtaposition between reality and exaggeration. So that, if Barack Obama joked that he would call out the National Guard if his coffee was cold, it would be accepted he intended it as a joke. (Whether it would be funny is a different question). The actual humor in this would be that everyone knew and accepted that Obama would never speciously call out the National Guard. Plus, there is the ridiculousness of making such a big deal out of such a small matter.
Trump's so-called jokes on the other hand are completely congruent with his beliefs and behavior. It is totally plausible that he would follow through on the things he jokes about. What's more, he has followed through on things he had initially claimed were jokes. What his jokes are in fact are deadly serious trial balloons floated to get the public used to his seizure of unlimited power.
He is deliberately planting seeds in the public mind. It is almost subliminal. Unless the press stops reporting these "jokes" as if they were legitimate things for a president to do, he is going to get away with it.
Interesting piece, thanks for writing it. But here’s where I struggle with the framing.
What I see isn’t just Trump “joking his way into autocracy,” but rather both political camps leaning into their own versions of authoritarianism. On the left, we see purity tests, speech policing, de-platforming, and a near obsession with “don’t normalize him.” On the right, we see law-and-order rhetoric and cultural trench warfare. Both sides claim to be saving the country, but each is comfortable using coercive tools when it suits them.
The irony is that Trump—painted as a looming dictator—actually tends to pull back when courts block him. He’s blustery, sure, but when federal judges say no, he complies. That looks a lot more like a constitutional originalist than a tyrant trying to smash the system. If his goal were genuine autocracy, he’s had chances to ignore judicial checks, yet hasn’t taken them.
Meanwhile, the left’s version of “soft authoritarianism” often comes wrapped in noble language: mandates “for public safety,” censorship “for the vulnerable,” policies “for the poor.” But history shows that invoking the marginalized doesn’t make the outcomes less damaging. Good intentions can still produce coercive and destructive results.
So while it’s easy to caricature Trump as a Chaplinesque villain—“orange man bad”—that doesn’t mean the other side is less insidious. In fact, America has lived with shades of fascism for a century or more, from the robber barons through post-WWII centralization. Today’s divide looks less like democracy versus dictatorship, and more like left-wing authoritarianism facing off against right-wing authoritarianism.
The real danger, in my view, is missing that bigger picture.
Nope. Not even close. On one side we have extrajudicial killings (the boat blown up in international waters), the biggest police force in the world with more than the budget of most countries’ whole armed forces, masked and unidentified agents pulling people into unmarked cars, and troops on the streets of our cities. On the other side, we have excesses of social shaming. One of these things is not like the other.
Lacey, the irony is that Trump shows just how weak an authoritarian he really is. Real authoritarians don’t just talk — they tally bodies. Stalin and Mao consolidated power through mass killings. Pinochet and Saddam disappeared their opponents. Even middling tyrants maintain rule by ensuring people vanish in the night. By contrast, Trump is a blustery showman who barks but never bites.
Look at his record: no gulags, no CIA kill lists of domestic rivals, no systematic purges. Every time a court blocked him, he backed down. For all the “dictator energy” headlines, he couldn’t even strong-arm the judiciary. He raged online, but he didn’t build a repressive apparatus capable of crushing dissent. That’s why the rhetoric around him is always “wannabe dictator” — not dictator, period.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has a real authoritarian streak, but it’s bipartisan and institutional. Obama expanded drone programs that killed Americans abroad without trial. Bush presided over black sites and torture. Clinton and Biden championed carceral expansions that devastated communities. Reagan and earlier administrations winked at or funded death squads across Latin America. And long before that, we had COINTELPRO, internment camps, and the tacit approval of lynchings. Those were not “theoretical harms” — they were measurable deaths, shattered lives, and state-sanctioned violence.
Against that backdrop, Trump’s version of authoritarianism is almost embarrassing. He’s a carnival barker LARPing Mussolini, without the infrastructure, discipline, or — bluntly — the body count that defines genuine authoritarianism. That doesn’t make him harmless: norm erosion, chaos, and reckless rhetoric are corrosive. But if we inflate him into a full-blown dictator, we miss the bigger picture: America’s deepest authoritarian reflexes have always come from the system itself, not from one failed strongman cosplaying as one.
Trump is all bark, no bite: all “booga booga” and no boogieman. In a decade of warnings, he’s yet to do anything unprecedented—every move has a precedent tucked somewhere in the last 250 years of presidents. I expect Bloodlands. I expect Killing Fields. I expect rivers of blood, camps, gulags—the “Hitler early on” script. But what do we actually get? Noise, tweets, chaos, cable-news hysterics. They’re calling deportation “kidnapping” and temporary deportation centers “death camps.” At this rate, we’ll never actually know when the killing begins—if it ever does—because the hyperbolic crying of “orange wolf bad” has dulled the alarm. If this is our great dictator, then he’s the weakest strongman in history.
Sure, I’m not going to argue with you. Eleven dead civilian foreign nationals in international waters might, but they’re not here to do so. Enjoy your life in the hellscape Trump is creating.
The entire GWOT was against civilians. That’s the brutal reality: warlords, cartel bosses, insurgents—they don’t wear uniforms, and they live in homes, villages, and cities. Every strike, from Afghanistan to Iraq to this Venezuelan boat, is justified by labels like “terrorist” or “narcoterrorist,” but in practice it’s civilians who end up on the receiving end. It doesn’t make the loss any less human—it just shows how the categories we use in war obscure the fact that violence almost always lands hardest on ordinary people.
Stupid and laughable didn’t really help. Smartness and clever are not guarantees against stupid and laughable, either. “Hitler, early on?” You do realize that Hitler was dead by 54 and that Trump’s been in some form of Presidential Power for over a decade now. And he’s not 30s and 40s, he’s Seventies and Eighties. So, not even Trump is anywhere close to “Hitler early on.” Like with climate collapse: it’s always a persistent 12 years away.
I take your point, Lacey—there are asymmetries in scale and severity. A militarized police state, black sites, and covert killings aren’t the same as overzealous campus speech codes. But I’d argue the comparison isn’t about equivalence of outcomes so much as recognition of a shared logic: both left and right, at different times, have been willing to suspend principles of liberty when the ends feel justified.
America’s record on extrajudicial violence long predates Trump. Obama oversaw a massive expansion of drone warfare, including “signature strikes” that killed unknown individuals in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—often justified by secret legal memos. Bush authorized CIA black sites and torture programs. Clinton pushed “tough on crime” laws that swelled the carceral state. Reagan’s “war on drugs” devastated communities while quietly funding death squads in Latin America. Go back further and you find COINTELPRO, the Palmer Raids, and state-sanctioned lynchings that were winked at for decades. The continuity is sobering: both parties have reached for coercive and sometimes lethal tools when expedient.
So when I talk about “soft authoritarianism” on the left, I don’t mean it matches the firepower of the Pentagon or CIA. I mean it follows the same pattern: claiming extraordinary necessity, casting dissent as dangerous, and wrapping compulsion in the language of safety or virtue. That doesn’t always end in body bags, but it does habituate people to the idea that liberty is negotiable, that some speech is too costly, that some citizens don’t deserve equal standing.
That’s why I resist a framing that says Trump is the unique authoritarian while the left merely overreaches in clumsy but harmless ways. Our democracy erodes not only under brute force but under habits of control, and history shows both sides have walked that road. The real danger isn’t just Trump’s bluster or “orange man bad,” but the bipartisan normalization of coercion as politics by other means.
*****Lots of Trump’s most dangerous statements are taken as jokes. Until they’re not.
Amid the chaos, it’s hard to know what could turn out to be real and what to ignore. How much is anyone really supposed to care about a silly hat? Does he really think he is right about everything? He has to be kidding… right? But we aren’t living in a parody of autocracy; our country is really becoming one.
Our plunge into absurdity and autocracy is not incidental. The constant mix of surreal and real makes it hard to discern the danger before our eyes. If, in the confusion, we see Trump as a clown with a bright red hat in place of a big red nose, then his bumbling threats can’t be serious, his abuses can’t be intentional, and his power grabs can’t be real.
[...]
What should be apparent by now is this: Whatever line there may have been between Trump’s absurdity and authoritarianism has collapsed.
They’re the same. He isn’t joking. Stop acting like he is.*****
.
I can only really speak for myself. I imagine, though, that few regular readers of "If you can keep it" have been lulled by the clown act. I imagine that with scant exceptions we have understood, as Charlie Sykes puts it, that this clown with a flamethrower is still incinerating all that is just and true, and good.
The challenge is to get others to see it. It is our duty to meet this challenge, persistently.
Reach out to as many House reps as you can about the Epstein files. This is bigger than a “I only represent my constituents” issue.
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, and those in a committee that fits your topic. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly. We deserve better ❤️🩹🤍💙
We are NOT amused. ☹️☹️☹️
A man with only the most rudimentary sense of humor like Trump doesn't really joke. Not in the way most people joke - which is looking for the juxtaposition between reality and exaggeration. So that, if Barack Obama joked that he would call out the National Guard if his coffee was cold, it would be accepted he intended it as a joke. (Whether it would be funny is a different question). The actual humor in this would be that everyone knew and accepted that Obama would never speciously call out the National Guard. Plus, there is the ridiculousness of making such a big deal out of such a small matter.
Trump's so-called jokes on the other hand are completely congruent with his beliefs and behavior. It is totally plausible that he would follow through on the things he jokes about. What's more, he has followed through on things he had initially claimed were jokes. What his jokes are in fact are deadly serious trial balloons floated to get the public used to his seizure of unlimited power.
He is deliberately planting seeds in the public mind. It is almost subliminal. Unless the press stops reporting these "jokes" as if they were legitimate things for a president to do, he is going to get away with it.
Interesting piece, thanks for writing it. But here’s where I struggle with the framing.
What I see isn’t just Trump “joking his way into autocracy,” but rather both political camps leaning into their own versions of authoritarianism. On the left, we see purity tests, speech policing, de-platforming, and a near obsession with “don’t normalize him.” On the right, we see law-and-order rhetoric and cultural trench warfare. Both sides claim to be saving the country, but each is comfortable using coercive tools when it suits them.
The irony is that Trump—painted as a looming dictator—actually tends to pull back when courts block him. He’s blustery, sure, but when federal judges say no, he complies. That looks a lot more like a constitutional originalist than a tyrant trying to smash the system. If his goal were genuine autocracy, he’s had chances to ignore judicial checks, yet hasn’t taken them.
Meanwhile, the left’s version of “soft authoritarianism” often comes wrapped in noble language: mandates “for public safety,” censorship “for the vulnerable,” policies “for the poor.” But history shows that invoking the marginalized doesn’t make the outcomes less damaging. Good intentions can still produce coercive and destructive results.
So while it’s easy to caricature Trump as a Chaplinesque villain—“orange man bad”—that doesn’t mean the other side is less insidious. In fact, America has lived with shades of fascism for a century or more, from the robber barons through post-WWII centralization. Today’s divide looks less like democracy versus dictatorship, and more like left-wing authoritarianism facing off against right-wing authoritarianism.
The real danger, in my view, is missing that bigger picture.
Nope. Not even close. On one side we have extrajudicial killings (the boat blown up in international waters), the biggest police force in the world with more than the budget of most countries’ whole armed forces, masked and unidentified agents pulling people into unmarked cars, and troops on the streets of our cities. On the other side, we have excesses of social shaming. One of these things is not like the other.
Lacey, the irony is that Trump shows just how weak an authoritarian he really is. Real authoritarians don’t just talk — they tally bodies. Stalin and Mao consolidated power through mass killings. Pinochet and Saddam disappeared their opponents. Even middling tyrants maintain rule by ensuring people vanish in the night. By contrast, Trump is a blustery showman who barks but never bites.
Look at his record: no gulags, no CIA kill lists of domestic rivals, no systematic purges. Every time a court blocked him, he backed down. For all the “dictator energy” headlines, he couldn’t even strong-arm the judiciary. He raged online, but he didn’t build a repressive apparatus capable of crushing dissent. That’s why the rhetoric around him is always “wannabe dictator” — not dictator, period.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has a real authoritarian streak, but it’s bipartisan and institutional. Obama expanded drone programs that killed Americans abroad without trial. Bush presided over black sites and torture. Clinton and Biden championed carceral expansions that devastated communities. Reagan and earlier administrations winked at or funded death squads across Latin America. And long before that, we had COINTELPRO, internment camps, and the tacit approval of lynchings. Those were not “theoretical harms” — they were measurable deaths, shattered lives, and state-sanctioned violence.
Against that backdrop, Trump’s version of authoritarianism is almost embarrassing. He’s a carnival barker LARPing Mussolini, without the infrastructure, discipline, or — bluntly — the body count that defines genuine authoritarianism. That doesn’t make him harmless: norm erosion, chaos, and reckless rhetoric are corrosive. But if we inflate him into a full-blown dictator, we miss the bigger picture: America’s deepest authoritarian reflexes have always come from the system itself, not from one failed strongman cosplaying as one.
Mussolini and Hitler were both stupid and laughable, and you are making precisely the argument that was made about Hitler early on: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/hitler-press-germany/682130/?gift=Um-3-qtMQYm-d32M7fJDDfNtYkHdp8iURcay7w_ysJw
Trump is all bark, no bite: all “booga booga” and no boogieman. In a decade of warnings, he’s yet to do anything unprecedented—every move has a precedent tucked somewhere in the last 250 years of presidents. I expect Bloodlands. I expect Killing Fields. I expect rivers of blood, camps, gulags—the “Hitler early on” script. But what do we actually get? Noise, tweets, chaos, cable-news hysterics. They’re calling deportation “kidnapping” and temporary deportation centers “death camps.” At this rate, we’ll never actually know when the killing begins—if it ever does—because the hyperbolic crying of “orange wolf bad” has dulled the alarm. If this is our great dictator, then he’s the weakest strongman in history.
Sure, I’m not going to argue with you. Eleven dead civilian foreign nationals in international waters might, but they’re not here to do so. Enjoy your life in the hellscape Trump is creating.
The entire GWOT was against civilians. That’s the brutal reality: warlords, cartel bosses, insurgents—they don’t wear uniforms, and they live in homes, villages, and cities. Every strike, from Afghanistan to Iraq to this Venezuelan boat, is justified by labels like “terrorist” or “narcoterrorist,” but in practice it’s civilians who end up on the receiving end. It doesn’t make the loss any less human—it just shows how the categories we use in war obscure the fact that violence almost always lands hardest on ordinary people.
Stupid and laughable didn’t really help. Smartness and clever are not guarantees against stupid and laughable, either. “Hitler, early on?” You do realize that Hitler was dead by 54 and that Trump’s been in some form of Presidential Power for over a decade now. And he’s not 30s and 40s, he’s Seventies and Eighties. So, not even Trump is anywhere close to “Hitler early on.” Like with climate collapse: it’s always a persistent 12 years away.
I take your point, Lacey—there are asymmetries in scale and severity. A militarized police state, black sites, and covert killings aren’t the same as overzealous campus speech codes. But I’d argue the comparison isn’t about equivalence of outcomes so much as recognition of a shared logic: both left and right, at different times, have been willing to suspend principles of liberty when the ends feel justified.
America’s record on extrajudicial violence long predates Trump. Obama oversaw a massive expansion of drone warfare, including “signature strikes” that killed unknown individuals in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—often justified by secret legal memos. Bush authorized CIA black sites and torture programs. Clinton pushed “tough on crime” laws that swelled the carceral state. Reagan’s “war on drugs” devastated communities while quietly funding death squads in Latin America. Go back further and you find COINTELPRO, the Palmer Raids, and state-sanctioned lynchings that were winked at for decades. The continuity is sobering: both parties have reached for coercive and sometimes lethal tools when expedient.
So when I talk about “soft authoritarianism” on the left, I don’t mean it matches the firepower of the Pentagon or CIA. I mean it follows the same pattern: claiming extraordinary necessity, casting dissent as dangerous, and wrapping compulsion in the language of safety or virtue. That doesn’t always end in body bags, but it does habituate people to the idea that liberty is negotiable, that some speech is too costly, that some citizens don’t deserve equal standing.
That’s why I resist a framing that says Trump is the unique authoritarian while the left merely overreaches in clumsy but harmless ways. Our democracy erodes not only under brute force but under habits of control, and history shows both sides have walked that road. The real danger isn’t just Trump’s bluster or “orange man bad,” but the bipartisan normalization of coercion as politics by other means.
Amanda Carpenter wrote:
*****Lots of Trump’s most dangerous statements are taken as jokes. Until they’re not.
Amid the chaos, it’s hard to know what could turn out to be real and what to ignore. How much is anyone really supposed to care about a silly hat? Does he really think he is right about everything? He has to be kidding… right? But we aren’t living in a parody of autocracy; our country is really becoming one.
Our plunge into absurdity and autocracy is not incidental. The constant mix of surreal and real makes it hard to discern the danger before our eyes. If, in the confusion, we see Trump as a clown with a bright red hat in place of a big red nose, then his bumbling threats can’t be serious, his abuses can’t be intentional, and his power grabs can’t be real.
[...]
What should be apparent by now is this: Whatever line there may have been between Trump’s absurdity and authoritarianism has collapsed.
They’re the same. He isn’t joking. Stop acting like he is.*****
.
I can only really speak for myself. I imagine, though, that few regular readers of "If you can keep it" have been lulled by the clown act. I imagine that with scant exceptions we have understood, as Charlie Sykes puts it, that this clown with a flamethrower is still incinerating all that is just and true, and good.
The challenge is to get others to see it. It is our duty to meet this challenge, persistently.
FYI I started a site based on JVL's Law to track examples of institutional subversion. I only launched it yesterday and still need to backfill it.
You can see it here: https://jvlslaw.com/
Please DM me with your suggestions, or click my name at the bottom to see contact me.
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣Don’t worry we WILL keep our REPUBLIC!