So it’s official. Incontrovertible. Donald Trump is enthusiastically using the powers of the state to target his political enemies.
There are words for that. A few that come to mind are abuse of power, political repression, authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism.
And yet as I look at the coverage of yesterday’s events in our top mainstream news outlets, I see none of those words used, except for maybe ascribed to “critics”.
No, the euphemism of choice for yesterday’s events in the New York Times and elsewhere is that Trump has (once again) shattered “norms.”
But he has not shattered “norms”.
He has shattered core democratic principles.
He has turned a corner.
He has reduced this country to a banana republic, where people can be indicted and arrested simply for the crime of offending the strongman in charge.
And I say yesterday’s events – plural — because history will record not just one major indicator of totalitarianism on September 25, 2025, but three:
- Former FBI director Jim Comey was indicted on Trumped-up charges that a slew of Justice Department officials had previously found lacking in merit.
- Trump signed an executive order seemingly intended to designate and target groups as domestic terrorists, based solely on speech against his regime.
- The New York Times reported that U.S. attorney’s offices have received directives to investigate George Soros’s grant network, suggesting possible charges including arson and material support of terrorism.
And all that came a few days after Trump publicly ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to hurry up and indict Comey, as well as two other political foes, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff.
Read It and Gnash Your Teeth
So how does the New York Times cover the end of the republic as we know it?
In the fourth paragraph of their news analysis, Alan Feuer, Jonah E. Bromwich, and Maggie Haberman called it a “break-glass moment,” which was promising.
But their conclusion was an abysmal understatement: “[I]t could well go down as a moment when a fundamental democratic norm — that justice is dispensed without regard to political or personal agendas — was cast aside in a dangerous way,” they wrote.
Washington Post reporter Patrick Marley focused on the Comey indictment being “one of the most brazen examples of payback since [Trump’s] return to the White House.” And it certainly is. But it’s also way more than that.
And again with the “norms”! Marley noted that after Watergate, the nation “adopted norms” to protect the Justice Department from White House interference. “Trump and his allies chipped away at those norms during his first term and have obliterated them in the second,” he wrote.
The closest Marley got to properly situating the day’s event came when he quoted Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, toward the end of the article. “You don’t want to live in a country where displeasing the president can put you in jail,” Nyhan said.
It’s one thing to point out that Trump is using the power of the state against his enemies. That’s easy now. It’s another to explain what it means.
Jill Colvin, writing for the Associated Press, did a fine job of the former, and (better than nothing) punted the latter to “critics”:
The developments marked a dramatic escalation of the president’s extraordinary use of the levers of presidential power to target his political rivals and his efforts to pressure the Justice Department to pursue investigations — and now prosecutions — of those he disdains. It’s an unabashed campaign that began soon after Trump returned to office and one that critics see as an abuse of power that puts every American who dares to criticize the president at risk of retaliation.
A more admirable description of what happened yesterday came from Aaron Blake, at CNN.com:
After regularly testing the guardrails of American democracy in his second term, President Donald Trump is now busting through them — at a breakneck pace….
The president has taken rapid and drastic steps to remove any obstacles within the government, to enforce loyalty, to punish his enemies and to quell the possibility of public dissent that might arise from his moves.
Trump is creating a system around him that appears increasingly devoid of friction, with the ultimate goal, it seems, to allow him to get whatever he wants.
It’s been a stunning period, even by Trump’s own often-stunning standards.
The Prognosis
I wrote a month ago that the U.S. had become an authoritarian state. I cited the proverbial frog in the heating-up pot of water and declared the frog boiled and dead.
Now the frog has exploded.
Covering yesterday’s events as if they were just another incremental step Trump has taken is a grave mistake. Even covering them as a major reversal of decades of Justice Department tradition is an understatement.
We are forever changed as a nation. The rule of law is dead. The era of one-man rule is upon us. And there are words for that.