To anyone who watched or lived through the ascension of Orbán and Erdogan in the 2000s it was very eerie how similar the playbook was for Trump.
The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.
Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.
The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".
You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.
I'm not from the US, so I may have get wrong, but didn't the Founding Fathers envision that people should be able to collectively rise up and overthrow a tyrant? Hence the right to keep and bear arms?
Of course, from a practical sense this does not seem possible, since the current US military, which a tyrant president would have direct control over, would be infinitely more powerful than a revolutionary group.
I don't know anything else apart from finding communities and mobilising with similar-minded people, there's power in numbers.
At the same time it feels pretty hopeless, even more when I noticed downvotes coming to my comment right after the day rose in the USA without any rebuttal, you're among people who actually support this and do not realise the path it's verging towards.
Maybe not that interesting for a non-Eastern-European, but Orbán went all mad when after his first term he lost the elections. He swore to come back and take revenge.
And then 2010-2025 happened, we saw what the revenge was.
Trump coming back feels very similar to this.
Project 2025 is just a collection of methods they used in E-Europe before. On one hand one could read and learn from history. On the other hand... It's a manual on how to do things, in case you wanna build a system like those in E-Europe.
The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.
Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.
The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".
You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.
[0] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745953