Authoritarian Watch
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January 30, 2026
For the nice of the nation, it’s time to cross the aisle.
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Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY).
(Sarah L. Voisin / The Washington Post through Getty Images)
To: Senators Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul and Representatives Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Thomas Massie
For the previous 12 months, the seven of you might have been uncommon voices of opposition from throughout the Republican Party to many of President Donald Trump’s energy grabs. You have critiqued his inflammatory language and expressed concern on the extremist conduct of many of his appointees.
As the creator of this weekly “Authoritarian Watch” column, nonetheless, it strikes me that your verbal opposition is just not sufficient. In this second of nationwide trauma, the best motion you might do to curb the excesses of the Trump regime is to cross the aisle.
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So lengthy as your Republican colleagues management the investigative and monetary levers of authorities, Trump will proceed to tear aside the nation’s social cloth and demolish the pillars of governance that make a functioning democracy doable. In your hearts, you certainly should notice this. But when you be part of the Democrats—not since you agree with all, and even most, of their insurance policies, however since you perceive the existential risk to democracy that Trump represents—you might change the political panorama of this nation and stop Trump’s nightmarish desires from turning into actuality. Yes, you may lose your seats to a main problem must you accomplish that—however you can be remembered in historical past for standing up to nascent tyranny.
I say this with out hyperbole: The president is unbound and, you could have observed, more and more unstable. Trump is exhibiting megalomaniacal tendencies on the worldwide stage which have fractured the put up–World War II Western alliance and rules-based world order. The United States has develop into a rogue state.
Domestically, Trump is trying to use overwhelming drive to break the resistance of extraordinary residents in Minneapolis. It’s arguably the primary time because the Civil War that the federal authorities has outlined a serious metropolis as being a hub for “the enemy within.” Trump’s hard-right henchman Stephen Miller has even demanded that native and state regulation enforcement in Minnesota “surrender” to the feds, as if he had been a commander in a brand new civil battle.
Can you truthfully say that the every day imagery of federal brokers beating, tear-gassing, macing, and capturing civilians—all of the direct consequence of Miller’s might-is-right philosophy—is the face of the United States that you just needed offered to the world if you went into politics?
If you’re hoping—as I think in personal that you’re—for a fast demise to Trump’s presidency, you could have observed that his cupboard members, lickspittles each one of them, employed solely for his or her potential and willingness to flip departments of state into morally denuded enforcers for Trump, have hardly proven a willingness to get up to his unlawful requests. Can you really think about JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, and the opposite sycophants ending this malignant presidency by invoking the twenty fifth Amendment?
And, regardless of your affection for the establishment of which you might have all been long-standing members, are you able to significantly see Speaker Mike Johnson’s GOP-led House impeaching Trump and John Thune’s Senate then convicting him? It merely isn’t going to occur.
Ten years in the past, Trump boasted that he might shoot somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and retain his core help. In Minneapolis in the previous couple of weeks, we have now seen this realized.
Trump could not have personally fired the three photographs into Renée Good’s face or the ten into Alex Pretti’s again and neck, however by empowering an out-of-control ICE, utilizing inciting rhetoric towards immigrants, and repeatedly glorifying violence towards his political opponents, Trump has given a wink-and-a-nod to ICE brokers to spill civilian blood. So, too, has Vance’s unacceptable assertion that the agent who shot Good after which referred to as her a “fucking bitch” enjoys “absolute immunity” from prosecution.
In the aftermath of the Minneapolis killings—cold-blooded murders, as I think you in your coronary heart of hearts know—Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller, and others in management positions launched a propaganda marketing campaign to smear the names of Good and of Pretti. Imagine having the gall to besmirch the identify of a younger mom killed for attempting to communicate up for her neighbors or of an ICU nurse shot within the again for attempting to have a tendency to a girl who had been pepper-sprayed within the face. In the sanctity of your personal quarters, away from the prying eyes of the media, I think you’ll agree with this bleak interpretation of their foul phrases.
In an identical vein, you in all probability squirmed in your seats if you noticed how Trump’s propaganda crew doctored a picture of a feminine African American protester who was arrested in Minneapolis in a means designed to strip her of all dignity, making her seem scared and silly, and pandering to the worst racial stereotypes peddled by white supremacists.
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Self-confident democracies don’t manipulate photographs of personal residents to serve the political pursuits and calls for of the nation’s management. But, in distinction, international locations managed by ruthless leaders don’t have any qualms about stripping residents of fundamental dignity. Nor have they got second ideas about sliming and denigrating opposition politicians in a means that goes far past the conventional tough and tumble of politics: Witness Trump’s allegations this week that Representative Ilhan Omar staged the assault during which a person rushed her on stage and squirted an unidentified liquid in her face. Or the collection of subpoenas issued towards Minnesota and Minneapolis political leaders as a result of of their opposition to Trump’s anti-immigrant insurance policies. It’s no marvel that Trump’s ICE is recruiting far-right white supremacists by together with neo-Nazi songs, memes, and slogans of their recruitment movies.
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I might go on. I might, for instance, clarify how democracies don’t embrace politically motivated prosecutions of Central Bank figures who refuse to decrease rates of interest when ordered to accomplish that, as Trump has completed in demanding the prosecution of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. I might clarify how democracies don’t order prime regulation enforcement businesses to raid elections workplaces in search of “fraud” that will clarify why a president misplaced an election; but, that’s precisely what Trump has completed this week in siccing Kash Patel’s FBI onto elections officers in Fulton County, Georgia, on the lookout for “evidence” that they dedicated fraud to make sure that Biden received the state in 2020. This time round, they’re seizing ballots solid greater than 5 years in the past. Next time round, in the event that they get away with their actions towards Fulton County, they might try to seize ballots solid within the 2026 midterms. You should see the calamitous impression this could have on the viability of the US electoral system.
I might even point out the use of humiliation rituals by federal businesses geared toward pushing immigrants into an totally Kafkaesque scenario. In current weeks, information shops in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the cities focused by ICE, have reported that asylum seekers and different immigrants are being summoned for obligatory “check-ins.” When they get there, they discover no appointments out there for days. If they go away the road, they’re technically out of compliance with courtroom orders and thus their asylum instances could be closed, and they are often fast-tracked for deportation. If they keep in line, oftentimes they find yourself having to camp on the streets for a number of days and nights in a row, even in freezing situations, earlier than federal officers allow them to into the constructing. That conduct that ought to shock the conscience of all Americans, yourselves included.
The litany of abuses that Trump’s persons are committing on daily basis towards the general public is huge. This authorities is fine-tuning strategies of cruelty and humiliation towards a rising listing of home “enemies.” It is the profoundest of betrayals and one which ought to disqualify Trump and his minions from ever holding excessive workplace once more.
I consider that the seven of precisely what is occurring. And so, I’ll shut out this letter the way in which I opened it, with an enchantment to all of you to, belatedly, do the precise factor. Your celebration has proven itself solely incapable of moderating Trump’s extremism. It is time to cross the aisle and deprive Trump of the congressional rubber stamp that has empowered and emboldened him and to begin reining on this most morally appalling and antidemocratic of presidencies.
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