Fight-or-Flight as a System of Governance

How Fear Replaced Persuasion in the Modern West

When Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in June of 2015, everyone thought it was a joke, likely including Donald Trump himself. I thought Trump was running the way Ron Paul used to, trying to impact the political positions of others more so than actually trying to be President of the United States.

The world changed when Megyn Kelly began to ask Donald Trump the following question: “Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’…”

At that point, before Megyn could even finish the question, Donald Trump interjected, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” and the crowd at the debate instantly burst into laughter, as I think did most listeners at home.

Any other politician would have apologized for those past comments, and would have immediately been out of the race.

Actually, let me say that more accurately: any politician would have apologized for those past comments, and would have been immediately out of the race.

The reason Trump survived is that he pivoted not to apology, but to comedy, and the reason he did that is the same reason so many people voted for him in 2016: he is not a politician. More to the point, Trump did not rise through the institutions that produce politicians. He is an outsider, and to the political class, an outsider can become an insider over time, but must become an insider before they can have any real power. Making an outsider President? They would not allow that if they had a choice - it is what they fear most.

Donald Trump is a flawed man, and I actually voted for Ted Cruz in the 2016 primary. I held my nose when I voted for Trump in the general election (I was NOT going to vote for Hillary Clinton), and then, like many, I was pleasantly surprised by how he ran the country, once President.

He is not a politician. He is a statesman, and imperfect as he may be, he is the first statesman we have had as President since Ronald Reagan, acting from conviction rather than calibration to do what he believes is right, rather than what the existing bureaucracy wants.

Once it became evident that Trump might actually become President, the reaction from the American left was that of a nervous system encountering a threat. Panic registered before analysis. And of course it did: Trump is an existential threat to the bloated bureaucratic machine that has been growing for over 100 years, and effectively running the country since the end of the Cold War.

Trump was not treated as a rival to be debated, but as a contagion to be contained. The cultural and media apparatus did not ask what his rise meant. They only asked how it could be stopped. Trump threatened the status quo and though everyone knows the status quo is broken, the thought of reducing the bureaucratic state and restoring liberty to the people, triggered a psychological rupture.

What the left feared was not the man, but what his popularity revealed: their control over the electorate had been emotional more than structural.

Emotional control is not real control, and once fear surfaced, panic metastasized into identity defense. From that moment forward, Trump’s supporters were not citizens holding a different political view, but a destabilizing class whose existence validated the threat.

This was the moment the left entered fight-or-flight mode, and it has been operating in it ever since.

It was inevitable that the political right would eventually go into fight-or-flight mode too.

Once fear becomes the lens through which a movement interprets reality, the nervous system displaces reason, and escalation becomes instinct.

The Physiology of Political Fear

The left went fully into fight-or-flight mode at 2:00 AM EST, on November 9, 2016, when internal algorithms suddenly realized Donald Trump was going to be President.

Four years later, when Trump was shot in the ear, the right started to join them in fight-or-flight mode, and went in completely the moment the news broke that Charlie Kirk had been shot.

Trump stood up and pumped his fist, but with Charlie Kirk, I began to panic myself. I was checking the news every five minutes, hoping to see that someone stopped the bleeding in time and that Charlie Kirk was still alive. I came out of it, but there are many on both sides who have not.

Let us look at what Fight or Flight mode is.

We evolved with a survival instinct that throws our blood pressure into the stratosphere whenever we run into a life-or-death threat. When ancient man walked into a clearing and saw a lion, or a group of warriors from a warring tribe, a doubling of blood pressure narrowed his perception into a hyper-focus on the threat so that he could decide instantly whether to stand his ground or run.

I suffer from hypertension. It responds very well to medication, but when I first got it, I would sometimes feel my blood pressure go down. It is like you are walking out of a tunnel, and suddenly you have peripheral vision again. You can actually feel the rest of the world, beyond that you were just hyper-focused on, come back into view.

Hypertension is dangerous. It is invaluable when in mortal danger, but only until the danger passes, at which point one’s blood pressure should come back down.

The fight-or-flight response precedes logic. It narrows awareness to survival cues and strips away nuance. In individuals, living in constant hypertension causes heart attacks and strokes. In societies, once a political movement enters fight-or-flight, its thinking collapses into moral binaries,as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We are unable to distinguish between physical threat and ideological threat once the panic switch has been thrown.

To a party in fight-or-flight mode, everything becomes existential, with every disagreement a form of danger, and once something is framed as danger, the mind stops asking what is justifiable and just tries to make the threat go away.

This physiological narrowing reshapes institutions. Fear is contagious, and institutions that absorb panic eventually enforce it.

A society governed through panic becomes incapable of differentiating dissent from harm. Debate begins to look like instability, and skepticism like sabotage.

My wife and I saw this panic firsthand last night. Former Polish President Lech Walesa spoke in Detroit about founding the Solidarity movement, the fall of Polish communism, and where the modern world now stands. He was explicit that he is pro-liberty and not anti-Trump, and yet when question-and-answer period began, every question was either from someone from Poland or about “how do we build a movement like yours to stop Trump.”

The crowd was asking a man who fought communism how to suppress an American political opponent President Walesa was generally favorable toward. They were so adrenalized they could not hear him say that Trump was imperfect, but largely doing a decent job. The fear response literally rewired the meaning of his words.

I had a very different question prepared. I wanted to thank him for helping make it possible for my wife to escape communism, and then ask for his thoughts on Ronald Reagan. I wanted at least one voice to speak to him as an ally of freedom rather than as a political weapon, but Q&A ended before the microphone reached me.

What struck me was not disappointment but recognition: this is what a nervous system in fight or flight does. It cannot process nuance, gratitude, or even agreement. It treats everything as danger, even those who stand on the same side of liberty.

When the nervous system becomes the interpreter of reality, fear has no patience for deliberation and so persuasion is replaced by control. Fear is a governor that only knows two verbs: fight, or flee.

The Progressive Moral Panic and the Right’s Counterpunch

The left did not simply oppose Trump. It cast him as an interruption to moral history. The rhetoric escalated from “dangerous” to “illegitimate” to “fascist” before he even held the levers of power.

Just to be clear, there are many reasons to dislike Donald Trump. His rhetoric is bombastic and often over the top. He is rude to his political opponents and often dishonest toward them, on both sides of the aisle. I remember when he called Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” during the primaries. I am not even sure what the supposed lie was - Ted Cruz is an honest man.

Democrats also had the “grab them by the…” quote from the infamous Billy Bush video, which by itself would normally have been enough to end someone’s political career.

Apparently none of those things were sufficiently bad for the left to justify the level of hatred they required. They ended up manufacturing a myriad of additional things to hate Trump for, that were not true, and Trump is now the most hated person in the world by people who were once asking him for campaign donations.

We were told he was a Russian asset, only to learn the Steele Dossier was a Clinton-funded political op built on disinformation. We were told he ordered protesters “gassed for a Bible photo op,” only to learn the park had been scheduled for clearing long before he arrived. We were told he called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” only to see the full transcript where he explicitly condemned them.

We were told he put immigrant children in cages, only to discover the photographs were from the Obama administration. We were told he tried to ban Muslims, when the order was based on Obama-era terror watch lists and left out over 80 percent of Muslim-majority nations. We were told he tried to overthrow the Post Office, that he suggested injecting bleach, and that he praised white supremacy, but every one of those narratives collapsed upon review.

The lies were not incidental. They were required to sustain the level of fear needed to justify the response.

Now the political left believes he is a racist, a fascist, a wanna-be dictator, a wanna-be king, and whatever other label fits the crisis of the day. Trump is portrayed as whatever someone thinks is the very worst thing a person can be, based almost entirely on lies that have long since been debunked.

People who were photographed smiling at his wedding have spent the past ten years telling their followers to “get in their faces” and “fight them when you see them in public” in relation to his administrative staff. Some of them have crossed the line into open calls for violence.

See Appendix 1 for a partial list of DNC leaders creating fear in the party base.

The media has been in lock-step on all of this, and I do not believe that is coincidental. It looks suspiciously like the kind of regime change operation the CIA has perfected overseas, being turned inward against our own country, and if that sounds conspiratorial, I laid out the mechanics of exactly how that works in a prior article.

See Appendix 2 for a partial list of media personalities feeding the fear.

My wife and I travelled to Japan a few months ago, and my wife’s friends and family in Poland could not believe she was willing to leave the country. “Don’t you realize that Trump is having American citizens who were not born in America arrested when they return to the United States?” they asked. People in Poland, and likely in other countries, actually believe that to be true, as absurd as it is.

We had no issues returning to the country. The Polish people are being fed lies, just as we are. Even overseas, the hatred of Trump is fight-or-flight, fed by a media that has lost its collective mind.

We of course have the freedom of speech, and I would never suggest restricting it, but free speech requires the individual to take some level of responsibility, and more to the point it requires the organizations media personnel are working for to take some level of responsibility.

The left’s political leadership, along with the mainstream media, moved from legitimate opposition based on truths, to moral panic based on lies. They have accepted no accountability or responsibility for that, and in fact they continue to do it largely unabated.

Panic needs constant reinforcement to remain stable, and once the left committed to treating Trump as an existential threat, it trapped itself inside the logic of its own emergency. As with shock humor, panic requires escalation, meaning that each new lie has to make Trump even worse than the last one.

When everyone tells the same lies, there is structure, and where there is structure, there is leadership. Someone is calling the shots and driving the fear. Manufacturing threat was the only way to justify extraordinary measures, and extraordinary measures were the only way to retain political dominance once persuasion failed.

The anti-Trump rhetoric created emotional permission to loot, riot, and commit mayhem, and once emotional permission was granted, some people predictably escalated from violence to attempted assassination. If an opponent is “fascist,” then suppression becomes self-defense.

Trump did not de-escalate the panic. He inverted it. He discovered that outrage is energy, and recognized that the left’s fear could be redirected. This instinctive judo created a feedback loop: the more the left panicked, the more his base felt validated; the more validated his base became, the more the left escalated its panic. Each side began to metabolize the other’s existence as proof of its own fears.

Trump did not try to put his own followers into fight-or-flight mode, but he certainly encouraged the left to go further and further into it such that the rhetoric got more and more extreme, and thus easier and easier to ridicule.

Trump’s supporters learned that panic unnerved their opponents, and unnerving them felt like ‘winning’ such the left’s fear became the right’s entertainment. Once politics became emotional theater, neither side had an incentive to restore equilibrium. Conflict was no longer about outcomes - it became identity reinforcement.

The right eventually entered its own version of fight-or-flight, but it did so reactively rather than initiatively. Its adrenalization came not from ideological vulnerability, but from spectacle and retaliation.

Trump being shot in the ear began pushing the right into fight-or-flight mode, and when Charlie Kirk was shot, that movement was complete. We now expect more rather than less violence.

I cannot predict with any certainty what a counterpunch from the right will look like. So far it has stayed in the realm of mockery rather than moving toward suppression. My fear is that continued escalation from the political left will eventually push the right beyond memes, and escalation does not stay symbolic forever.

Fear as Operating System

The left began pushing people into fight-or-flight mode the instant it became evident that Donald Trump would become President, but it needed something structural to fully encapsulate things. Covid-19 gave both the encapsulation vehicle, as well as an excuse to perform a proof of concept for control.

Once Covid hit, the state suddenly had not only emotional justification, but also the procedural justification to suspend norms. Censorship became public health, mandates became morality, and civil liberties were treated as epidemiological threats.

The world was locked down.

I was personally guilty of falling for the hype. My wife and I were on vacation in San Antonio when the disease hit the United States and traveled home in fear. We got lucky and bought toilet paper at Costco the day before the lockdown in Michigan started, and for a brief period we were disinfecting everything we bought from the store, on the rare occasions we left the house.

Then I got Covid-19 myself.

There are certain groups Covid-19 hits very hard, but I am not in those groups. I felt slightly fluish. I don’t remember where we were planning to go, but we needed to take a Covid-19 test, and when we went to CVS to get tested, I popped up positive - otherwise I would never have known I had the disease.

Friends and family were horrified that I had this disease, but I didn’t feel very sick, and after a few days it went away.

I remember thinking, “The world looks very different now that I’m on the other side of things.” I was happy I now had antibodies, before any vaccines were even available.

Then the lies started.

I don’t know when I realized just how bad the lies were, but by the time I heard, “Not having symptoms is a symptom,” the lockdown suddenly made me feel angry rather than safe.

I’ve had Covid-19 at least four times. It lasts longer than a regular flu, and since I work from home, I’ve missed a total of two days of work. My wife had a fever of over 103 from it one morning, but I gave her ibuprofen and her fever came down. For us, at its worst it was like getting a flu when you were a kid, before your body knew how to deal with such things.

For the public at-large, it was said to be much more than that, and it gave left-leaning political pundits, comedians, and celebrities an excuse to lash out at the unvaccinated.

Once fear became the organizing principle, every institution that could amplify fear became a de facto arm of governance: media, academia, bureaucracy, Big Tech, and even the medical establishment. Much of what they were telling us was clearly not true.

By December of 2021, I was reduced to writing stuff like this on Facebook:

I want to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. It does not protect the protected from the unprotected, and protects neither the protected, nor the unprotected from the omicron variant, but it does offer protection to the protected if the unprotected are protected by the protection that omicron leaves them unprotected against.

If you get protected by the protection that will not protect you, then when the omicron variant hits in force, you will be better prepared to weather the symptoms of not having symptoms.

Within 100 days we expect to have a vaccine that will protect the protected against a disease that can be so severe that nobody knows they have it. While some might think that an asymptomatic disease is not something we need to be protected against, particularly when the protection does not protect the protected, the truth is that the unprotected must protect the protected, lest the protected be unprotected from the disease that will afflict them with afflictionless afflictions.

Understand that the afflicted are afflicted with afflictions that are unafflicting, and that the symptoms of the symptomatic are that they have no symptoms, and are asymptomatic, making them the perfect vehicles to unprotect the protected from the protection the protected need the unprotected to protect them from.

The great thing about mutations is that every new variant makes this whole thing easier to understand.

Unfortunately, not everyone thought that was funny, and once the public got used to the idea that fear can suspend law, a civilization-level threshold was crossed. The precedent was not the specific mandates. The precedent was the principle that emergency overrides process. When that principle is accepted, nothing prevents the next emergency from being ideological rather than biological.

At that moment, fear stops being a reaction and became a governance model.

Once governance is based on fear, it will invariably go too far. Fear is the measurable threshold that leads to tyranny and once the state formalizes content policing with statutory backing or delegates it to platforms under threat of sanction, emergency governance has crossed into illiberalism.

A political movement that governs through fear learns quickly that fear is more efficient than persuasion. Fear rallies turnout. Fear freezes dissent. Fear centralizes authority without needing to justify doing so.

Once fear becomes the operating logic of politics, returning to argument becomes impossible. Panic cannot back down without losing the emotional payoff that sustains it, and as with Andrew Dice Clay and his over-the-top chauvinism comedy bit, each new show has to be more outrageous than the last to maintain its shock-value.

This is where the left crossed the point of reversibility. Fear is not only what it uses; fear is what it must maintain. It cannot relax its grip without collapsing its own justification for control.

Calm is a threat to a system that depends on anxiety to secure obedience. Once fear becomes the bloodstream, the patient can no longer imagine life without it.

Asymmetry of Collapse: Why the Right Can Exhaust Itself but the Left Cannot

The right’s fight-or-flight is a response. The left’s fight-or-flight is a worldview. The right does not depend on crisis to justify its legitimacy, but the left now does. The right may eventually burn out simply because emotional adrenaline has a half-life. The left cannot burn out, because its legitimacy is tied to the perpetual claim that it is trying to prevent catastrophe.

Conservatives retreat into fight-or-flight when they feel hunted. Progressives now remain in fight-or-flight on the belief that democracy, the Constitution, and all that is holy in this world, is under siege by the man they call ‘the Orange One.’

Shortly after Trump was elected, my parents were bemoaning his existence and I stopped them cold by asking, “Would you prefer Ted Cruz?”

They would not come out and say it, but they would not have preferred Ted Cruz anymore than a conservative in Canada prefers Mark Carney over Justin Trudeau. It took Trump four years to figure things out, whereas Cruz would have hit the ground running on day one.

Those who see Trump as a buffoon would not prefer someone they see as more competent, and as such the politics of Fight or Flight will not end with Trump. This is the new normal.

Even if the next President is on the left, the left will remain in fight-or-flight mode in order to strengthen and retain power.

The right still has a built-in feedback mechanism tied to competence. When systems break, conservatives eventually want them to work again. The left, by contrast, uses broken systems as proof that its ideology has not yet been fully applied. The more disorder exists, the more it can be invoked as justification for further intervention. The right repairs. The left reinterprets collapse as evidence that it needs more control.

If what the left defines as success ever arrived, justification for extraordinary measures would evaporate. Order would remove the need for ideological emergency, and as a consequence, order must never be allowed to arrive. The system must remain sick so that the physician retains authority.

The right can, in principle, return to normal (whether or not it will in the age of Trump has yet to be seen). The left has defined normal as privilege, which means a return to normal would invalidate its mission.

This irreversibility is already visible across Europe, where there are no structural constraints to force ideological retreat. There is no equivalent to the First Amendment, nor are there any other natural guardrails against ideology. Bureaucratic authority is sovereign, and once panic becomes embedded in the bureaucracy, there is no exit.

The United States is the only Western nation with a constitutional immune system strong enough to resist permanent authoritarian capture. The administrative state can panic indefinitely, but it cannot fully consummate its power so long as constitutional law remains outside its reach. That does not guarantee reversal, but it preserves the possibility of reversal, at least until the Bill of Rights is ignored, and you’ll know that’s happening as soon as you hear the phrase, “the freedom of speech was never intended to let you say whatever you want.”

This is why the future of the West now rests disproportionately on the United States. If the United States remains free, there is still a functioning model of liberty in the West. If the United States succumbs, there is no free society left to re-export freedom from.

For the third time in just over a century, Europe may need America to rescue it, not from an external enemy, but from its own new political rot.

The National Heart Attack

A body cannot live forever in fight-or-flight, and a civilization cannot remain hypertensive without consequence. There comes a point where the arterial pressure exceeds what the structure can withstand.

The United States, and the West in general, is not drifting toward collapse, but accelerating toward what biology would diagnose as cardiac arrest: a system that has mistaken constant tension for life and has lost the ability to self-regulate.

The coming break will not arrive as a surprise so much as a culmination. Everyone thinks France will go through it first, but it will start in England, which is on the verge of civil war, thanks to mass migration, parallel moral orders, and the state’s failure to police grooming gangs.

France seems to lack the political will to rebel, or it would have done so when Marine LePen was banned from running in an election she was poised to win. France instead accepted being told who it can and cannot vote for.

Was Marine LePen guilty of using her European Union Parliamentary staff to perform national political activity? As a Parliamentarian representing France, how exactly is she supposed to separate those things? If that is the law, it is impossible to be in the EU Parliament without being guilty.

Perhaps that is why she was put in the EU Parliament to begin with.

Before the English public revolts, the government will clamp down, and since the government can claim to be doing so to protect Islam and anti-Islamic elements from one another, much of the public will see that clampdown as both just and necessary. Covid-19 already supplied the blueprint.

Chronic adrenaline does not end with resolution. It ends with failure of capacity. A nation that can no longer tolerate calm eventually treats quiet as threat. When a society forgets how to breathe, the first true stillness that returns is a lockdown.

Our political class still behaves as if this is a contest over policy, but it is not. It is a contest over emotional territory in which one side believes panic is survival, and the other believes panic is retaliation. Neither has any interest in governing. They are too busy reacting to one another.

And Trump, for all his faults, may ironically be the only adult in the room, as far as governance is concerned. He and his administration seem like the only ones who remember that the government is supposed to do more than fight among itself.

The solution is both painful and obvious: the political right needs to continue to govern calmly, even as the left flails away trying to prevent governance. While the left continues to defund the police and to do other things everyone knows will cause failure, the right needs to continue governing with competence and restraint.

The left is going to go into a collective cardiac arrest whether we like it or not. The way past that is to avoid going through it with them. Postmodernism can create as many ‘my truths’ as it wants on the left as long as the political right does not start playing the same games. If too many follow Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens into what is being called the ‘woke right,’ we’re in trouble, but as long as the ‘woke right’ stays fringe, the country should survive.

The antidote to tyranny is not outrage, but reality.

I would love to see de-escalation, but I’m afraid things are going to get worse before they get better. After the left finishes its collective heart attack, the actual voters on the left will realize they still breathe in a free country, and that all of the fear was for naught. What the left begins to look like after that, I can’t say, but if it does not involve a shared reality the left will cease to have a national stage.

No society can survive when escalation becomes a civic virtue and calm becomes a civic threat. A hypertensive body either relearns how to downshift, or it seizes. A hypertensive nation either rediscovers equilibrium, or it turns increasingly violent, eventually forcing government to intervene through totalitarianism.

We are living inside a political nervous system that has forgotten how to rest. The heart is still beating, but only through pressure, and sooner or later, every over-pressurized system meets its limit. At some point we are going to have to put the pieces back together, and we will need the political left to do so, once it regains sound footing.

The United States has one remaining safeguard that no other Western nation retains: a constitutional structure that has thus far been strong enough to outlast each specific crisis. That will be true until a critical mass of our citizens are fearful enough to put security ahead of the Bill of Rights.

Every cardiac arrest has a point of no return. The West is approaching it. Either America becomes the place where fear finally breaks, or it becomes freedom’s epitaph.

Appendix 1: DNC Leadership Quotes

Speaker

Date / Context

Quote

Joe Biden

Sept 1, 2022 — “Soul of the Nation” speech

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Joe Biden

Aug 25, 2023 — Maryland fundraiser

“Trump and his MAGA followers are determined to destroy American democracy.”

Kamala Harris

Aug 2023 — press remarks

“We have a former president who literally tried to overthrow the United States government.”

Hillary Clinton

Oct 21, 2022 — MSNBC interview

“We are at the brink of losing our democracy, and Trump is the catalyst.”

Hillary Clinton

Sept 2023 — CBS interview

“Trump is an authoritarian figure… it is a reappearance of fascism.”

Bernie Sanders

Jan 2020 — CNN town hall

“This president is a pathological liar, an authoritarian, and a threat to the future of this country.”

Beto O’Rourke

2019 campaign speech

“This is a president who is a racist and a fascist.”

Jerry Nadler

Dec 2019 — impeachment remarks

“Donald Trump poses a continuing threat to our democratic institutions.”

Chuck Schumer

Jan 2020 — Senate floor

“We have a president who sees himself more as a king than as a president.”

Nancy Pelosi

June 2019 — NYT interview

“We are dealing with a president who believes he is above the law.”

Adam Schiff

Feb 10, 2021 — CNN

“Trump wanted to be a king, not a president. That is the danger he still poses.”

Joe Biden

Sept 2022 — Philadelphia speech

“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not believe in the will of the people.”

Hillary Clinton

Oct 2023 — media interview

“We are dealing with a cult. And that cult is a direct threat to the rest of the country.”

Maxine Waters

June 2018 — rally speech

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant… you push back on them.”

Eric Holder

Oct 2018 — campaign event

“When they go low, we kick them.”

Cory Booker

2018 — public remarks

“Get up in the face of some congresspeople.”

Appendix 2: Media Leadership Quotes

Speaker / Outlet

Date / Context

Quote

Rachel Maddow (MSNBC)

Jan 6, 2021 broadcast

“Trumpism is not a political movement. It is a fascist threat to the United States.”

Joy Reid (MSNBC)

Aug 2023

“We are watching the rise of American fascism in real time.”

Don Lemon (CNN)

June 2020 broadcast

“Trump is a dictator. He wants absolute loyalty and obedience.”

Anderson Cooper (CNN)

Nov 2020 coverage

“This is what authoritarian leaders do when democracy threatens their hold on power.”

Morning Joe (MSNBC — Joe Scarborough)

Jan 2022

“Trump is openly an autocrat in waiting.”

Washington Post Editorial Board

Jan 2021

“Trump is the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.”

New York Times (Paul Krugman)

July 2022 column

“We are facing an authoritarian movement with Trump as its figurehead and battering ram.”

New York Times (Thomas Friedman)

Sept 2022 column

“If Trump returns to power, it will be the end of American democracy as we know it.”

The Atlantic (Anne Applebaum)

Dec 2021

“Trump is not merely populist. He is leading a proto-fascist movement.”

The Atlantic (David Frum)

Oct 2020

“Trumpism is authoritarianism in motion.”

MSNBC (Nicolle Wallace)

Oct 2021

“He’s not running for office. He’s running for revenge.”

CNN (Brian Stelter)

2021 broadcast

“We are living through the attempted dismantling of democracy.”

The Guardian

Nov 2020 analysis

“Trump is no longer a president in a democracy. He is an aspiring strongman.”

Slate Magazine

2022 headline

“The GOP is now a fascist movement.”

The New Republic

2023 feature

“Trump is building an American authoritarianism inspired by European fascism.”

Vanity Fair

2019 profile

“Trump does not want to govern. He wants to rule.”