What's Your Criteria To Say, "OK, It's Enough Of A Dictatorship For Me To Move Somewhere Else?

I suspect that if you asked every American the simple question, “Has Trump turned the presidency into a dictatorship for himself,” the majority would say “no.” He may be going in that direction but… the moment hasn’t come yet? How will we know when it does come? Is there a moment when we weren’t in a dictatorship yesterday but we are in one now? I suspect most of us are waiting for a red line since most of us still imagine dictatorship the way Hollywood does: tanks in the streets, a president-for-life speech, a national anthem in minor key. But in real life?

We know from Hannah Arendt that totalitarianism doesn't always come with boots and armbands— it creeps in through bureaucracy, normalization and public exhaustion. It's not “one big moment” as much as a thousand little moments where people choose comfort, or denial or cynicism. 

The moment doesn’t feel like a moment. It feels like… “Well, the courts let him get away with that, but maybe next time…” or “Yeah, he threatened to jail his opponents, but that’s just talk.” Until one day a member of Congress is jailed; the bureaucracy is loyal to him alone; elections still happen— but they’re basically performative and only the outcome he wants is allowed.

So, is there a line between “not a dictatorship” and “dictatorship”? Technically, yes. But it’s not usually recognized at the moment it’s crossed— only in retrospect. As with 1933 Germany or Hungary under Orbán or Turkey under Erdoğan… things felt “salvageable” right up until they weren’t. You go to sleep thinking the institutions are holding, and you wake up to realize they were hollowed out long ago. When will the Supreme Court be more like Alito and Thomas-level tools? Is that the moment? Has political violence been sanctioned, if not “officially” then through wink-and-nods and Truth Social posts? The Democratic Party hasn’t been crippled yet— at least not by external forces— but is that coming? If Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, is telling her constituents  “We are all afraid… I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real,” at what point do we Hera Chuck Schumer making excuses for the arrest and detention of Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren or Chris Van Hollen?

For many Americans, MAGA propaganda has already filled the void created by a systematically delegitimized media. When will “many” turn into “most?” Is that “the moment?” Or just prt of a mood shift, a  slow decay, a dangerous normalization? It’s almost like we haven’t realized the lights are off while we’ve been sitting in the dark for hours. Fact of the matter is that dictatorship doesn’t arrive all at once, wrapped with a swaktika bow. It creeps; it tests; it learns; it asks: “Can I get away with this?” and when the answer is yes, it asks again. And again. Until one day, the rule of law is gone, the elections don’t mean anything, and the only loyalty that matters is to the man himself. And that “one day” won’t feel like a day. It’ll feel like Tuesday. Like your morning coffee. Like scrolling through news that doesn’t shock you anymore.

Right now— at best— we’re watching the line blur between democracy and authoritarianism, waiting for a definitive moment that may never come. Because by the time you can say, with certainty, “this is dictatorship,” it’s already too late to stop it. So the right question isn’t whether we’re in a dictatorship. It’s how far into it do we have to be before we admit it to ourselves? Yesterday, Michelle Hackman, Mariah Timms and Jacob Gershman reported that the Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, against the Trump Regime’s latest attempt to illegally deport Venezuelan migrants to the El Salvadorian concentration camp. The mirgants’ ACLU lawyers “asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to halt their deportations as reports came that immigration officials began loading the detainees onto buses for deportation under the Alien Enemies Act… U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the federal judge in Washington who is embroiled in the legal fight over the last wave of removals, held an emergency motion hearing by video Friday evening, at which he expressed doubt about having jurisdiction to intervene and declined to take any immediate action. ‘I certainly think the notice is very troubling,’ said Boasberg. ‘I just don’t think I have the power to do anything.’”

The expulsion of hundreds of migrants without hearings sparked legal battles that have gone to the Supreme Court twice in less than a month. The justices in a narrow ruling confirmed individuals designated as alien enemies are entitled to notice of pending removal from the country and an opportunity to challenge their deportations before a federal judge in the district where they had been detained. 

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, individuals designated as alien enemies who are still held in U.S. custody have filed challenges in several states, and judges in those cases issued temporary blocks on categorical removals under the Alien Enemies Act.

Hearings are set for next week in several cases. The cases argue the government still hasn’t implemented a system of notice that would allow those slated for deportation to seek a court’s intervention in time.

“Saying to people, here’s your notice and we’re going to deport you immediately, do what you need to do. That is not proper due process,” said Michelle Brane, the executive director of Together and Free, an immigrant advocacy organization. “I don’t think that’s what any court means when they say give people a reasonable amount of time.”

The DHS spokeswoman said the agency was “complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling.” 

Peter Baker added that “In the unlikely yet profound showdown between the president and the migrant that has captured international attention, the courts have uniformly determined that one of them recently violated the law. And it wasn’t the migrant. According to liberal and conservative judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, Trump’s administration broke the rules by departing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Trump and his team are trying to rewrite the narrative so that it is a dispute about illegal immigration rather than the rule of law. It is a fight that Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and following a process that might have resulted in him being deported anyway. Instead, Trump opted to double down, defying the courts and reverse-engineering a justification for a deportation that his administration initially acknowledged was wrong.”

Trump’s xenophobic team is counting on this being a popular issue with voters. But it’s become less popular everyday Trump is exposed breaking more and more rules and shipping innocent people to the concentration camp. “‘Trump is desperately trying to change the conversation on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s abduction and disappearance because he’s losing in the courts and in the court of public opinion,’ said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center. ‘The vast majority of Americans value the rule of law and the separation of powers, and the public is viscerally responding to these growing attacks on our democracy.’ This case has resonated more broadly, according to some critics of the president, in part because Trump has made clear that he respects few limits on his power. In recent days, Trump, who is himself a convicted felon, has gone so far as to say that he is contemplating sending violent criminals who are American citizens to be locked up in El Salvador, where prisons are not governed by minimal U.S. standards.”

The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return from El Salvador, but the president and his team have indicated they plan to take no action to do so. The case has troubled not just liberal opponents of the president but a number of prominent conservatives, including writers for National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Among them is Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who issued a searing opinion against the Trump administration on Thursday. Judge Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, has been a conservative stalwart for decades, once considered a finalist for the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush.

In his opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Wilkinson chastised the Trump administration for asserting that it can “stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons” without due process. “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” he wrote. 

Still, Trump was undaunted. Inveighing against judges has become almost as appealing to him as inveighing against immigrants. Rather than back down, he made clear on Friday that he plans to dig in on Abrego Garcia’s wrongful imprisonment and will keep taking his case to the public.

“I’m sure it’s a winner politically,” Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under Bush, said of the White House argument.

But “the point is the government is bound by the rule of law,” he said. “And it’s just vitally important that in insisting that others— including immigrants— follow the rule of law and court decisions that the government do the same.”

“Thus far,” wrote Ian Millhiser yesterday, “the Supreme Court has been extraordinarily tolerant of Trump’s efforts to evade judicial review through hypertechnical procedural arguments… Though it is just one order, Saturday’s post-midnight order suggests that the Court may no longer tolerate procedural shenanigans intended to evade meaningful judicial review. If the ACLU’s application is accurate, the Trump administration appears to have believed that it could comply with the Court’s decision in J.G.G. by giving men who are about to be deported a last-minute notice that many of them cannot even understand. Whether most of the justices choose to tolerate this kind of malicious half-compliance with their decisions will likely become clear in the coming days. The Court’s A.A.R.P. order suggests that they will not. Still, it remains to be seen how this case will play out once it is fully litigated. The post-midnight order is only temporary. And it leaves open all of the most important issues in this case, including whether Trump can rely on a wartime statute to deport people during peacetime.”