The White House just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from its grounds. Reporters were turned away. Credentials were confiscated. TЯ★MP called their reporting “FAKE NEWS,” said other outlets could follow, and described the offending press as a threat to “national security.”
There is a temptation to treat each of these things as another Trump outrage, another bead on an apparently infinite string of outrages.
I think that misses the machinery.
Years ago, JD Vance wrote something considerably more interesting than most of what he says now. Trying to understand TЯ★MP in 2016, he told a friend that he went back and forth between seeing him as something like Nixon or “America’s Hitler.”
That is not Democratic opposition research. It is the private judgment of the man who eventually became TЯ★MP’s vice president.
Perhaps Vance’s original insight deserves more attention than his subsequent conversion.
Because Hitler did not seize power from a country that unanimously opposed him. Neither do most aspiring autocrats. They acquire power through some combination of elections, elite collaboration, institutional weakness, propaganda, intimidation, grievance and—eventually—the willingness of ordinary people to excuse increasingly extraordinary things.
That last ingredient matters.
The problem is not merely that some people crave power. Human beings have been producing those people for as long as we have been producing kings.
The deeper problem is that frightened and angry people can be persuaded to hand over their own power to them.
That is the essential psychology of the bootlicker: mistaking proximity to the boot for protection from it. If the boot is currently planted on the neck of someone you hate, it can feel like power. It isn't. You surrendered your power when you handed someone else the authority to decide whose neck deserves the boot.
I have always subscribed to a pretty basic concept in political science that economics TЯ★MPs ideology no pun intended. Although at the moment, his political mass is collapsing inward, I am understandably concerned that not enough people care or understand or will get off their ass and go vote.
Democracy rests on a comforting assumption: give people enough information and political freedom and they will generally resist anyone who threatens to take those freedoms away.
History offers no such guarantee.
People can be frightened into surrendering freedom. They can be taught to hate their neighbors more than they value their own rights. Journalism becomes “fake news.” Political opponents become enemies. Immigrants become invaders. Disagreement becomes disloyalty. Eventually the institutions restraining the leader become obstacles to the nation itself.
Then the inversion is complete.
This is exactly why I built the Autocracy Pressure Index to measure pressure applied, rather than waiting for democratic collapse before admitting something dangerous was happening. A court blocking an abuse does not erase the abuse. Resistance and pressure are different variables. My last full run already found authoritarian pressure spread broadly across all eight measured domains.
Political gravity still matters. I've been writing for years about the enormous gravitational pull of economics on political outcomes: when people feel economically insecure, fear and anger become politically combustible.
TЯ★MP’s economic approval can fall. Courts can resist him. Journalists can fight back. Voters can become exhausted by chaos. And, as I recently pointed out, slightly more than a third of eligible voters didn't vote at all in the last election—more than the share that supported either major party. Political gravity matters enormously. But gravity only moves the people who remain in the system.
None of that guarantees what happens next.
Gravity is a force.
It is not a guardrail.
The terrifying thing about dictatorship has never been that one monster can appear. Human history has never suffered a shortage of those.
It is how many ordinary people will surrender their own power for the pleasure of watching him use it against somebody else.
Related posts
The Autocracy Pressure Index
The original framework: an attempt to measure authoritarian pressure before institutional failure makes the diagnosis obvious.
Running the API
Applying the model to the evidence: where the pressure is concentrated, how institutions resist it, and why resistance should not be mistaken for absence of the threat.
Phase Changes, Moral Geometry & Dashboards
December 17, 2025 — A system can look stable on the dashboard even while its underlying boundaries have shifted. By the time the instruments register the phase change, the important transformation may already have happened.
Pretextual Instrumentality
June 16, 2026 — Political emergencies have a dangerous second life: the problem becomes the justification for building powers and institutions that can survive long after the original pretext disappears.
Shawshank Sunday V: Stoicism
January 1, 2006 — An early meditation on corruption, bitterness, and the part of human freedom that remains ours: the refusal to surrender our own agency simply because the surrounding system is unjust.
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