Greg Olear writes:

In “Slouching Towards Dictatorship,” the introduction to my 2024 book Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Re-elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, I warned that if, God forbid, Trump won a second term,

a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists [are] poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025.

Full disclosure: When I wrote that, I never really believed that Trump would win. I had faith in the wisdom of the American electorate and the essential goodness of humanity. I was accurately reporting all the horrible things Donald had done and the even more horrible things he planned to do, sure, but even I was naïve enough to think that it would never happen here.

But it’s happening.

The Rough Beast was indeed re-elected. We are now just three days away from the Fourth of July 2025. And the America that existed when my book came out last May has, alas, already changed as drastically, and as uglily, as a MAGA woman’s Mar-a-Lago’d face.

Cast your memory back 13 and a half months. (It feels like a decade ago, I realize, but it’s only been a little over a year.) Back then, there was not a masked goon squad kidnapping legal U.S. residents and trafficking them to horrific prisons in El Salvador. Back then there was due process. Back then, members of Congress and mayors of large cities were not being assaulted, detained, arrested, and indicted for trying to prevent these kidnappings from happening. Back then, the National Guard and the Marines were not patrolling the streets of L.A.

Back then, the President was not flying to Florida to ribbon-cut the opening of an Everglades concentration camp called “Alligator Alcatraz,” nor was he peddling “Alligator Alcatraz”-branded merch. Back then, there were no plans to waste resources trying to un-debunk the insidious lie that vaccines cause autism. Back then, there were no plans to build an autism registry. Back then, there were no measles outbreaks.

Back then, we did not award a gargantuan federal contract to a mass data collection and surveillance company owned by a creepy fascist who isn’t sure he wants humanity to survive. Back then, a gaggle of smirking boys had not been granted the authority to use crappy algorithms to mass-fire federal employees. Back then, the idea of a four-year-old rubbing his boogers on the Resolute Desk while his ketamine-high father held court with the White House Press Corps as the President sat idly by was unthinkably preposterous. Back then, our Secretary of Defense was sober, our Attorney General not motivated by personal vendetta, our White House press secretary truthful, our FBI Director not a litigious fabulist who never once was even tempted to utter, in a public press conference, the words “pretty freaking cool.”

Back then, the President of the United States was not actively hawking his own branded memecoin or his own branded cellphone carrier or his own branded social media platform. Back then, the AG and the FBI Director were not board members of a company the President owned. Back then, the President understood that tariffs were dumb. Back then, the Supreme Court hadn’t given the President the power to rule by decree, nor was the President seeking such a power. [Continue reading…]