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America’s Authoritarian Remodel Is Well Underway

There’s an ick factor to Trumpism that is getting worse by the day.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent displays an article on the proposed $250 banknote featuring an image of President Donald Trump during a news conference at the White House on May 28.

Over the past few weeks, the Trump Department of Justice has been assiduously scrubbing press releases relating to the January 6, 2021, convictions. Hundreds of these documents announcing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of people involved in the insurrection have simply vanished. It is an astoundingly Orwellian effort at erasing history, at the same time that the agency has created, with taxpayer money, a multi-billion dollar slush fund to reward these men and women who flirted with treason on that dark winter day.

As Trump’s popularity continues to plummet, his authoritarian instincts have kicked into an even higher gear. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump and his administration are corroding not only basic norms about what the public purse can be used for, but they are also marshaling the entire apparatus of the federal government to retell the story of the past decade in a way designed to make the president and his henchmen—including his paramilitaries outside of government—look anything but the traitors to democracy and decency that they so manifestly are.

At the same time, the Trump regime is also putting extraordinary pressure on public officials to meet self-imposed authoritarian  targets on everything from mass deportations to cult homages to Trump himself.

We Should All Be Mad As Hell About Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund May 22, 2026

We Should All Be Mad As Hell About Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund

Trump Is Rooting Around in the Public Trough May 15, 2026

Trump Is Rooting Around in the Public Trough

Hungary Just Showed How to Kick Out a Strongman May 8, 2026

Hungary Just Showed How to Kick Out a Strongman

When it comes to the deportations, perhaps no case better illustrates the Kafkaesque depths that the bureaucracy is now plumbing than that of Levi Mendez-Maldonado, a young Honduran asylum seeker in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Mendez-Maldonado arrived, unaccompanied, as a 17-year-old, in 2022, at the height of the most recent surge of asylum seekers at the southern border. He spent a few months in Texas and then relocated to Charlotte, where an older brother lived. A little over two years later, Mendez-Maldonado was shot and killed. 

The young man’s immigration attorney, Becca O’Neill, co-director of the Carolina Migrant Network, only found out about his murder months later, when her office received his work permit and she tried to reach him to give him the document. Unable to locate him, she........

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