QUOTED FROM:  https://jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-our-daughters

 

My daughter has had a difficult few months in school. By some administrative fluke, she ended up in a class where she was the only girl—it was just Layla, surrounded by a dozen or so 15-year-old boys. She could have found it tolerable, I think, if not for the rape jokes.

That’s right, in the year 2026—in a progressive Brooklyn high school—my daughter had to listen to her classmates ‘joking’ about rape. These are boys she thought were her peers and friends, some of whom she’s known since pre-school. And though the school ended up handling it well, I watched Layla’s light dim a little every time she came home from that class. For her, it was a regular reminder that the world sees her as less human, less worthy of dignity. Just less.

It’s a feeling I remember well, and one I couldn’t stop thinking about this weekend as I considered conservatives’ plan for the next generation of girls and young women. Because what they have in store for our daughters isn’t just about policy and politics, but dimming their collective lights.

A few weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation—the powerhouse organization behind Project 2025—released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.” Written by authors with close ties to the Trump administration, the document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls and young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.

The document is part of a broad, well-funded campaign to reassert misogynist control by targeting women while they’re young and pliable—and chip away at one of Democrats’ most supportive demographics in the process.

According to Heritage, the future of the country relies on more straight married couples having more children. To make that happen, the group says, the government has to address multiple factors that “conspire” to drive down birth rates:

“These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home…”

In other words, pretty much every major advancement for women’s rights and freedom is a problem. And whether it’s eradicating “cheap and ubiquitous” access to contraception or appointing family court judges hostile to divorce, Heritage has the answer.

Like the conservative movement more broadly, the organization wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? “Less burnout, more babies.”

This isn’t some fringe effort. From the tradwife explosion to MAHA disinformation about birth control, conservatives are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into convincing the next generation that the rapid erosion of their rights isn’t a political and moral crisis—but a lifestyle upgrade.

Why bother with the horror of the professional and public world, young women are told, when you can just opt out? That message isn’t limited to Turning Point USA conferences, either: over the last year, outlets from CBS News to NPR have hosted earnest ‘debates’ on whether feminism “failed women.”

Even the Vice President of the United States is advising women to give up work for motherhood. At the March for Life last month, JD Vance said, “you’re never going to find great meaning in a cubicle or in front of a computer screen—but you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.” (He said something near-identical in a 2022 tweet.)

But there’s only so much choice conservatives plan to give young women in the matter—and other powerful misogynists are done bothering with pretense. This week, billionaire pro-natalist Elon Musk—who bemoans birth control and built an AI tool that lets men “undress” women’s images—co-signed this chilling X post:

When I say they’re coming for our daughters, I’m not exaggerating. The powerful people obsessed with the (white) birth rate and enforcing ‘traditional’ values and norms know they need young women to do it—whether those young women like it or not.

What do you think provocateur Jordan Peterson meant when he talked about “enforced monogamy” as a solution to men’s violence in 2018? Or why, nearly a decade later, one of the country’s most popular podcasts would seriously debate whether young men’s inability to find sexual partners and have children is a “mass extinction event” akin to “genocide”?

“Does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct this?,” Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett asked.

If this were just about men’s overwhelming desire to advance their genetic lines, we’d hear podcasts and pundits talking about IVF or how to incentivize surrogacy. And if conservatives were simply concerned about the birth rate, they’d propose policy solutions that actually help families—like paid parental leave, affordable child care, and laws that don’t kill pregnant women.

Pretending this is some noble pursuit to save civilization is just a way to launder rape apologia and misogyny. The actual goal is good old-fashioned control and a world where women—young women, especially—have no choices.

And let’s be blunt: abortion bans and forced pregnancy were just the beginning.

Key to conservatives’ plan is getting girls and young women married and pregnant as early as possible. How early? Well, Heritage cites women in their early twenties as “more fertile” (yuck), but the authors also scold Democrats for “stigmatizing teen mothers.” One of those authors, Emma Waters, is working with the White House on a campaign to “persuade” women to have more babies—an effort that includes scrapping sex education in favor of “menstrual cycle classes” designed to teach the optimal time to conceive.

At the same time, the Trump administration has blocked funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs, blasting them as “radical indoctrination,” while Heritage has quietly dropped its hand-wringing about teen pregnancy in favor of a new term: the “non-marital teen birth rate.”

In other words, the problem is no longer that girls are getting pregnant before adulthood—it’s that they’re not married first. Pair that with the fact that most teen pregnancies are fathered by adult men, and with Republicans’ ongoing resistance to child marriage bans, and you start to see exactly what kind of future they’re fighting for.

Consider what all of this means for girls across the country, especially those in conservative-led states. Sex education is being eliminated or replaced with propaganda like ‘Baby Olivia’ videos, lessons telling girls that sex makes them ‘dirty’, and Trump’s menstrual classes. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive healthcare clinics are being shuttered in favor of crisis pregnancy centers, which doesn’t just make it harder for young people to access abortion—but contraception, too.

In fact, it’s only a matter of time before Republicans argue teens shouldn’t have birth control at all. They’ve already laid the groundwork by banning gender affirming care for minors, arguing that hormones harm young bodies.

Girls who would normally turn somewhere for help will also be out of luck. Conservatives aren’t just systematically stripping away support systems for teens, they’re eradicating basic information. Attorneys general in several states are fighting to ban ads for pro-choice groups that share information about abortion, while legislators across the country are introducing bills to make those sites illegal in the first place.

Lawmakers are also working to quash pro-choice speech in high schools and colleges—like banning campus health centers from even mentioning abortion, including in states where it’s legal. And under so-called ‘abortion trafficking’ laws, grandmothers and older sisters could face felony charges for helping a teen end their pregnancy. There are even attempts to criminalize lending a young person gas money to leave the state, or sending them a text message with a URL to an abortion clinic.

They want our daughters and granddaughters to have zero information about their bodies and sex, no ability to protect themselves from pregnancy, limited choices for an intellectual and professional life, and—once our girls have been corralled into early marriages—few opportunities to leave.

Push them into the home, force them to get pregnant, rinse and repeat.

And while it’s certainly easier for the Heritage Foundation and their allies if American girls fall in line, conservatives in power are just as happy to force them onto that narrow path. As with all coercive men, the fact that young women don’t want this is part of the appeal.

The truth is that the next generation is as ambitious as ever. The futures they want for themselves are broad and bright. Sometimes that includes husbands and children, sometimes it doesn’t. The most recent studies show that young men are actually far more likely to name children as their top marker of personal success. (Women cite financial independence and their careers.) It’s young men who are having a hard time finding partners, and it’s young men who are lonely.

In other words, despite years of cultural messages to the contrary—it’s men, actually, who are desperate for marriage and babies.

I suppose that’s what Heritage’s roadmap and the conservative agenda is really about: building the world that men want, and forcing women to live inside it.

I’m far more interested in the big, bright life my daughter wants, and ensuring it stays her own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night’s NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.

But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, “socialism,” and the differences between Republican “free market” nuts and FDR’s re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation’s citizens.

Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the League the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times.

But that’s pretty much exactly what Reagaonics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it’s the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.

For capitalism to work in a way that doesn’t produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.

The NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other, and under what circumstances.

The NFL’s super-socialist regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise up through the ranks in the following season.

It’s much like progressive income taxation and the estate tax, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top. These regulations guarantee the safety and stability of the game itself, and also guarantee that fans of football have a consistent experience, because everybody understands and follows the rules.

That’s not meritocracy; it’s planned redistribution of future resources to maintain league balance. If American public policy worked this way, the millionaire opinion bots at billionaire-owned Fox “News” would spontaneously combust.

The league also pools its television and licensing revenue and divides it equally among all teams: No owner gets richer just because they’re in a bigger market. In a pure “free market,” the Cowboys and Giants would drown everyone else in cash. The NFL says, “Nope, everybody eats.” That’s redistribution by design.

And they impose a hard salary cap so rich owners can’t simply buy championships, and they require owners to spend what is effectively a minimum wage on players rather than hoarding profits. Teams that overspend are punished: that’s collective control of capital to prevent oligarchy, the exact thing conservatives scream about.

NFL teams are also required to spend a minimum percentage of shared revenue on their players. Owners can’t just hoard money; they must reinvest in labor. That’s closer to social democracy than laissez-faire capitalism.

The NFL figured out something America forgot after Reagan: markets only work when rules prevent the powerful from rigging the game.

In other words, the NFL is a regulated market with enforced rules that prevent monopolies, protect labor, and preserve competition. And because of that, small-market teams can win, dynasties don’t last forever, and fans get a fair game.

If the American economy were run more like the NFL, we’d have fewer oligarchs, more competition, and a much healthier middle class.

But imagine if Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, or the other idiots like them who first advised the Reagan administration and now have guided Republicans ever since were to have taken over the NFL.

The teams with the wealthiest owners would always get the best players, and thus would win every game. They might even decide that the team that gave the NFL the most money could have an extra player or three on the field at various times.

They’d assure us that the teams that didn’t perform as well just have to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Perhaps their problem is just that their players are “lazy,” these people would tell us, and the solution is to cut their salaries and reduce the amount of protective equipment they can wear so that they will have a “incentive” to play harder and increase their performance.

Then the richest teams would begin buying the poorer teams, until all the teams are owned by three or four billionaires. Sounds like every industry in today’s America. But conservatives would try to convince you it would create a football paradise, right?

Of course it wouldn’t be a paradise: Fans would stop watching, kids would stop dreaming of playing, and the game itself would collapse under the weight of rigging and unfairness. Not to mention that if the socialist NFL ever actually tried some crazy “free market” stupidity like that, Congress would be holding hearings within a week and the public outrage would be deafening.

But when the same thing happens in our economy, we’re told by Republicans that it’s just “the free market.” We’re told that “monopolies are natural,” that “billionaires are geniuses,” and that working people who can’t get ahead in a rigged system somehow “deserve their fate.”

We’re told by these fools that any attempt to re-write the rules so the American economy is fair again and our middle class can recover from the massive $50+ trillion hit it’s taken from 45 years of Reaganomics is “socialism,” even though FDR’s system is exactly how every successful capitalist system in history has worked.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He knew markets don’t self-police any more than football does. Without referees, rules, and consequences, the biggest and most ruthless players take over, the game stops being a game, and democracy itself is put at risk. And when the morbidly rich write the rules, they inevitably only benefit themselves; everybody else gets screwed.

The NFL doesn’t regulate football because it hates competition: it regulates football and “redistributes” wealth and opportunity so competition can exist at all. America once did the same thing with capitalism, and the result was the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.

Two-thirds of us were in the middle class when Reagan came into office, and could get there with a single paycheck thanks to FDR‘s and LBJ‘s “socialist” New Deal and Great Society policies. Today it’s only roughly 45% of us, and requires two paychecks. All because of 45 years of Reaganomics.

The choice in front of us is simple. We can keep pretending that letting billionaires write the political and economic rules and own the media is “freedom,” or we can remember that a fair game is what freedom actually looks like.

Because when the rules only work for the owners, the rest of us aren’t players anymore. We’re just there to watch, pay, and lose what little we have so the billionaires can buy another super-yacht.

 Surprise, Surprise?! TrumpRX is a fake: read the fine print. 

Most drug companies offer introductory specials on their new drugs, where if you contact them they’ll give you a substantial discount for the first one or two months. Trump’s new TrumpRX website claims to reduce the cost of drugs for Americans, but all it does is link you to the drug companies’s websites where these very limited coupons are available. It’s just another grift, as one should always expect from this professional grifter…

Trump bankruptcies and failures (a partial list )

• Trump Taj Mahal
• Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino
• Trump Castle Casino Resort
• Plaza Hotel in New York City
• Trump Hotels & Casino Resort
• Trump Entertainment Resorts
• Trump Steaks — these were discontinued after only two months due to extremely low sales.
• Trump Vodka (2005–2011): Launched with high expectations to compete with top-shelf brands, it failed to capture market share and ceased production in 2011.
• Trump Mortgage (2006–2007): Launched just before the housing market crash, the company failed within 18 months, with reports of misrepresented leadership and low revenue.
• Trump Magazine (2007–2009): Originally branded as Trump Style and later Trump World, this publication shut down amid the recession and declining ad revenue.
• GoTrump.com (2006–2007): A travel website that failed to gain traction in a competitive market and shut down after one year.
• Trump: The Game (1989/2004): A Monopoly-style board game that failed to sell well in its initial release and a subsequent relaunch.
• Trump University (2005–2011): A real estate training program that faced lawsuits alleging fraud and, in 2017, resulted in a $25 million settlement.
• The Trump Network (2009–2012): A multi-level marketing company that sold vitamins and home test kits before folding.
• Trump Fragrances (2004–2015): Lines such as “Success by Trump” were discontinued due to low sales.
• Trump Ice (2000s): While it had some intermittent success, this bottled water brand failed to establish a permanent, successful place in the market.
• Trump Shuttle (airline)
• Other Failed Goods: Trump Mattresses (Serta), Trump Shirts, and various other branded items were discontinued. 
• Trump First Presidential Administration – failed
• Trump Second Presidential Administration – failing

 

You need to read this book:  The Last American President:  A Broken Man, A Corrupt Party, and the World on the Brink, by Thom Hartmann.

Hartmann pulls no punches in this recent book that summarizes the convergence of (1) a man with no morals, a man whose entire life has been one failure after another, but who plays the part of a genius, (2) obscenely wealthy men who want to control government, and (3) a political party that threw away principles to gain power.

The Last American President rips open America’s wounded democracy to expose a terrifying truth: Donald Trump isn’t an anomaly—he’s the inevitable product of a system engineered to fail. This searing investigation reveals how a man forged by childhood trauma, pathological narcissism, and calculated cruelty didn’t hijack democracy—he was handed the keys by those who should have been its guardians.

Hartmann uncovers the unholy alliance between Trump’s damaged psyche and America’s rotted institutions. From Fred Trump’s brutal parenting to Roy Cohn’s lessons in shamelessness, from a Republican Party that traded principles for power to billionaire donors who treated democracy as a profit center, this book exposes the assembly line that manufactured an authoritarian.

But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it’s surprising, but because it is so ignorant, so filled with hate, so vile — and because it tells us EXACTLY what Trump is about.

This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump is one of those moments — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens.

That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.

Promoting a video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as non-human primates isn’t a joke. It isn’t satire or an accident. It’s the oldest racist smear in the book, dressed up in a cheap meme and now blasted out by a man who once swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the president of the United States does something like this, it doesn’t just insult two people. It tells a story about who, according to the most powerful man in the world, belongs in America and who doesn’t.

For centuries, racism in this country has relied on the lie that some people are less than human. That lie has been used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, and mass incarceration.

It’s the lie that made it easier for people to look away while their neighbors were brutalized. It’s the lie that justifies ICE’s brutal, racist behavior. When Trump shares imagery that taps directly into that history, he’s not being edgy: he’s reopening wounds that never fully healed.

When the President of the United States signals that this kind of racism is acceptable, it gives permission to others. It tells the kid being harassed at school, the family being targeted by a hate group, and the voter being pushed out of the polling line that the cruelty they’re experiencing is justified. That it’s their own fault.

It tells the bullies and thugs of ICE as they do their “Kavanaugh Stops” — targeting people based on their race — that they’re on the right side of power.

This isn’t just about harm to minorities, although that harm is real and immediate. It’s about what happens to democracy itself when the presidency becomes a megaphone for dehumanization.

Democracy depends on the idea that we’re all political equals. Once you start suggesting that some Americans are animals, that idea collapses. It becomes easier to justify taking away voting rights, ignore court rulings, or shrug when violence follows hateful rhetoric.

I remember a time, during the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when the presidency stood as a kind of moral North Star. Even when presidents like Nixon and Clinton failed to live up to it, there was at least a shared understanding that the office itself mattered. That it should pull us together, not rip us apart.

Trump has spent years doing the opposite, from the 1970s when he was busted along with his father for refusing to rent to Black people to his recent use of words like “vermin” and “shitholes” to describe Hispanic and Black people and majority-Black countries. Last night’s post is another brutally clear example of Trump’s deep, lifelong racism.

What’s even more chilling is the silence from Republican leaders and elected officials. If you can’t bring yourself to condemn something this overtly racist, where exactly is your line?

Silence in moments like this isn’t neutrality: it’s complicity. It tells people of color in America, already dealing with the burden of centuries of institutional racism, that their pain is irrelevant and their dignity a plaything in the hands of white people.

I know some people will say we should ignore it, that reacting “just feeds the outrage machine.” Trump’s propaganda princess, Karoline Leavitt, tried to downplay it by telling reporters this morning:

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But pretending this doesn’t matter is how we normalize it and weaken our shared sense of humanity. And the end point of that is always disaster.

As California Governor Gavin Newsome just posted:

“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”

“Denounce” is a bare minimum. This country can do better. We’ve done better before, often after terrible struggle and sacrifice.

But we won’t get there by minimizing moments like this or waving them off as “just another Trump post.” We get there by calling it what it is, by standing up for one another as equals in our humanity, and by insisting that the presidency must reflect our highest ideals, not our ugliest instincts.

If this doesn’t provoke the 13 white billionaires in Trump’s cabinet — who would all instantly fire anybody in any of their companies who posted such an image on their company’s servers — to start 25th Amendment proceedings or endorse impeachment, it’ll tell us everything about who they are, too.

Assuming there is a Presidential election in 2028, the Democrat who is elected President must be MERCILESS and must appoint an Attorney General who also is MERCILESS.

Assuming it even happens, the process of recovery is not going to be discreet. It’s not going to be painless or easy.

It is going to be loud and necessarily bloody.

• Arms will need to be twisted.
• Careers will need to be ended.
• Indictments ought to fly, thick and fast.
• Sentences must be long and brutal.

The republic is going to need radical surgery because the malignancy is everywhere.

That is the reality of the next several elections.

Any Democratic politician who is not prepared to be merciless is unworthy of support.

Trump Administration Official, US Republican Senators, and Republican Members of the US House of Representatives:

I’m writing to you not as a political opponent, but as a concerned citizen who’s spent a lifetime studying what happens when democracies flirt with strongmen and otherwise decent people convince themselves that loyalty to Dear Leader today will be rewarded by safety and protection tomorrow.

It never is.

You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.

History is littered with people who believed the same things: let’s start close to home.

Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison: his loyalists did.

His attorney general John Mitchell did hard time in a federal prison. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman did hard time, as did John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and his White House attorney John Dean. The burglars did time, as did the fixers. The forty Nixon officials who went to prison even included two members of Nixon’s cabinet, AG Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.

The people who “just followed orders” or egged Nixon on — like you’re doing now with Trump — were the ones who went to jail, while Nixon walked away to a quiet retirement.

That’s the pattern history shows us over and over, all the way back to the Roman Republic: the boss either dies or escapes while his helpers become the long-term fall guys.

Every authoritarian system runs on the same fuel you’re today giving Trump: people who believe that by protecting the leader they’re protecting themselves and their families. Tragically, at least for them, it never works out that way.

When Hitler’s regime collapsed, he was dead but his inner circle faced tribunals, prison cells, and even the gallows.

The men who signed orders, ran ministries, moved trains, seized property, and “made it all legal” discovered that when corrupt administrations fall, their paperwork trail lasts longer than their leader’s loyalty. Their defense of “I was serving my country” or “just taking orders” didn’t save them: it convicted them.

Mussolini’s story is even darker. As his own crimes caught up with him, his own allies turned and ran. He was executed by people horrified by his excesses. His son-in-law, once his foreign minister and a loyal insider, was put up against a wall and shot after a show trial. Dictators never go down alone: they take their flunkies with them and it’s typically the flunkies who bear the harshest punishments.

Chile’s Pinochet managed to dodge some justice himself, but the men who ran his torture chambers and death squads didn’t. Years later they were dragged into court, convicted, and sent to prison. Time didn’t save them, and neither did politics or the loyalty they expected from the good general. And it won’t save you.

The same happened after Saddam Hussein fell; his henchmen were tried and executed or died in prison. In Romania, the Ceauşescus were hunted down and shot but their senior officials faced courts, disgrace, and decades in prison. Across history, when the music stops, the people closest to the guy at the top inevitably find there aren’t enough chairs.

Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.

So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob.

And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights.

They’ll start, in other words, with the people who made Trump’s crimes happen: people like you. That’s how conspiracies are proven in a court of law: not by vibes, but by nailing the insiders.

Right now you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side.

But history has a funny way of circling back:

— Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.

— The senior-most Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.

— Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.

— Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.

There’s a simple and perennial reason why prosecutors always say, “Follow the money” and “follow the paper trail”: abusive power always leaves fingerprints.

And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away.

Obstruction of justice. Conspiracy. Civil rights violations. Election interference. Murder under color of authority. Bribery. Abuse of power. False statements. Unlawful detention. Retaliation against whistleblowers. Collusion with foreign enemies.

These aren’t political talking points that I’m trying to wave around to score with public opinion or scare you, they’re criminal statutes.

You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves.

Already we’re seeing this pattern with dozens of people who’ve left Trump’s first term employ, from his Attorney General, CIA director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, and FBI Director all the way down to functionaries in the Oval Office: “I didn’t know he was that crazy.” “They acted on their own.” “I was advised incorrectly.” “They went too far.”

Every authoritarian uses the same script and Trump has already proven that he’s no different. Do you think he’s suddenly going to decide to protect you rather than run off with the goodies? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously, here’s the part nobody in the cheering crowd has bothered to tell you: when regimes fall — or even just lose power, like Nixon did — the leader’s efforts become solely about his own personal survival. Your life, as a disposable underling, becomes a tool he can use to redirect blame and avoid accountability.

The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did.

Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes?

That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat, to abandon your “conservative” principles, or even to leave your party. Instead, I want you to realize that the Constitution is older than Donald Trump and far more durable than any cult of personality.

There’s a reason the Founders feared concentrated power and split it among three branches of government: like their advisor Montesquieu, they’d also studied history.

Strongmen always promise protection to the people they con into doing their dirty work. What they deliver to those folks, though, is always collateral damage.

Right now you’re standing close to a light that feels bright and powerful. History suggests, however, that it’ll end by burning the people nearest to it. Including you.

Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.

You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in.

Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.

If you want to know what Republicans are planning for the midterm elections, you should be paying close attention to Steve Bannon. He isn’t your regular, everyday right-wing conspiracy theorist and propagandist. He’s the smartest strategist in the MAGA movement, and most importantly, he is the Trump whisperer when it comes to election denialism.

It was Bannon’s hand pulling the strings back in 2016, sending Trump to the White House while installing himself as chief strategist. On Jan. 5, 2021, he told the world that “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” And on Jan. 6, it did.

While he may not be in the Trump White House right now, don’t be mistaken: Bannon is the single most influential person in the MAGA movement. What Steve Bannon says goes.

So, when he stood behind a podium today, we all needed to listen: “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again… We will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Bannon’s remarks weren’t pulled out of thin air, and the timing is no coincidence. It echoes what Trump said yesterday, when he doubled down in the Oval Office about his plan to take control of elections.

Calling states an “agent” of the government, he said, “When you see some of these states, about how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is, I think the federal government [should get involved].”

This is not the first time Trump has said this. Last August, he wrote the same thing on social media: “The States, are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them … to do.”

Bannon’s remarks also follow Trump’s recent declaration that Republicans should “take over” elections and “ought to nationalize the voting.” House Speaker Mike Johnson also falsely claimed that elections were “fraudulent.”

Johnson, with a long history of election denialism, went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost… It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” In true election denier fashion, he added: “Can I prove that? No.”

The implications seem clear: Nine months out from the midterm elections, we face a coordinated effort by Trump, his administration, congressional Republicans and MAGA leaders to normalize a federal takeover of elections, enforced by ICE and federal agents.

Many election observers have been sounding this alarm for months. Trump will use federal paramilitary forces to block voting access. After that, Trump may use the Department of Justice to seize ballots and take over vote counting.

Sending in ICE and federal agents to patrol elections isn’t just about immigration. We know that ICE won’t hesitate to go after American citizens, and just their presence alone will prevent people from going to the polls.

Federal officers can block roads, making it more difficult to get to your local polling location. They can use intimidation tactics to scare people who are trying to vote for Democrats. They may use violence against those who are campaigning, knocking on doors and doing same-day voter registration.

All of this, of course, is unconstitutional and illegal. However, Trump has no respect for the Constitution and no regard for the rule of law. He will eagerly deploy this plan if it helps him secure a Republican victory. If Democrats win the majority, Trump’s authoritarian plan will be foiled — and he knows that.

Voter suppression isn’t always done quietly through laws and the courts. Trump has figured out that he can normalize voter intimidation and election subversion by talking about it regularly in the open.

We cannot let him. We must not allow Trump and Bannon’s threats to become normalized. We must sound the alarm and insist that our leaders resist Trump’s efforts to take over elections and use federal officers to restrict voting and intimidate U.S. citizens from voting.

Most importantly, we cannot allow ourselves to live in denial about what is happening to our democracy. Republicans are planning to steal the midterms. Don’t say you weren’t warned.