Trump is telling us he wants to be dictator. When will Congress listen?

Finally, a reporter tried to get Trump to explain his execrable lies, lies so bad they’re insulting, lies so bad he’d appoint them to his cabinet, lies that stink so much that they attract more gnats than the Octagon outside the White House, lies so hollow that a single follow-up question detonates the entire con.

So, he exploded. He left.

His brain is now mush. He’s cracking up. It’s over this time.

Nope. Sorry. This is who he has always been.

Someone just turned the dial slightly toward truth, and it became unbearable to him, because the truth has always been unbearable to Donald Trump. Now it’s time for Congress to wake up from their own denial.

Stop and think about what just happened. A journalist asked the president of the United States for evidence for what would be the greatest crime in the history of freedom. He didn’t have any. He never does. He just wants to destroy democracy if he loses. Also, if he wins.

Timothy Snyder has argued for years that Trump operates on 'no concept of American national interest — only transactions, only payoffs, only the personal loyalty that money buys.' That's the only explanation for a 50% military budget increase that no defense review requested and no battlefield result justified: bribe the soldiers, and they stand with you when you decide to stay."

Kristen Welker asked Trump for evidence that California's elections were rigged. He said, "All I have to do is look." His own Justice Department has been in charge for seventeen months. They haven't charged a single person for a crime that would have had to be the greatest conspiracy in human history. When she held the line, he called her crooked, called NBC crooked, called the elections crooked, and left. That's not a man cracking up. That is the playbook running the same as it was when he was a birther. It’s all the same move: the squirming out of his "no wars" promise, the casual threat to "blow the hell out of" Iran as "the easier path," the grandiose certainty that his say-so outranks evidence. The only thing that changed is what stage we’re in.

What’s behind it is a systematic effort to not just make it impossible to disagree with but to make himself impossible to remove. He has hundreds of billions allocated for what amounts to a secret police. He is prosecuting Rep. LaMonica McIver, a sitting member of Congress, on charges filed so hastily by his own U.S. Attorney Alina Habba that a federal judge reprimanded her for it. There is a bunker being built in the White House backyard and a victory arch Trump is trying to build over Washington. The bunker and the arch aren’t vanity projects. They’re the infrastructure of a leader who isn’t planning to leave power, even if he leaves Washington, DC.

Trump doesn't just want the US to back a flailing Vladimir Putin, who has been slaughtering women and children in Ukraine on a daily basis for years now. He wants to be our Putin, who props up the real deal.

While he consolidates power at home, he is sending delegations to Putin's economic forum in St. Petersburg — the one every other world leader is boycotting, the one Ukraine opened with a drone strike on the city's oil terminal, black smoke rising over the forum as it began — while Ukraine bleeds. Military historian Phillips O'Brien has tracked the specific steps: Tomahawk deliveries to Germany canceled to avoid alarming Moscow, sanctions waivers extended for Russian oil, Patriot missiles withheld from Ukraine's air defenses. The relationship with Russia is not ambivalence or miscalculation. It is a to-do list or a quid pro quo, and Trump is checking boxes.

Now Congress is being asked to let him keep long-term warrantless surveillance powers.

Section 702 of FISA, the authority that lets intelligence agencies collect communications without individual warrants, expired June 12 after the Senate blocked reauthorization 47-52. You’d think Democrats, who have twice suffered Trump sending mobs, first one filled with neo-Nazis and then one filled with shady DOJ lawyers, would be thrilled that Trump has less dictatorial power! But nope, they were ready to hand it right back to him until they got triggered.

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SAY NO TO GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE.
CLICK TO CONTACT CONGRESS NOW.
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The trigger was Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no intelligence experience. His only qualification, as Sen. Mark Warner put it, is that “he’s willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants.” Democrats held. Seven Republicans joined them, most citing the absence of a warrant requirement to search Americans’ data. For now, it lapsed.

The House already passed a 45-day extension in April, 261-111. A new deal is being negotiated. And a president who is prosecuting a sitting member of Congress, who called six Democratic lawmakers traitors “punishable by death” for posting a video about the Uniform Code of Military Justice, would have — if a clean reauthorization passes — a mass surveillance tool run by a loyalist, pointed at Americans, with no warrant required.

Democrats didn’t win the DHS fight, but they didn’t collaborate either. When Republicans tried to fund ICE without reforms after agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis, Democrats held for 75 days and refused to provide the votes to do Trump’s dirty work for him. Republicans eventually passed a bill that excluded ICE funding entirely, without a single Democratic vote for the version that would have handed Trump’s enforcement machine more money and no accountability. Refusing to hand Trump the instrument is the whole job. You don’t have to win. You have to refuse.

FISA without a warrant requirement is a similar ask. The question is not whether Section 702 serves legitimate national security purposes in a functioning democracy. Debatable! The question is what it becomes when handed to a man who already told you he sees political opponents as traitors and evidence as optional.

Playing games and hoping “this time he’s going to crack” got us here. Fascism doesn’t need your active support — it needs your willingness to keep the arithmetic of ordinary life running smoothly, to make collaboration feel like reasonableness, to wait for a crack that isn’t coming. Don’t do his dirty work for him.

He’s not cracking. His interests are his own. He’s telling you exactly what he wants: compliance beyond questioning, backed with the threat of prosecution, violence, or both. Congress needs to decide if it’s finally going to listen.

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