It's time to use the term "authoritarian" forthrightly

It's not hyperbole or manipulation at this point; it's what's plainly happening

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It’s said that a writer with a professional mindset approaches work with the same discipline as anybody else with a job. You show up to the empty screen regardless of your physical or mental state and produce.

And so I do. But I’m not the only scribe who brings some dread to the task of surveying the current scene these days.

The trick for a wordsmith striving for integrity is not to use one’s dread, or that of one’s likely readers, for manipulative purposes.

Here we get to the matter of the conflation factor about which I’ve written since 2015. Trumpism has co-opted actual conservative principles and folded them so thoroughly into the overall incoherence, spitefulness and bombast of this new movement that extricating them becomes nigh impossible.

One small example: a low level of taxation used to be tied to the conviction that people’s money was their own, that government should be small and hew to the Madisonian vision of a few functions properly falling within its purview, and that an economy thrives organically.

Now, the administration is talking about relief for farmers from the effects of tariffs - a remedy for a situation caused by government messing with the operation of the free market in the first place. Tax cuts are merely the bone thrown to those who can’t make the connection between the simultaneous market interference and why inputs cost so much. And for those for whom the numbers still don’t add up, government steps in to “help,” FDR style.

Getting rid of DEI in our institutions, public and private? Hey, I’m the first to applaud a well-thought-out move away from militant identity politics, but this has been handled so ham-handedly that it has given progressives a freshly sharpened arrow in their quiver. They are able to frame this initiative as being of a piece with the administration’s truly authoritarian moves. And if there is a Republican bloodbath in 2026, as seems increasingly likely, the identity politics nonsense will come roaring back with a vengeance. Ditto climate alarmism.

And I hope you have a keen enough sense of my temperament to know that I hesitate to use loaded terminology, especially once it’s become fashionable. Yes, a lot of people, both forthrightly of the Left, and the more broadly intended swath represented by the likes of The Bulwark, want to confirm the disgust of those of us on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, but for the purpose of getting us to buy in to an agenda that is not ours.

But the time for hesitating to use the term “authoritarian” has passed. Our country is being gripped by authoritarianism, and that’s more obvious by the day.

There’s nothing else to call the Very Stable Genius’s Truth Social post stating that CBS should lose its license because its news division’s flagship show, 60 Minutes, had the temerity to interview Volodomyr Zelensky in one segment last Sunday evening, and present a variety of views regarding the administration’s designs on Greenland in another.

Then there’s the VSG’s defiance of a 9-0 Supreme Court order for the administration to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the Salvadoran super-prison.

I won’t get into the weeds of that case’s particulars. SCOTUS didn’t, either. They simply ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia is entitled to due process.

But we now have some unavoidable context in which to place this nose-thumbing. When the VSG met with Salvadoran president Bukele in the Oval Office yesterday, the two of them had a hearty cackle over the possibility that El Salvador might have to build more super-prisons, in which the “homegrown” troublesome types could me housed. In plain English, that means sending US citizens to such a gulag right away after being yanked off the streets of post-America.

I will just briefly mention - because I’m not the first to bring it up - that Bukele received his warm welcome in the same room where Trump and Vance engaged in the most shameful behavior of a president and vice president in my lifetime. I’m speaking of the “you don’t have any cards / are you going to thank us” meeting with Zelensky.

But the VSG has doubled down on his lies about Ukraine, and they’re getting transparently ludicrous. “I was told [the double-tap missile attack on Sumy, which killed at least 35 and injured more than 100] was a mistake,” he said with a straight face. He then went on to prattle about how it wasn’t his war, but rather that Zelensky had started it, with Biden’s help. The next step was for post-America to refrain from signing the G7 declaration that Putin was culpable for Sumy. The lies get ever more removed from the actual and even the plausible.

The ‘golden age” lie particularly rubs salt in our national wound.

During the Obama era, I wrote a lot about planned decline, as did myriad other scribes. The difference between what Obama was up to and the present juncture is that Obama had a particular vision of where he wanted to see the US situated on the world stage, as evidenced by his dismissal of the concept of exceptionalism, as well as his apology tours; there is no vision with this go-round. Trump is merely hoping that his brashness and mercuriality will keep him politically buoyant. He just wants to continue to be lionized by enough post-Americans that history can’t ignore him.

He might be in for some tough sledding, as news items such as tourism to the US from Europe, Asia, Canada and Mexico cratering, the supply of US vehicles, both new and used, falling precipitously, and Chinese airlines being ordered not to accept shipments of planes from Boeing and not to order aircraft-related equipment from any US customers sink in.

Back to the Bukele visit for a moment: It’s yet another example, along with the useless summits with, and “beautiful letters” from, Kim Jong-Un, the appeasement of Putin, and insisting, even as tensions with China heighten, that Xi is his close buddy, to name a few, of the thrill the VSG gets going up his leg in the presence of strongman leaders. He sees that club as the cool kids’ table. In return, they regard him as a fool who can be played like a Stradivarius.

Have I avoided using dread for manipulative purposes here? I certainly hope so. Trumpists would no doubt say that it’s exactly what I’ve done.

But all you have to have is a modicum of humanity, a decent grasp of history, and a conviction that principles must guide leaders, to start feeling pretty damn squirmy.

The Very Stable Genius has done more in three months to untether America from the essence of its existence since its founding that any progressive president ever did in his entire times in office.

Which isn’t advocating for more progressive presidents. Actual conservatism would begin the mighty reversal necessary for a recognizable America to re-emerge.

But that’s not happening. And so we stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, speaking what we know as long as it’s still possible in this new environment.