Portside

Eventually, people in countries that are in the process of flipping from democracy to fascism figure out that they’re now living in a dictatorship; by then, however, it’s usually too late.

For people in Hungary, it was May, 2020 when Orbán started arresting people for their Facebook posts. For folks in Russia it was when Navalny and his supporters were first assaulted in public and then arrested and sent to brutal gulags in Siberia. For Germans, it was July 14, 1933 — six months after he became chancellor — when Hitler outlawed all political parties except his own.

But at first, the steps from democracy to fascism and tyranny always seems like “just another thing the government has to do to deal with a very real problem.” Something that reasonable people would understand and can’t reasonably object to. Something that, even if weird, makes a certain amount of sense.

Until suddenly the mask is dropped and the twisted face of hateful fascism peers out at the country with laser-red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with threats and lies. Wearing camouflage, face masked, carrying handcuffs.

We’re there. Trump and his neofascist enablers started with quiet cat’s feet; now they’re holding a rifle and using a bullhorn.

How do we know that Trump is doing something very different from America’s past, something that inevitably leads somewhere other than democracy?

During the first three months of President Obama’s presidency, he deported 63,257 people for being in the country without documentation; Trump’s first three months of 2025 saw roughly 61,060 deportations.

Why is Trump getting headlines — and protestors — with his arrests and deportations while Obama didn’t, even though he deported even more people than Trump has?

Because, for Trump, this isn’t about deportation or purging the nation of “illegals”; instead, it’s about making Americans comfortable with authoritarian, police-state tactics. The immigrants are just props, albeit ones that appeal to the racist MAGA base.

Obama deported people based on so-called Morton Memos, also known as “enforcement priority memos,” which required ICE to focus entirely on those undocumented aliens who posed either “national security” or “criminal” threats to America.

While those arrested and immediately turned back at the border didn’t get a day in court, the people Obama targeted within the US were detained after warrants were issued based on probable cause they had committed a crime or were a threat to America, as the Bill of Rights and US law requires, and each had their day in court where they could claim that they’d been arrested and held without legal justification.

Obama also started Operation Cross Check, organizing coordinated raids across the country targeting aliens with established criminal records, and each arrest required proper legal documentation or warrants.

He also operated his immigration enforcement efforts equally well in Red states as Blue states.

The Biden administration also largely followed the legal structures — court hearings, due process, and enforcement priorities — established under Obama.

But under Trump, in complete defiance of the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments of the Constitution, ICE officers are arresting people without warrants and imprisoning or deporting then without an opportunity to contest their detention or removal from the country in a court of law.

Why would Trump do this, when both Obama and Biden were able to deport as many or more people while simply following the law?

— Why has Trump put the National Guard and Marines in our streets with their guns turned on American citizens?

— Why is Trump having federal police carry out high-profile raids in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and courthouses rather than simply showing up at people’s homes after hours and quietly detaining them like Obama and Biden did without all the fanfare? Why all this military theater?

— Why is our Secretary of Homeland Security dressing up like an immigration agent to cosplay for the cameras, with the resulting videos being plastered all over social media?

— Why is Trump giving a highly political, banana-republic-style speech to active duty soldiers, attacking the previous president and the governor of California with lies and partisan slurs, and none of the leaders of our military stepped in to point out what a violation it was of apolitical American military policy and tradition going back to George Washington?

Because it’s really not at all about undocumented aliens or deportation: Instead, it’s all fascism theater designed specifically and intentionally to get us ready to accept what’s next.

First, you see, they turn their guns and their violations of cultural and legal norms on the weakest and most misunderstood or even hated people in society. For Hitler that was trans people and immigrants. For Mussolini it was labor leaders and immigrants. For Putin it was rebelling Chechens and immigrants. For Orbán it was Roma people and immigrants.

In each case, “regular citizens” quickly got used to police kicking in other people’s doors without warrants, throwing “undesirables” in prison without attorneys or court proceedings, and having masked, out-of-uniform “officers” dragging folks off the streets without identification or justification. After all, it was only “them” who were targeted.

At the same time, each of these regimes began extensive intelligence-gathering operations to identify actual or even potential dissidents and ways they could be broken, whether through exposing secrets like homosexuality or affairs, by bankrupting them with libel suits for speaking against the administration, or even outright arrest on trumped-up sedition charges.

Think DOGE’s pimply-faced incels downloading every single bit of data the government has ever had on you and aggregating it into a massive database this administration can use against you when the time comes.

Next, wannabe dictators always open huge detention/prison facilities with the rationalization that they were for “those people”: the immigrants, Jews, Gypsies, protestors, and communists. Like Trump is doing right now with the multi-billion-dollar private prison contracts he just signed. And Trump’s reopening the Guantánamo offshore military prison.

And then, of course, in each case throughout history, the regime’s police, paramilitaries, and ultimately the military itself turn their guns and their new prisons on those same “regular people” who dared speak up, who challenged them politically, or who outed their crimes and corruption.

The first and most important key is always to get the police and the military on the wannabe dictator’s side, so there would be no resistance when the hammer drops.

Thus, yesterday, Trump spoke to troops at Fort Bragg, telling them how he was going to bring back the names of Confederate generals to American military facilities, even though those racist, slavery-defending men had launched a murderous war against the United States.

“For a little breaking news, we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee," Trump said as the soldiers cheered wildly at the name of the traitor Robert E. Lee, who killed more Americans than Hitler or any other single foreign enemy in history.

He then turned to the news media and, in front of these men and women who we have trained to use military arms to kill people, proclaimed to loud boos from the crowd:

“And for a little news for the fake news back there, the fake news, ladies and gentlemen, look at them, look at them all, what I have to put up with. Fake news.”

Author of The Third Reich of Dreams Charlotte Beradt lived through the rise of the Nazis in Germany. She wrote:

“The Nazi official who remarked that people had a private life under the Third Reich only while they were asleep actually underestimated the dictatorship’s powers.”

The data genius, the Elon Musk/DOGE of Germany in the 1930s, was IBM. They organized and kept the data on every German who was Jewish, gay, socialist, or otherwise offended the Nazi regime.

And now comes the beginning of the final stage — much like when Hitler opened Dachau on March 22, 1933, a mere three months after becoming Chancellor — with the announcement in yesterday’s Washington Post:

“The Trump administration is preparing to begin the transfer of potentially thousands of foreigners who are in the United States illegally to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, starting as early as this week, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter.”

Yes, this is an old movie the world has seen several times throughout history. That’s why Europe’s leaders are so freaked out about Trump right now.

Back in the early 1950s, Germans who lived through the Nazi era warned Chicago journalist Milton Mayer that they had “become used to being governed by surprise” and told him how each step toward Hitler’s eventual tyranny was incremental. As a college professor told Mayer:

“You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. …

“Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”

We’re already far down the road, step by step, to MAGA tyranny utterly destroying American democracy. Will we finally draw a line and stop this violent, armed juggernaut?

Or will we, like the Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Russians, Turks, Egyptians, and so many others, wait to act until the repression is so obvious it’s undeniable…and unstoppable?

The choice, at least so far, is still ours.

Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.