Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet…

What you’re looking at now is the empire on autopilot, the bipartisan machinery of war, corporate rule, and mass surveillance that’s been grinding along for decades. Trump tapped into it and twisted the rhetoric, but he hasn’t yet had the full opportunity to merge the machinery with personal loyalty tests, purges of dissent, and legal shields for his own power.

Under Biden or Obama, the system still pretended to maintain “checks and balances,” even as it carried out drone wars, mass deportations, and corporate bailouts. Under a fully unleashed Trump, those same tools would be wielded openly as weapons against political opponents, journalists, and entire communities, with fewer restraints, fewer masks, and more blood in the streets.

What we have now is control. What he’s threatening is ownership.

We’ve seen this movie before. in Chile under Pinochet, in Egypt under Sisi, in countless coups and dictatorships the U.S. has backed abroad. First, the system rots under “respectable” leaders who keep the violence polite and procedural. Then a strongman steps in, strips away the pretense, and uses the same machinery (the police, the courts, the military) to crush opposition and rewrite the rules in his own image.

The tragedy is that Americans think it “can’t happen here,” even though it’s already happened everywhere our government has exported it. The only difference is that this time, it’s coming home.