The speed of American democracy failure seems apropos for the man who repeatedly went bankrupt faster than anyone in history, and the playbook feels familiar.
Once he established that norms don’t constrain him, and he fatigued the accountability systems, the violations naturally escalated and expanded rapidly. “Grab’em by the pussy” was his subtext, yet actual campaign slogan.
Financial corruption → legal system weaponization → extrajudicial killings → unauthorized military action. Each step tests whether anyone can stop Trump from groping, grabbing and raping like he’s some kind of Epstein pervert.
For years I’ve had lawyers, true experts in democracy far more intelligent than me, tell me that an information warfare history perspective doesn’t account for the complex control frameworks of American government.
That to me has always sounded like the horse manure industry will somehow pivot to diesel emissions investigations. I predict the opposite. Indeed, we see clearly now how all these vaulted democratic “accountability mechanisms” that handled the Watergate-era crimes (at best) aren’t doing much today:
- Investigative journalism exposing hidden wrongdoing
- Congressional oversight responding to discrete violations
- Public outrage mobilizing around clear transgressions
- Courts adjudicating specific legal violations
Exactly none of them scale into Steve Bannon’s explicit “flood the zone with shit” warfare strategy of simultaneous transparent corruption across dozens of vectors. A militant planned and distributed denial-of-service attack on democratic accountability itself is in full swing. And there’s a bizarre lack of response to the accelerated velocity, volume and variety (Big Data Three Vs) of breaches.
I suppose it’s kind of like being told by lawyers in the 1960s that foreign assassinations of state leaders by America would never happen at home, because of accountability, right before JFK and MLK were shot dead. So many Americans assassinated, so little accountability. Mondlane was American, right?
By the by, America still won’t release the files on who assassinated the UN Secretary General Hammarskjold in 1961.
Does anyone in America care about why the assassinations weren’t prevented? They even hit the UN leader. I mean does anyone even remember an “Ace of Spades” was found on the wreckage of his passenger plane after it was shot down?
America seemingly now borrows directly from Russian information warfare doctrine: the goal isn’t to convince people of some alternative truth, it’s to just curate rapid confusion and exhaustion that drives people to disengage entirely while being unable to leave or even look away. Physical presence, complicity, comes without the usual mental clarity that should tell people to fight or flee. First they came for A, and we did nothing…
Apathy becomes acceptance
Scandals are being operated now by Trump like his true currency: infinite supply creates dangerous hyperinflation for intentional destabilization of legacy systems. Watergate unfolded as an accountability mechanism as it was so singular and digestible. The public and institutions could focus their investigative resources, media attention, and political capital on one clear violation. The GOP spent decades picking apart what went wrong and how to avoid being caught again. Then came the racist bankruptcy con artist king Donald and his wrecking balls.
And that’s how being an historian suddenly puts me in a better position of describing and predicting moves in… what amounts to an information civil war:
- Attention fragmentation: Human cognition can’t process details of 42 simultaneous scandals. Each new outrage displaces the previous one from the news cycle before accountability mechanisms can engage. By the time Congress schedules a hearing on the calendar, there are twelve new more pressing crises.
- Normalization through repetition: The first pardon for a crypto billionaire would have been shocking. The fifteenth financial conflict of interest barely registers. You’re essentially boiling the frog but at TikTok and Zoom velocity of doom scrolling.
- Weaponized uncertainty: With so many claims flying, the average person can’t distinguish between:
- Actual corruption (Qatar plane, UAE chip deal).
- Hyperbolic partisan attacks
- Outright disinformation
So they default to tribal affiliation for filtering. “My side good, their side exaggerating.”
- Exhaustion as strategy: This isn’t accidental. Making resistance exhausting is tactical. Activists, journalists, investigators, prosecutors—everyone operates with finite energy. Keep them racing from fire to fire and they can’t extinguish any single blaze completely. I haven’t met a single person, not even in Austria, who understands that the Nazis lit over 100 buildings on fire in Vienna for 1938 Kristallnacht. That’s a ground-based bombing run impossible to fight, long before the threat of VBIED and… Tesla.
Trump’s privilege has always been failing faster and more completely than institutional responses are willing to track. Six bankruptcies that would have destroyed normal businesspeople became proof of his “comeback” narrative because the legal and financial systems couldn’t process the velocity of fraud, opposite of survival. He gamed lag time between action and consequence, externalizing the suffering to his followers.
Now he’s showing how it can be done at constitutional scale, as if the corrupt liar Andrew Jackson is back in office, rounding up and killing Americans through false resource scarcity.
Lawyers live within a playing field that has law and order formalism, which makes sense if law and order can be enforced. They believe written rules and institutional architecture provide the field its protection, like engineering believes their code bugs are just delayed patches, rather than active exploits destroying the entire game.
Historians of information warfare, let alone hackers, however see how institutions are just people following norms, and norms have repeatedly collapsed under sustained attacks/pressure. Game over comes quick when the rules are unenforceable. The Constitution doesn’t enforce itself, and so a huge gap between written law and actual enforcement seems like where Trump’s authoritarian takeover happens regardless of law.
The Andrew Jackson tell
Jackson explicitly defied Supreme Court rulings (“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”) and weaponized presidential power for ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears).
The institutions existed, the laws were clear, but nobody stopped him commiting genocide. The formal architecture was irrelevant because America lacked the political will to enforce it.
Trump likely studied this, unlikely from history books, as he infamously was a child of a convicted Klansman. He understands Jackson’s adherents in the KKK have always celebrated moving fast to break things and maintainimg popular support within a tight coalition of secret militant groups. Unaccountable privilege for them was unlocked when enforcement mechanisms melted instead of congealed.
Remember Trump boasting “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” That reminded me of a blistering broadside during Jackson’s 1828 campaign to be president, which tells voters he is unfit for the office. It stresses how six men realized an error, returned voluntarily to camp, and offered to resume their service yet were murdered by Jackson instead. He is said to have “illegally and wantonly shed the blood of his countrymen and fellow soldiers” by ordering executions 21 Feb 1815 after a kangaroo military trial in which they were convicted for leaving camp, despite return. There are six engravings of coffins (two rows of three), with memorials to each of the soldiers murdered by Jackson, giving details of their lives and deaths: Edward Lindsey, Henry Lewis, David Morrow, Jacob Webb, John Harris, and David Hunt.
The formalist lawyer keeps talking about how intended behavior of the system will eventually form, like a bicycle rebalancing itself. The information warfare analyst in me instead describes actual behavior under attack conditions, pattern detection and prediction, like how to prepare and respond when a bicycle race competitor brandishes a pump to jam in your spokes and throw you into a ditch.
These are two completely different assessment skills. Lawyers saying attacks will be “judged harshly for cheating” aren’t very useful for those who actually want to keep riding in the race and avoid crashing, fatally.
Americans need to look immediately for how best to block the GOP taking any more big swings at democracy. “Preparedness” is literally what this was called in America just before WWI.
Think about an effective response to the parallel system setup by the GOP for their sustained, deliberate, high-velocity bad faith political moves destroying the country even faster than Trump ruined the people who invested in his business scams.
| Democratic Institution | GOP Replacement | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Independent judiciary | Federalist Society | Capture courts |
| Professional journalism | Fox/OAN/Newsmax | Control information |
| Campaign finance limits | Citizens United | Legalize corruption |
| Electoral accountability | Gerrymandering | Lock in minority rule |
| Academic expertise | Heritage/Cato/AEI | Corrupt platforms and manufacture alternate “facts” |
Trump is the first president operating entirely within this post-Watergate parallel system that was setup to ruin democracy; build a unitary executive with unaccountable power that Nixon (and Ford) could only dream about. The GOP doesn’t need or want the legacy institutions to work—they built a system of replacements that will never check the annointed King Donald.
Each step, lawyers say to me “watch and see, he will cross a line soon.” And after each step, when no line enforcement comes, the Overton window shift leaves those lawyers grasping for the next chapter in their Maginot-like playbook for “the walls of yesterday“.
France could have counter-attacked, could have rushed in and crushed Rommel’s ill-concieved, weak and overstretched logistics. But why, why did they not? Alas, the historian in me can’t help seeing the patterns…
The French had superior forces but got outmaneuvered because they were fighting the last war.
Trump’s operation is very vulnerable (he’s overextended, rife with squabbling, logistically weak, reliant on bluff), yet the institutional response is paralyzed by outdated doctrine. American institutions have superior resources (courts, Congress, media, public support in many areas) yet are thinking Watergate-style accountability, unprepared for the information war that I have warned about here since at least 2012.
This isn’t just about Trump’s bankrupt authoritarianism, it’s a social media putsch towards territorial ethnonationalism and theological hate, known since the late 1800s as “America First”.
By the time Trump’s constant disregard for law and order reaches predictable parallels with Nazi concentration camps, Nazi extrajudicial executions of civilians, Nazi racist Christian Crusade rhetoric, and ACTS 17 “lebensraum“, people still seem confused and apathetic about mounting an effective resistance to the diabolical offspring of Nazis.
Are you one of those confused people, or are you now able to understand?
