The view of the Greenbelt Labor Fest from atop the carnival Ferris wheel: Glynn Wilson
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Something woke me up early on Labor Day 2025. I slept deep and well after an afternoon of fun at the Labor Day Fest in Greenbelt, Maryland, 10 miles due north of the White House and Capitol. I went out of my way to try to join the party of people still traveling and having fun as if we were not in the middle of a violent revolution against our so-called free way of life.
I walked around in the crowd looking at the booths of art and things for sale, chowed down on a German sausage sandwich with sour kraut and spicy mustard along with real potato fries, listened to some inspirational American music, and snapped photos from atop the carnival Ferris wheel.
In my Monday morning reading, I suppose it felt somewhat gratifying to see a few more writers finally catching on to what’s really going on in Washington, although it feels like too little too late.
Once again Margaret Sullivan joins the chorus in her Substack blog American Crisis.
“Readers of this newsletter already know we’re in a bad — maybe irrevocably bad — moment in American history,” she writes. “Today, on Labor Day, Donald Trump’s ‘strongman’ image looms over Washington, D.C., including on the Department of Labor building — just like the dictator he promised to be and is in the process of becoming.”
CULT OF PERSONALITY – Trump orders a giant picture of himself with his nationalist slogan flown on a banner on the Labor Department building in Washington, D.C., while he calls up the National Guard to aim automatic weapons at U.S. citizens in our nation’s capital. If this is not fascism, I don’t know what is: NAJ screen shot
“It’s maddening, frustrating, scary. Many of us feel powerless,” she adds.
She cites historian Garrett Graff, who finally comes around and makes a compelling case that, just in the past few weeks, the U.S. tipped over into authoritarianism.
Doomsday Scenario: America Tips Into Fascism
“The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism,” he writes. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.”
He thinks many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.”
“Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.”
It’s felt different to me for a very long time. But every day, I see people going on about their lives as if nothing was wrong, and I keep wondering when they might wake up and grasp what they are in the middle of losing?
“Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go?,” Graff writes. “Do we end up ‘merely’ like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an ‘American Reich’? So far,” he says, “after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.”
“American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents. … like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections.”
The president’s military occupation of the capital has escalated in recent days into something not seen since British troops marched the streets of colonial Boston — even though precisely nothing has happened to warrant it, the Pentagon has now armed the National Guard patrolling DC and armored vehicles, designed for the worst of combat, are patrolling the capital, where they’re colliding with civilian vehicles because war transports are not supposed to be on civilian streets. (Why a 14-ton MRAP is in any way necessary for a domestic police mission is its own worthy line of questioning!)
Word came over the weekend that the president is now drawing up plans and explicitly threatening domestic political opponents like the governors of California and Illinois with similar military occupations — exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power.
Civilians who try lawfully to exercise their right to document the abuses of the regime are themselves arrested and charged with felonies through trumped-up charges teeming with official lies. The fact that this military takeover and federal occupation is being done to the city’s residents — and not on their behalf — is evident in how deserted DC has become as residents refuse to enter public spaces where they might have to interact with agents of the state.
America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.
It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting US companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.
It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.
It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration. It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.
It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.
It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.
***
For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power — some incident that would bring party leaders to their senses, some principle or red-line would be unwilling to trade or cross in pursuit of furthering Trump’s agenda. Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.
It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years simply to please Donald Trump and avoid running afoul of his temper.
Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written. It will surely get worse — Trump’s push now is clearly focused on locking in an illegitimate claim to power. Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again.
I called it from day one.
Fascist Dictator Donald Trump Stuns American Establishment, Defeats Hillary Clinton for President
And the second time.
And after his second 100 days in power.
One Hundred Days in Trumpville: The People Must Act to Stop This Madness
But the people didn’t march to Washington. They held up some funny protest signs and engaged in big talk on social media.
Sullivan has some advice for “political hobbyists.”
Don’t be a ‘political hobbyist.’ Here’s how to harness your power.
It all feels like too little too late.
But there’s always the midterms, and 2028.
What To Do About Trump? Democrats Hope to Retake the House and Senate in 2026 and Impeach Him Again
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Tears and smirks – but no smiles as I read this. Thanks for this cogent piece.