Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Friday, August 21, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 10amET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you can find the video at lucid.substack.com.
Our guest will be Barb McQuade, who is a professor from practice at Michigan Law School, and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, and the terrific new book The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.
Bring your questions about the conversion of our legal system to a personal tool of the president, corruption, disinformation, and more. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone.
If you’d like to take part in these informative sessions, you can upgrade to paid or premium here:
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During the Cold War, America played a double game, fostering democratic ideals and culture in Europe while backing coups to install right-wing dictators in other parts of the world. That game is over. Now, President Donald Trump and his fellow saboteurs are taking down the world’s most important democracy so that right-wing and selected Communist tyrants can prosper.
Autocrats often tell us what they intend to do, and Trump was no exception. He ran for president on a platform of helping some of the world’s most murderous leaders. During his campaign, he repeatedly “joked” about becoming a dictator himself, and declared at a June 2024 rally that a “smart president” would not consider North Korea, China, and Russia as enemies, and would “make them do great.”
In case this message was not clear enough, he asserted in October 2024 that America’s “enemy from within…the people actually running the government,” —United States Democrats—were “more dangerous…than Russia and China and other people.”
Then came the blitzkrieg tactics of early 2025. I spent those months writing essays to help us understand the unthinkable: America was being wrecked from within, at record speed, and was shifting from deterrent to enabler of autocratic expansionism. I forecast a “dialing back of America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world” to “create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.”
I also wanted us to have the right language to convey this exceptional moment in American history. I came up with four concepts that describe the qualities and operations of Trump’s government: Engineered Incompetence, National Sabotage, Plunder and Shakedown Operations, and Leader Self-Enrichment.
Twenty months later, all of these trends have tragically advanced, and the language is all too accurate. The Trump administration is kneecapping the country by wrecking American science, medicine, and education, creating the conditions for diseases to spread, while also perpetrating massive environmental depredation that makes natural disasters far more likely (and cutting FEMA funds).
The United States is also rolling back its soft and hard power presence in the world, retreating from intelligence and military alliances and commitments to democracies that made autocrats think twice about armed aggression, while forging partnerships with dictatorships.
The developments in this direction are, sadly, too numerous to list, but a few recent ones include:
FBI Director Kash Patel has approved law enforcement partnerships with Russia and China (supposedly to combat transnational drug trafficking, cyber fraud and child sexual exploitation), and Patel will also visit Moscow in October, hosted by the FSB.
The Pentagon is withdrawing U.S. military personnel from Baltic states and other areas vulnerable to Russian autocratic aggression. It also redeployed the USS George Washington to the Middle East, leaving the vast Pacific without any U.S. aircraft carrier, fueling “fears of a U.S. retreat from Asia” that leave Japan and other countries more exposed to Chinese imperialism.
Lest North Korean leader Kim Jong Un feel neglected, since he was included on the list to be made more successful:
Trump also ordered military exercises with South Korea to be scaled back because they could be interpreted as “hostile” to North Korea and might disturb his “very good relationship” with Kim.
Kim benefits from Trump long feeling an affinity with him, in fact having told the world that “we fell in love” after a meeting during his first term. Kim benefits from Trump seeing him as important due to his heightened status as a supplier of troops and technology to Russia, and, crucially, as someone who has nuclear weapons. He has the kind of power Trump wants, he is helping Putin, and maybe one day he will even be open to a real estate development deal, as per the proposals made in a film made for Kim during Trump’s first administration.
Communists with Nukes and Absolute Power are OK for Trump
And that brings me to the hypocrisy of MAGA anti-Communist rhetoric. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is spearheading efforts in Latin America to prop up far-right leaders and encourage the exit of leftist ones, even recently hosting a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” that identified Marxists and Communists as the enemies of “civilization.”
The Communist dictatorships of China and North Korea are evidently exempted from this crusade. That’s because Trump’s “anti-Communism” is transactional. He is happy to enable Communist leaders who “count” because they have nuclear weapons and prop up Russia in its fight against Ukraine and can enter into dirty deals with him unencumbered by any scruples or scrutiny.
Behind Trump’s “anti-Communism” lies a fantasy of becoming just like current Communist Xi Jinping and former Communist Vladimir Putin (who stopped being a Communist only because Communism collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe, to his great dismay).
Unfortunately for Trump, America is not a Communist regime, and he will never succeed in becoming a dictator. He has failed to consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular. He may inflict huge damage on our beloved country, but it will backfire on him, and then he will be gone, and we will rebuild.
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