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(Dobbs) In A One-Party State, Who's Going To Stop You?

Would you bat an eye if you read about these kinds of things in a Hungary, a China, a North Korea, a Russia?

Nov 15

If you need more proof that Donald Trump and his troop of toadies are trying— not just talking about, but trying— to turn this nation into a one-party state, all you have to do is look at yesterday’s news. Not that you need yesterday’s news to see it— there are signs of it just about every day of the week.

But focusing only on yesterday, here’s what happened in yet another day in the life of our diminishing democracy.

First, the president put up a post telling Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to prominent Democrats. It’s as simple as that: not prominent Republicans, but prominent Democrats.

Would you bat an eye if you read about this kind of thing in an authoritarian one-party state— in a Hungary, a China, a North Korea, a Russia? No, because it’s a known part of their playbook. It’s also part of Trump’s. Make the opposition pay, maybe with their very freedom simply for being the opposition. That’s how they do it in one-party states.

What Trump wrote was, “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers (President Clinton’s treasury secretary), Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor), J.P. Morgan, Chase (whose chairman Jamie Dimon also has been a major donor to Democrats), and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”

Conveniently left off the list of people to investigate is Trump himself. As if his hands are clean. There are growing signs that they’re not. His ties to Epstein are out there now for all the world to see, especially since the Epstein emails were released this week with plenty of mentions of Donald Trump.

Then there was Trump’s reaction yesterday after the state of Georgia announced that it will proceed with the racketeering case against him and his alleged co-conspirators, who were indicted in 2023 for trying to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020. This is the case where our then-future president was indicted, booked, and had to pose for a mug shot.

What’s laughable here is what Trump called it: a “politically charged prosecution.” Whether or not that’s true is in the eyes of the beholder, but how with a straight face can Trump’s team call a “politically charged prosecution” but run full speed ahead with prosecutions against Trump rivals like James Comey, John Bolton, and Letitia James?

Easy, if you’re making moves to turn America into a one-party state.

Meanwhile, yesterday Trump’s justice department joined in a lawsuit to invalidate the decision of California’s voters earlier this month to agree to Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the lines of five congressional districts, which will erase five Republican seats for California in Congress and add five more for the Democrats.

Attorney General Bondi issued a statement that called the redistricting scheme “a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.

Fair enough, it’s bare bones politics and perverts the whole process. But lost in this federal complaint is, Texas started it. Back in August, 108 Republican politicians in the Texas legislature, the majority, redrew the lines in five districts to adjust the balance of Texans in Congress from a ratio of 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats to a ratio of 30-8.

What’s laughable is, Bondi never raised her voice about that (or about the Republican legislatures of North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri, which played copycat). Nor did Trump. How could he? He’s the one who told Texas to do it. If California’s tactic—approved by the voters, not just the legislature— was a “brazen power grab,” what would you call it in Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri, and Texas, where the voters didn’t even have a say?

Then Bondi got even more ridiculous: “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.” One-party rule? Let’s look at those Texas numbers again: from a ratio of 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats to a ratio of 30-8.

Isn’t it interesting, the four Republican states that already have redrawn their maps to give Republicans a bigger advantage haven’t faced legal action from the feds, but Democratic-led California now does. The Republican states haven’t faced charges of “one-party rule” but now, California does.

The attorney general’s cuckoo closing shot came yesterday in a post on X.

She wrote, “Newsom should be concerned about keeping Californians safe and shutting down Antifa violence, not rigging his state for political gain.” Why is that cuckoo? Because while Bondi and Trump like to invent scapegoats, there simply is no “Antifa violence” in California, and when it comes to “rigging his state for political gain,” does someone need to remind her again about Texas?

If you read about a government in an established authoritarian state using its own justice ministry to rein in the behavior of the opposition party, you’d think, “Oh those poor people, they must yearn for freedom.” Soon that could be us. We have a government that’s trying not just to beat the opposition, but to punish it. If it succeeds, a one-party state could be close behind.

There were more small examples in the news yesterday of Trump’s preference for a diminished democracy. One was a woman named Ellen Mei, who worked in the mid-level position of program specialist at the Food and Nutrition Service at the Department of Agriculture. In a short interview on MSNBC early during the government shutdown, she warned that SNAP payments to 42 million Americans were in jeopardy and “things might get a little dicey if this drags on into November.”

For that sin, while co-workers returned to the office Thursday when the shutdown ended, she was placed on administrative leave as the first step in the process of being fired. Another woman, Dr. Jenna Norton, who worked at the National Institutes of Health, had helped organize medical professionals to write a letter criticizing the degradation of medical research since Trump returned to office. Thursday, she too was placed on administrative leave.

In a one-party authoritarian state, free speech is not a given right. Mei and Norton both would be disciplined in authoritarian states for speaking out. Now, it’s happening here.

Finally, the boats. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced yesterday that U.S. forces had blown yet another boat with four people aboard out of the water in the Caribbean. Four more non-judicial executions, people who the military instead could capture and prosecute. This brings the number of deaths to 80.

Trump justifies it the way rulers in one-party states would: that these executions, with no due process, are within the powers of a wartime president. What they don’t explain is how drug smuggling, even if that’s what every boat was doing, can be classified as an act of war. As The New York Times reported it yesterday, a justice department memo “asserts that boats believed to be carrying narcotics are lawful military targets because their cargo would otherwise generate revenue that cartels could use to buy military equipment to wage the purported armed conflict.” As CNN reported, “Military officials have acknowledged they didn’t know the names of those killed, the exact destination of their vehicles or have the documentation to prosecute them for their alleged crimes.”

But if you are creating an authoritarian one-party state, you don’t need that. You just do it. In an authoritarian one-party state, you don’t need to ask the permission of your legislature to carry out a campaign like this, you don’t need to provide proof that the people you’re killing are combatants, let alone terrorists. You just go ahead and do it.

Next up, as America’s biggest aircraft carrier and its strike group take up positions just off the coast of Venezuela, military officials have been huddling at Trump’s White House to talk about an invasion. In a one-party state, who’s going to stop you?

[Salon] In A One-Party State, Who's Going To Stop You?

(Dobbs) In A One-Party State, Who's Going To Stop You?

Would you bat an eye if you read about these kinds of things in a Hungary, a China, a North Korea, a Russia?