4/15/25: Deporting citizens goes mainstream as dictatorship in focus

**David Pakman** (0:07)
Welcome, everybody. I want to start today using a word. We have the best words here that many people are understandably afraid to use. That word is dictatorship because, of course, we look around. We have elections. We have courts that some people follow when they make a legal court order. But what we are seeing right now at the federal government is not just dysfunction.
It is a devolution, de-evolution, devolution into dictatorship, becoming a dictatorship and becoming is a key word. Now I want to make it very clear that this is not some like over the top hyperbolic nonsense. I'm not saying we live under Hitler. I'm not saying we have a 20th century style literal dictatorship under Donald Trump. But what we do have are the first signs of the structural decay where courts get ignored. The law is bent around one man, a large orange man. Civil society gets demonized. Power centralizes in the executive opposition is framed as illegitimate. Media critical of leadership is seen as disloyal and treasonous. And you don't have to live under literal dictatorship to see that these are the early stages of how dictatorship forms. Plato warned about this. First the people get angry and they get desperate. Then a strong man comes in loud and angry and vengeful and sometimes charismatic, who says he basically always he is the only one who can fix it. And soon the institutions don't work unless he allows them to. The institutions don't work unless unless they allow him to do whatever he wants to do. So it's really important to understand that authoritarians don't always storm the palace on horseback. Sometimes they tweet or once Twitter becomes X, they excrete on X. Sometimes they host rallies. Sometimes they just ignore court rulings and dare anyone to stop them. And nobody does. And look at what happened this week alone. The Trump administration is defying a nine zero Supreme Court ruling, ordering them to return a wrongly deported man from El Salvador back to the United States. Their responses were not doing it. We'll look at video of that of Trump alongside the Salvadorian president a little bit later. That was a wrongful deportation. The administration admitted it was a mistake. A unanimous Supreme Court said fix it. And at least for now, they're refusing. That's dictatorship behavior. It's not a full dictatorship. It's not Hitler. OK, but this is how it starts. And this is why the word becoming is so important. When the executive stops following rulings from the judiciary and nobody stops them, that is part of a move towards dictatorship. And it's part of a bigger pattern. Trump threatening again to deport US citizens, defying the court rulings, as I talked about, calling civil rights lawyers terrorists, attacking the press, attacking universities, attacking law firms. This is authoritarianism, the likes of which we have seen previously in history open the door to start on the road towards dictatorship. And just because it's happening through press releases and legal memos and executive orders doesn't make it any less real. That's how it always starts by making it sound boring and normal so that a lot of people don't pay attention until we're already 15 steps deep into it. And of course, underneath all of this is the economic pain. Trump's tariffs, early signs of disruptions to Social Security, Medicaid cuts that are in the works, Trump underwater in every poll on nearly every issue. This is why the word becoming matters so much. We're not North Korea, but we're also not where we were ten years ago before Donald Trump, as he likes to say, came down the escalator and said a lot of Mexicans are rapists. The guardrails are coming off one by one. And if we don't call it what it is, while there is still time to do so, we potentially lose the ability to stop it. And so there's a bunch of factors here that are important to consider. Number one is the slow motion nature of the transformation of a democracy into something else. We've been a flawed democracy for some time. We are now devolving into whatever comes after that. We also have to consider and kind of go beyond this, that we do have an environment right now. And it's not about blaming any one person or any one system or any one platform. But we have an environment where there is nothing that is too far for the sycophants and the loyalists to defend. And so I know that there are some out there who are saying, yeah, you know, I am sort of concerned by some of the things that I'm seeing. But if it were really that bad, if it were really that dangerous, if this really suggested that we were on the precipice of something like what you're talking about, David, everybody would be up in arms. But of course, we know that that's not the case because we have an environment right now where at minimum. I mean, Trump talks about I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, right? That's like a benign example. If Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue, you would have the right wing media ecosystem come in and talk about how it was only self-defense and why are sissy liberals against people protecting themselves. You'd have the algorithms of the social media networks feeding people the right wing coded content that would make Trump shooting someone on Fifth Avenue look like the big strong alpha thing to do. And someone was coming after our kids and Trump. So that's like a benign example. I'm talking way worse. What if Trump talked about deporting US citizens? Oh, he's doing that. And what's the reaction? A combination of he doesn't mean it and maybe we should do that and we need to be tougher. And what you want criminals to just do whatever they want. There is essentially nothing. Maybe we can come up with an example that would be a bridge too far. But there is essentially nothing I can think of where we would have a united opposition to what Donald Trump does. He will have the algorithms. He will have the right wing media defenders. He will have people like Stephen Miller screaming on Fox News that they're right in everything they do. We'll have an example of that, by the way, later on in today's show. So for those who are sort of sitting back and saying, I'll know when it's really serious because everyone will be telling me that every news channel will be telling me that every neighbor will be telling me that every social media platform will be telling me that I think that that's not something I would hold my breath for. And so we need to figure it out ourselves. Instead of saying, I don't know, not everybody's freaking out right now. What we should be saying is, how have dictatorships developed in the past? How has authoritarianism crept in in the past? It wasn't someone shows up and on day one does all the dictator stuff by decree.