It is my belief, and take it as such because obviously I can’t prove it, that he is losing power faster than he can consolidate it. In other words, that this exact speedrun we’ve all been watching is going to be what collapses underneath him and causes the destruction of his power, if anything does.

I believe this because all indications were that it was his plan to have declared martial law as early as this spring, but he has not. All he can do is saber-rattle about it.

Because the success of martial law historically depends almost entirely on military enforcement, if a would-be dictator pulls that trigger without certainty that a preponderance of enlisted will actually shoot for you and not just hop to the other side, you can lose everything. Get that wrong and your regime is immediately done, over with, and stronger forces come in to mop up. This has happened before in much stronger and older regimes, not just new wannabe tyrannies like his, and the bottom line underneath it all is that at the end of the day, if the American military refuse to shoot their fellow Americans on his order, Trump is done.

He can enlist unemployed sociopaths to work for ICE and pay them massive signing bonuses to do it, to engage in terroristic amoral acts and be publicly happy about it, but he can’t do that with the entire military. The military, or a critical mass of those who serve, actually have to believe that the orders they are receiving are legitimate and right, or at least not as wrong as they look on the surface, in order to lift that gun and shoot.

But that belief is waning rapidly with each passing day, in the military and among us all, as his core supporters are revealed to be what they are and his true plans to con and discard them become clear. Even Hitler built the Autobahn and Mussolini made the trains ruin on time, which is to say that they both genuinely did things to improve their countries, but behind the flood of propaganda, Trump has done nothing but stolen credit for what others have done in spite of him. And now that he is fully in command of all three branches of government, there’s no one left doing any work for the country. He controls everything, and it’s all visibly going to hell.

Here he is with low-respect Kegsbreath running the military, judges ruling against his attempts to test his military support at lower levels (and so far only in two states of the union that have the lowest number of guns per capita, Illinois and California, so they can be reasonably certain citizens won’t shoot back), and meanwhile the government has shut down, the public isn’t blaming the lIbRuLs for it like he wants, Trump-supporting farmers are being visited with the unlubed dildo of consequences in the shape of unsold soybeans, his probable guilt in the Epstein lifestyle is becoming widely assumed, ICE is pissing off almost everybody with their incompetence and the utter inhumanity of their gestapo approach, he’s got money for a goddamn ballroom and billions for Argentina but jack shit for average citizens, what few reporters are allowed ask legit questions and Pam Bondi replies “Your mom,” and even the firehose of propaganda is finally failing him as his supporters quietly realize, one by one, they’ve been conned . . . and now millions of us are in the streets, more every time, meeting and talking with each other in open, non-digital places that cannot be censored or artificially manipulated. With every day that passes his need for martial law is becoming extreme to the point of desperation if he wants to keep his stolen crown.

But he cannot yet safely declare martial law, because he cannot yet be certain enough that if he does, the critical mass of servicemen and women actually bearing arms will shoot their fellow citizens on his order, much less that their commanding officers will actually relay those orders. He’s working hard on it, but he’s not there yet. Meanwhile that is a mistake that has ended far more entrenched autocracies than his, and it can end his too. So instead he is reduced to releasing fevered AI representations of what he actually thinks of himself, NYC, and this country as a whole.

You haven’t seen much slow them down because 1) there really hasn’t been much, aside from the incompetence in which they excel, and 2) the media, as we have seen, are largely into anticipatory submission and underreporting or not reporting counter-successes at all. Additionally, I have no way of knowing if tech and media giants actually report real numbers of viewers and how many people are just not consuming the propaganda anymore as things get worse for them personally, but if those numbers are falling, I have zero faith we’d ever know the truth of it. It’s not like Zuckerberg or Musk are ever going to tell the truth about their platform losses. But every one of those people who are angry enough to simply turn it off and walk away is one more person who cannot be manipulated, or even counted on by the Trump regime.

So if you’re watching these events and waiting for the scales to tip decisively one way or another, understand that these things are very slow until they’re not, and then they are lightning fast. We’ve been headed down this road in earnest for fifty years, possibly eighty, but it’s really only started to tip in the last twenty-five, and even then things stayed pretty normal until the pandemic. He’s done a speedrun in his second term, but even that is slow compared to how quickly he can be ejected from power. Never forget that the fall of East Germany took place in under a week, from start to finish, and the wall itself fell in 48 hours because of what was essentially a broadcaster’s error.

Protests matter. Individual beliefs matter. You matter, and what you believe matters. Don’t wait for the world to tell you that, because it never will. But when you come to a protest, you will absolutely know that you are not alone. There is a lot of quiet rage in this country, rage that Trump appropriated to get himself into power, but now that the con is being exposed and literally the best he can do is put out AI slop shitting on his own country . . . it is possible that an explosion of the quietly aggrieved masses may be coming sooner than expected.