Thomas Friedman writes a regular column for The New York Times. This one is unusually perspicacious. I was deeply moved by its candor. And I agree with him. Trump and his enablers are turning the Presidency into a monarchy, giving him more power than any President ever had and more power than the Founders imagined. Checks and balances have been wiped out. The Supreme Court’s rightwing majority approves of all his power grabs. He is imposing heavy fines on universities without regard to basic principles of academic freedom. He has made it criminal to support policies that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is waging war on science. He is forcing the news media to pay him tribute. He fires veteran data scientists unless they report good news.
In his first term, his most notable achievement was the funding of “Operation Warp Speed,” which invested in the rapid production of mNRA vaccines. These vaccines dramatically reduced COVID, which killed one million people in the U.S. Yet just days ago, Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cancelled $500 million in research grants for mNRA vaccines. RFK killed further development of Trump’s greatest triumph. When asked about it at a press conference, Trump took pride in what RFK was doing. Did he understand the question?
His actions are unprecedented. They are the actions of a dictator.
He writes:
Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.
He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.
What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.
As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”
As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.
The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.
The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.
Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?
Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”
He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”
If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.
In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.
And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.
One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.
Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.
And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”
And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”
That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.
And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.
That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps we will get it back the same way the Politburo failed in the Soviet Union. The way Eastern Europe fell from Soviet Dominance before that . The way an endless stream of Latin Dictators were overthrown . When the Military for what ever reason has had enough . When a Lieutenant Colonel leads a revolt. When the Military refuses to fire on the People. The question is what replaced these authoritarian Governments after they failed .We have gone the path of move on and hope for the best since 1865. When we lost the Civil War by allowing the Landed Gentry of the South to stay in place. Rapidly leading to the end of reconstruction and then Jim Crow. And now we are bringing back those Jim Crow statues and one could argue Jim Crow itself with the gutting of the Voting rights act. Than after an attempted insurrection Garland failed again to prosecute those other than the foot Soldiers . So when , not if Fascism comes to an end in America and it could be a long time, what does Justice look like . The Fascist Right has certainly demonstrated that moderation was not the answer. Th other possibility is that sheer incompetence will cost enough economic pain to dramatically shift the legislature . Highly unlikely, followed by the legislature dramatically changing the Court . But what does that look like if the Military / Police state remains remains loyal to the Fascist . Back to solution # 1 .
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During his first term, the orange glob was a novice in the office, and his team generally functioned as guardrails that offered some degree of guidance. His second term is a “horse of a different color.” He has had four years of spiteful rumination to perfect a hostile takeover of our democracy. According some experts, in the first six months the orange glob and his band of rogue vandals have already been able to implement about 47% of Project 2025. While many in the justice department are working to constrain his overreach, they are under attack and being dismissed. The only hope for this country is for the people to reject authoritarian dictatorship and fight against oppression and our dwindling rights.
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I have been thinking lately of aspects of society that produce civilization. The daily news seems to suggest that the Trump administration is attempting to undermine one of the most important underpinnings of a civilized society. Civilization requires that people in that society accept observable reality. The Trump régime learned during its first attempt at ruling that this is the cornerstone of real civilization, and it must be destroyed in order to change that society. It spent four years organizing the people who would cause the collapse of the system. The cheif aspect of this chosen group (mostly proj 2025) was that they must ignore objective reality when it was called for. Hence there was no problem with hiring JD Vance, who found it easy to ignore his assessment of Trump as Hitler. His observation was objective reality in its opinion form, and his original opinion has been supported by his and Trump’s behavior.
This administration is going after most of the pillars of our civilization, and it grows more and more evident that meeting this assault with methods outlined to protect it are failing.
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Thanks for posting this, Diane. I’m signing up to get Friedman’s regular column today. My hope is that there will come a time, soon I hope, when putting “Fired by Trump” on one’s resume will make you a shoe-in for that job you want to fill.
I wonder what MAGA will try to do to Friedman now?
As for Trump, there must be a stadium full of shrunken-brained sycophants who now do his bidding; but with the 2025 document, it is now systematized. No way he’s doing this all by himself, or even as a leader. He is a crime boss who has a shadow board of controllers. I smell the oil companies, to begin with, and the rot flowing from the unrepentant racism that the “Southern KKK soul” never got rid of.
Also, the upcoming election WILL BE TRUMP RIGGED. It’s only a matter of HOW. It is my belief that there is nothing they won’t do to get their way. And I used to know girls in high school like that Laura person. Someone needs to write a book about that one.
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Amazing that Laura Loomer tells Trump who should be hired and fired. Who the hell is she?
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BLUE STATES must all immediately redistrict to assure that they send all-Democrats to the House.
In politics, if you don’t fight fire with fire, you’re toast.
PLUS: The Math is on Blue States’ side if they redistrict because the number of Representatives a state has in the House is based on population. Because Blue States have the greatest population, if Blue States redistrict so that they send100% Democrats to the House, BLUE STATES WILL PERMANENTLY OWN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
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