It’s terrifying but it’s not entirely new, that “red line” was crossed long ago, with thunderous applause. Bush did this shit too, disappearing people off the streets with no due process and sending them off to be tortured at a CIA blacksite or Egyptian prison. And extraordinary rendition also goes back to Clinton, and then Obama explicitly reaffirmed that the US considers itself to have jurisdiction over every country on earth, that it can freely drone strike anywhere it thinks there are terrorists - and that can include US citizens as well.

These tools have existed for 20 years or more and constitute a massive violation of civil liberties both for Americans and for the entire world, they are fundamentally incompatible with a free society, and there was no telling how far they could be taken. These concerns were largely ignored and brushed aside because of 9/11 and the “Jack Bauer” fantasy of being a badass antihero who breaks all the rules to get things done, there was a virtually complete bipartisan consensus that these tools needed to exist and at no point has anyone had the opportunity to vote against any of it.

Trump is of course expanding the scale of it, which is terrifying. Maybe you’re right that he’ll be remembered as the “tipping point” into fascism, but the real tipping point was Bush, who was all the more terrifying because he was doing it while having like a 90% approval rating. Trump is just taking the mask off and doing it in a blatant, incompetent, and unpopular way, which makes him in some ways more dangerous and in some ways less.

Of course you could make the argument that it goes further back than Bush, the US has a long history of toppling democratically elected governments and disappearing people to blacksites, running experiments like MKUltra and the like. But there was a massive shift in discourse after 9/11 where caring at all about civil liberties meant you wanted the terrorists to win.

This might be corny but I remember a movie from my childhood - Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame - certainly a flawed movie in many respects, but you can tell that it was very obviously made before 9/11, because otherwise it would’ve read as a call to action to rise up and overthrow the US government. The bad guy is obsessed with hunting down minorities to the point that he burns and kills innocents, doing whatever it takes to get them, his ultimate act of crossing the line is violating the right of sanctuary, breaking and entering a place of worship that he wasn’t legally allowed to, at which point the heroic captain of the guard turns to open rebellion and rallies the masses against him - it’s a direct allegory for Bush’s presidency and calls for soldiers to disobey orders and turn against the government - except for the fact that it was made before he took office. Growing up at this time, I watched those virtues become vices and those vices become virtues. A mere five years later and Judge Claude Frollo would be the based antihero doing whatever was necessary to save Paris from terrorist infiltration while Captain Pheobus would be the weak disloyal liberal traitor undermining Paris’ safety through the sin of empathy because of his whiny “rules” about whose houses you’re allowed to burn down. (Although tbf, it was attacked at release, but the people attacking it were considered the far-right fringe as opposed to the mainstream discourse).

Trump is worse only because he’s further down the line of where this shit was always headed and where I’ve been saying it was headed since I was like 13 when libertarian weirdos like Ron Paul were the closest thing we had to any kind of opposition to any of it. I’m glad people are finally waking up to the fact that the president has dictatorial powers and that that’s a bad thing, but please remember that when the next, more competent fascist gets in and does all the same shit while being more “respectable” and having better PR.