Overwhelmed Yet Taking Notes

Nearing seven months of the second Trump presidency, I’m overwhelmed with the steps this administration has already taken to pervert and dismember our democracy. Their strategy of flooding the zone is working. Every day, something egregious, at least one if not multiple actions.

Commenting on Robert Hubble’s Substack post today, a reader copied a list of Trump’s authoritarian actions published by the Caledonian-Record, a conservative newspaper in St. Johnsbury, Vermont (in the northeast corner of Vermont, not far from New Hampshire). This is the publisher’s list:

For the record, our concern about Donald Trump’s leadership is not about party loyalty; it’s about democratic norms. His record includes:

Capturing the justice system through politicized prosecutions and intimidation of judges and lawyers;

Purging and politicizing the civil service via loyalty tests, watchlists, and removals;

Overusing emergency powers to bypass Congress on trade, immigration, and security;

Manipulating elections through extreme gerrymandering, weakening voting-rights enforcement, and politicizing election machinery;

Using domestic militarization for routine policing and threatening cross-border military actions;

Pressuring universities and civil society through funding freezes, punitive settlements, and licensing leverage;

Politicizing science by deleting datasets, blocking research, and controlling grant decisions;

Undermining independent media through defunding, blacklists, and legal harassment;

Profiting from public office through conflicts of interest, foreign gifts, and opaque schemes;

Weaponizing tariffs against allies;

Undermining immigration rights, including birthright citizenship;

Attacking diversity, equity, inclusion, and civil rights infrastructure;

Rolling back equal-protection enforcement;

Weakening social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and student debt relief.

We believe these are not conservative values — they are authoritarian ones. Between the loss of local journalism and the normalization of such tactics, all Americans, regardless of politics, stand to lose.

Now, if I’m asked why I don’t support the president, rather than staring like a deer in the headlights at the incredulity of the question, I can simply show this list and say, “Pick one.”