In Trump’s second term, it isn’t even fun to be right

The news, in brief …

• Trump places DC police under federal control, deploys National Guard

  The president spoke of a city overrun by violent youth while announcing a takeover of the capital's police. Read more.

• America’s heartbreaking divorce from Canada

  Bourbon boycotts, a drop in Canadian tourism — Trump's tariffs and rhetoric are taking their toll. Read more.

• OpenAI’s Altman admits the way people might use ChatGPT makes him “uneasy”

  The head of the company behind ChatGPT worried about using the app to make important decisions. Read more.

• Trump eyes Chicago, New York City after federal takeover of DC police

  The president put several cities on notice after taking control of the police department of Washington, D.C. Read more.

Make me smarter …

Texas Democrats face a “complicated” long game

The odds are stacked against state lawmakers who broke quorum in an effort to stop a GOP gerrymander. Read more.

Hate to say we told you so

No one has been more obviously vindicated than the people who have been calling Donald Trump a fascist from the moment he descended that gilded escalator.

It wasn’t exactly hard to see Trump as the authoritarian strongman he is. The president who laid cheap gold filigree over much of the White House and paved over the Rose Garden doesn’t go in for subtlety. No student of history, Trump trod the path of previous despots in the understated manner of an elephant with the grippe. His move to take control of the police in Washington, D.C., this week is one more trumpeting step.

He’s stolen so many plays from Buzz Windrip’s playbook that they’re looking to erect a statue of him in Foxborough. And yet, we can’t even enjoy can’t even enjoy calling Trump a tacky, unsubtle boor because his open fascism is making life in America so much worse.

The initial buzz of a lightbulb moment for library haunters and 20th-century history dorks can’t last past the reality that Trump is supercharging his own anti-immigrant Gestapo. Being clear-eyed enough to call his administration’s concentration camps what they are doesn’t change the fact that people are being disappeared. The recognition of his familiar pattern of ignoring the courts and bowling over dissident politicians is quickly followed by the horrifying realization that all those people in the past also failed to halt the horrors.

The Democrats, unwilling to remember any history outside of the 2016 election, seem both unprepared for the moment and unwilling to act to stop Trump’s fascist bullrush. They know that Trump rode to power on the back of a conspiracy theory that the world was run by a pedophilic cabal of elites. As evidence mounts that Trump was friendly with the central figure of this supposed shady outfit, top Democrats have called the news a “distraction.”

(Chico Marx said that a sure thing is no fun, so pressing Trump on Jeffrey Epstein should be right up the alley of these smug pragmatists, and yet…)

We’re watching fascism’s full-throated arrival in the United States, and we can’t even brag about seeing it coming. As one sci-fi legend with a noted bent toward fascism once said, “Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”

What do you think? Are you comforted by the fact that you saw all this coming? Does that only make watching it play out more frustrating? Sound off in the comments.

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Before you go …

Divorce him already, Usha

JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other. Read more.

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