The Daily Populous Sunday August 24th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by newrepublic.com and submitted by Quirkie

But those of us in the anti-Trump camp must do a better job of collectively telling a single story. The Democratic Party should name members who specifically focus on Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. I would love to see a well-respected figure not formally associated with the Democratic Party designated as a lead spokesperson for the anti-authoritarian movement, amplifying all the great work activists are doing to confront Trump. (Sherrilynn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Found, would be an ideal choice.)

News outlets not committed to a both-sides approach can orient their coverage around the potential of dictatorship in America. I worry that MSNBC, which is now separating from NBC, is missing an opportunity to remake itself into the kind of news outlet that the United States needs in 2025. The network seems to be leaning into covering incremental events and breaking news without much context (its new name will be MS Now) and is creating a traditional D.C. bureau that seems fairly similar to those of outlets like CNN. It would be better if the network put a set of reporters on the authoritarianism beat in addition to the ones covering Capitol Hill and the White House.

“Journalism is a curriculum of everything that happens in the world on a single day or in an hour,” said Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in a recent episode of TNR’s Right Now, the Substack video series I host. “What’s often missed are these kinds of syntheses and putting them together and telling us, ‘We reported on these 25 things that happened this week in Washington, these 25 things that happened at the state level.… Let’s put this together for you and show you a pattern.’ We need that ambition in our journalism.”

coconutpiecrust on August 24th, 2025 at 12:28 UTC »

“Dictatorial tendencies” - media.

“I will be a dictator from day one” - Trump.

Tendencies.

Pale-and-Willing on August 24th, 2025 at 11:44 UTC »

If a president wanted to become effectively a dictator, he’d likely:

Purge govt of non loyalists Weaponize law against opponents Use military to police opposition strongholds Threaten media, schools, businesses w penalties to get them to heel Change election rules in his favor.

BTRCguy on August 24th, 2025 at 11:26 UTC »

Following additional months of violence and intimidation against the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the government seized all its assets on 10 May 1933. On 22 June, they banned all Social Democratic publications and meetings, and canceled all SPD electoral mandates in both the Reichstag and the state Landtage (parliaments). Membership in the SPD was declared incompatible with holding public office or a civil service position. All over Germany, three thousand party functionaries were arrested, assaulted, tortured and confined in prisons or concentration camps. The SPD was effectively hounded out of existence.

By early July, all other parties, representing the broad German middle class, had been intimidated into dissolving themselves rather than face arrest and imprisonment. All the major parties of the Weimar Republic formally disbanded within the span of about a week: the German National People's Party, the Nazis' coalition partner (27 June), the German State Party (28 June), the Centre Party (3 July), the Bavarian People's Party (4 July) and the German People's Party (4 July).

Ensuring that the Nazi Party's hegemony was enshrined in law, the Reich government then enacted the Law Against the Formation of Parties on 14 July 1933. It declared the NSDAP the country's only legal political party, and mandated a punishment of imprisonment for anyone supporting or seeking to establish another party organization. The brevity of its three sentences belied the historical import of the action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_the_Formation_of_Parties