This Nebraska mom's ordeal points to the darkness awaiting us all under Trump

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet.

“The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, the mayor of Minneapolis, and any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles:

Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out.

“You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet.

Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet.

Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia state policeman, because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes:

“The activist … has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town:

“They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As theTimes reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.”

In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian:

“It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night.

But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Stephen Miller posted last night about Minneapolis:

“Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Elon Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly.

But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than 20 years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly-liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid 40 years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Trump and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes.

Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them.

And then, of course, it’s too late…

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.