The Big Picture

I mentioned a few days ago that my regular output has been a little slower than usual because of an emergency rush project. I’m not quite done with that project yet, but I’m ready to announce it.

I’m taking the work I’ve been doing for The UnPopulist’s Executive Watch, tracking Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power as they go by, and drawing on it for a book that pulls all of the details together and shows the big picture.

I previewed some of this in a series early in the year, and in an article for The UnPopulist titled “A Dictator on Day 100.” At about that time, when I started getting interview requests from a French magazine, I realized that I had gone farther and put together the big picture better than anyone else. So I decided to put it into a short book—between 100 and 150 pages—to be published in the next few weeks.

I’m calling it A Dictator from Day One, with the subheading, How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back.

Here’s an initial mockup of the cover.

Trump did half my work for me by choosing villain lighting for his official photo.

The idea is to give a short, readable, and above all, urgently timely overview of Donald Trump’s efforts to create a system of one-man rule.

Here’s an excerpt from my Introduction:

In what follows, I set out to describe the five main prongs in Trump’s campaign to create a dictatorship in the United States.

1. He has stolen from Congress the power to control government spending.

2. He has created a vast apparatus to seize and imprison people without due process.

3. He has defied orders from the courts and schemed to curtail their power.

4. He has sought to control the economy with arbitrary powers to tax and regulate.

5. He has asserted control over independent institutions such as universities and the press.

You will notice that these issues tend to cross over the usual borders of ordinary partisan politics. It might seem unusual for a leader on the “right,” supposedly the faction devoted to free markets, to seek centralized control of the economy. But a campaign for dictatorship is outside our normal politics.

Dictatorship is not an issue of left versus right, as we have traditionally used those terms in America. It is an issue of power versus resistance to power. It is an attempt to concentrate power in the hands of a single man by knocking down any competing center of power, any barrier or check against the dictator. That includes private businesses and markets just as much as it includes university faculties and independent journalists.

The goal of this book is to show the pattern of this push toward dictatorship, to take many individual incidents and integrate them into a big picture of what is happening so we can make a proper response.

Having this be timely is important. When I started doing working on this issue, first with my “Chaos Report” series, then at Executive Watch, I assumed there would be a lot of other people doing the same thing. Heck, I thought some big liberal university would make it a class project for their entire law school, and I could mostly just sit back and aggregate work done by others. What has surprised me is how few people are really tracking this carefully, and hardly anyone else seems to be trying to pull it into an integrated picture. You can see this in the Democratic Party leadership, such as it is, which has been caught flat-footed and is responding to Trump’s second administration as if we were still in the realm of normal politics and this was the Romney administration.

I decided something needed to be done as soon as possible, so I went into high gear, and this whole project is going to be done, pretty much start to finish, in about 8 weeks total. I’m aiming for September 17—Constitution Day, two weeks from today—as the launch date. I have almost the whole thing written, and I’m already at work on the layout.

I’ll be publicizing this book hard when it launches, but in the meantime, I am asking your support.

Make a donation in the next week to support this project, and as usual, I will include your name in the book as a sponsor. (Only if you request; given the kind of retribution I describe in the book, not all donors may want to be listed.) Donate at least $100, and I’ll send you a signed copy. Donate more if you can, because starting now—I’m getting advanced copies out to all of my contacts—I’m going to be putting an unusual amount of work into getting a big audience for this book.

At the very least, if you’re still on my free list, subscribe.

I’ll close with a line from my Preface that conveys this sense of urgency.

In this book, I attempt to capture, in breadth and in detail, the story of America’s political devolution from a free society to an authoritarian dictatorship. I largely describe this in a dispassionate manner, focused on facts and arguments, but don’t let that tone deceive you. The purpose of this book is to grab its readers and shake them awake.

It is a warning to show them the scope, speed, and detail with which they are being sold into serfdom.

I think it is exactly what the country needs right now, and not a moment too soon. Help me shake the American people wide awake, before it’s too late.