Finally, a pol does the thing he promised voters! The pol is Trump. The thing is fascism.

As the long, hot summer of 2025 winds down, with masked secret police making violent misdemeanor arrests in the streets of the nation’s capital as armored personnel carriers roll past the Washington Monument, and FBI agents raiding the home of a president’s highest-profile enemy, people are finally wondering when it all went off the rails.

Was it when Donald Trump told an audience in Iowa that Chicago and New York City are “crime dens,” and that he planned to send armed troops into their streets, “and we’re going to show how bad a job they do”? Not the troops, the cities’ leaders.

Maybe it was when Trump spelled out that the real purpose of his 47th presidency was less policy than revenge, dramatically pronouncing that “I am your retribution.” And then he started filling in the blanks of which political enemies he wanted to see behind bars, as many as 100 times. Or when he repeatedly cited the New York attorney general who won a fraud judgment against his business empire, Letitia James, whom he declared “should be prosecuted!”

Or you could argue that this short-fingered vulgarian and former real estate tycoon revealed to the world the true nature of his project when he declared his plan to send back all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants, while an arena packed with 20,000 MAGA faithful waved signs reading, “Mass Deportation Now!”

Maybe the most striking thing about the last few days of news flashes about the decline and fall of American democracy has been the disgruntled conservatives or recovered “objective” journalists now forced to concede the true nature of the Trump project: fascism.

Even David Mastio, the former George W. Bush speechwriter turned columnist for the Kansas City Star, conceded that Friday morning’s FBI raids on the home and office of his former Bush 43 colleague — John Bolton, who became Trump’s national security adviser and later a fierce critic — were “right out of the fascist playbook.” (Even as he continued to insist anyone who’d used “the F-word” before this week was wrong.)

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which had endorsed Trump’s return to the White House, wrote that “it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.” The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper concluded that the president’s abuses of power are “turning out to be worse than we imagined.”

Really? That is one massive failure of imagination.

That’s because all of those statements and quotes at the beginning of this column — the threats to militarize America’s great cities, the vows to use the full power of the federal justice apparatus to come down on political rivals, the human rights disgrace of mass deportation — aren’t from last week, or even this summer.

They were all made during the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign. An American dictatorship that embraces many, if not all, of the core tenets of fascism isn’t some kind of secret agenda the Trump regime unleashed from a Trojan horse after the GOP nominee brazenly lied about it. No, fascism is what this president openly campaigned on — 77,303,568 citizens voted for it. And pundits who should have been listening — like Mastio or the Journal editorial board — instead clamped their hands over their ears.

In a weird way, you gotta hand it to Trump. This late boomer and teen Watergate geek has been waiting a lifetime for a president who actually keeps his word to the voters. Even the candidates I supported have largely flunked, from Bill Clinton liberating Wall Street while imprisoning Black folks (and expressing his hatred for “the liberal media” … meaning me) to Barack Obama keeping Gitmo open and keeping the drones locked and loaded. But Trump showed us who he was the first time. Promises of authoritarianism made, promises of authoritarianism kept.

The FBI raids on Bolton’s house, which apparently are a hunt for classified government documents, are the ultimate example of a news story that was both shocking and utterly unsurprising at the same time. And they seemed to epitomize how Trump has turned the federal justice apparatus into his own vengeance squad in a way never before seen or envisioned in 249 years of U.S. history.

Sure, it’s not inconceivable that Bolton, a hawkish adviser to two presidents, has a document that he’s not supposed to, which would be yet another case of arguably the most overhyped alleged white-collar crime in America today. But it’s also hard not to notice that Trump’s six-year feud with his former aide — whose security detail, because of an Iranian assassination threat, was yanked in the first hours of Trump’s presidency — has been boiling over after recent Bolton TV appearances critical of his former boss. As the Washington Post noted, “People close to Trump have privately noted … that the president was bothered by Bolton’s recent deprecation of his efforts at peacemaking.”

» READ MORE: Trump’s D.C. takeover: Not distraction. Dictatorship. | Will Bunch Newsletter

So the timing and appearance look awful. And I say this as someone who has vehemently disagreed with most of Bolton’s ideas, but would defend to the death his right to equal justice and due process. Even if Bolton is never charged, the damage from a federal investigation — in anxiety, reputation, and dollars — is incalculable.

And Bolton is hardly an isolated case. Most of the subjects of the president’s political grievances — the prosecutors, agents, and lawmakers who investigated Trump over his campaign aid from Russia or the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, or former aides turned critics, or Democrats who ran against him — are now facing some kind of investigation.

Exhibit A is James, the New York attorney general, who drew Trump’s ire with her business fraud lawsuit. Her conduct in that case is now the subject of a U.S. Justice Department probe, but federal agents are also looking into alleged irregularities in mortgage applications she filed for separate homes in Brooklyn and in Virginia.

A Trump loyalist, Bill Pulte, is now running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and has pulled the files to refer several high-profile Democratic politicians to the Justice Department to investigate allegations of mortgage fraud, including James, California Sen. Adam Schiff, who led a House impeachment effort in Trump’s first term, and now Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board.

Trump — who’d love to install his own people at the Fed to lower interest rates — has posted gleefully online about these allegations, while Justice has named its most pro-MAGA pit bull prosecutor, Ed Martin, to look into them. Much like the new probe into Bolton, the political stench of these selective prosecutions is overpowering.

Indeed, the idea of these MAGA die-hards pulling the mortgage files of Trump’s well-known enemies and checking to see if every “i” is dotted feels as if the regime is following Democrats, journalists, and other critics with traffic cops, waiting for them to go three miles over the speed limit. An all-powerful state apparatus can always find some pretext against its enemies. Josef Stalin did this, and now the Trump regime is shamelessly following in his footsteps.

The investigations into Bolton, James, or others, from former FBI chief James Comey to Joe Biden, are just one example of how Trump’s government is using a mix of transparently flimsy pretexts and extreme, novel interpretations of existing laws to expand American dictatorship while clinging to the veneer of democratic norms. Deploying troops against U.S. citizens, hastily constructing unlawful concentration camps, deporting inconvenient migrants to faraway places like Uganda, and looking to jail political foes are hallmarks of the worst autocratic regimes. And yet, too many of the desperately needed checks and balances remain instead in denial that Trump is delivering the fascism he promised in 2024 campaign rallies.

These include the mealymouthed reporters and editors at elite outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which spun the authoritarian military takeover of D.C. as merely Trump fulfilling a fantasy of acting like “a big-city mayor.” Or the Democratic pols who cling to their dreams of a fair 2026 election, or vow to someday battle Trump “in a time, place, and manner of our choosing,” even as the regime is rapidly sifting through their own mortgage applications or tax filings, as well.

History has shown that prying power from fascist regimes is hard once they plant their roots, and it’s clear after just seven months that Trump’s assaults on democracy are getting more brazen by the day. We need to encourage the true resisters — like the everyday folks pushing back against the D.C. occupation — and get more serious about unconventional protests such as civil disobedience, boycotts, general strikes, and actions that can be taken well before November 2026.

If anything good came out of Friday’s Bolton raids, at least a few more people finally understand that when Trump showed us who he really is, we should have believed him the first time.

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