Trump now a tyrant restrained only by ‘my own morality.’ We stop him with our own.

Vladimir Lenin, who famously (may have) said there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen, probably would have been flabbergasted by the century that took place in the first week of January 2026.

America’s battered psyche had barely processed Donald Trump’s dictate to illegally bomb Venezuela — killing as many as 100 people — and capture its ruler when a political earthquake struck Minneapolis, where an ICE agent’s stone-cold killing of a 37-year-old mom in her SUV, captured on multiple videos, shook the national conscience.

These two seismic stories sandwiched a grotesque effort by the Oval Office to whitewash the fifth anniversary of Trump’s attempted Capitol Hill coup on Jan. 6, 2021. Yet I would argue that American historians will look back and see the most consequential moment — amid seven more days that shook the world —occurred on the quiet hiss of a New York Times journalist’s tape recorder.

The nation’s 47th president insisted to anyone listening that he believes there are no limits to his power, other than those that he himself sets in a brain clogged by decades of Big Macs.

A dictatorship, if he can keep it.

In the White House last Wednesday, Trump was asked by four New York Times reporters during a wide-ranging interview whether he believed there are any limits on his own powers. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

His morality? The man who, as found by juries of his peers, sexually abused a woman in a department-store changing room and committed massive business fraud as a real-state developer, while palling around with the most notorious sex-trafficker on Planet Earth? That morality?

His mind? The one that is increasingly revealing its age after nearly eight decades of intermittent use, from the president’s increasingly incoherent news conferences to getting up and gazing out the window during important White House meetings, when he’s not boasting about his ability to distinguish a giraffe from a hippo? That mind?

God help the United States of America.

As America’s self-proclaimed paper of record, the Times gets a lot of well-deserved criticism for its news judgment, but it was absolutely right to splay Trump’s kingly pronouncement across the top of the front page — even in a week that seemed like the end of the world as we know it. This actually was the most important story — a unitary dictatorship theory that binds Caracas with the Twin Cities.

There’s an understandable yet somewhat misguided tendency to label Trump’s most impulsive and outrageous actions as “a distraction” from deeper long-term problems. And, to be sure, the president’s MAGA inner circle probably doesn’t mind when TV’s talking heads are talking about Venezuelan crude oil and not the flagrant lawbreaking of blocking the mandated release of the Jeffrey Epstein Files, with 99% still outstanding.

But these so-called “distractions” are, in reality, the very essence of Trump’s “red Caesar” vision for his personalist, authoritarian governance of America and his perceived sphere of domination in the Western Hemisphere. It is a regime that believes in the raw power of brute force and its ability to murder people with “absolute immunity,” whether it’s an 80-year-old grandmother who lived too close to Nicolás Maduro or a 37-year-old mom whose SUV is in the way of its masked secret police.

The independent journalist and author Jonathan M. Katz summed it up best: “Everything is a distraction and everything is the crisis.”

That crisis aims to eliminate the perceived constraints on the regime’s lethal conduct — traditions of America morality that are very different from what dwells in Trump’s clouded brain — by outrageously lying about the present and altering the factual narratives of the past.

Any high-school student struggling to understand George Orwell’s 1984 (just kidding...they don’t read books in high school anymore) could have simply turned on the news last Tuesday, when the Trump regime threw the truth about the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 down the memory hole with a fictionalized rewrite of what happened — thus seeking to control the future by controlling the past.

Although published some 78 years ago, Orwell’s novel is proving an even better roadmap to the deeper truths of the Trump regime than the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It predicted the meaninglessness of past political alliances (“We were at war with Greenland. We had always been at war with Greenland.”), the Two Minutes Hate that is Trump’s Truth Social Feed, and the deepfake altering of reality that turns a part-time poet with three kids into “a domestic terrorist.”

What Orwell was describing was essentially totalitarianism — government with no real objectives or moral force beyond the whims of its Dear Leader and the violent social control that’s required to keep that from unraveling. Less than one year after his inauguration, Trump is claiming this worldview as his own. If he had bothered to crack open his high-school French book, he might have told the Times, “L’État, c’est moi.”

Yet the most chilling part of this regal declaration from the Oval Office was when Trump said his own values and intellect are the only thing that can stop him — presumably from killing again in Caracas or South Minneapolis or the middle of Fifth Avenue. In fact, the institutions that have restrained less-ambitious presidential overreach in the past seem to have vanished in the face of an actual dictator.

For sure, there are some members of Congress willing to meet the moment, but they are drowned out by the fear-laden paralysis of Democratic leaders and the zombie-like obedience of Republicans on Capitol Hill. There are some judges insisting that the rule of law is still in play, but their decisions are sucked into a rogue Supreme Court. There are remarkable independent journalists fighting tear gas and pepper balls in the street, but too many people get their news from in-the-tank billionaire-owned outlets that are functioning as a kind of state media.

Speaking of which, there was one other passage in the New York Times this week that was also striking. It read: “On state television, an anchor warned that protesters could be risking their lives by taking to the streets. ‘Tonight is the night for parents to stop their children from going out,’” he said. “‘If something happens, if someone is injured, if a bullet is fired and something happens to them, do not complain.’”

You can’t be blamed for thinking that the “state television” being quoted was CBS News under its now pro-Trump billionaire owner and his muse, Bari Weiss, but of course the Times was describing that other country where people are risking getting shot to protest: Iran.

» READ MORE: In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution | Will Bunch

There are no coincidences in this already incredible year of 2026. The slow moral rot of the backwards-looking, theocratic regimes behind the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Reagan revolution of 1980 has finally decayed to the point where thousands of people are out in the streets of Tehran, Minneapolis, Tabriz, and Philadelphia.

“People are saying we have nothing left to lose.”

Again, this is a quote from an Iranian anti-regime journalist named Elyar Kamrani, but it’s a vibe that is also deeply felt by the thousands who marched this weekend all across America. One imagines that the gunfire of Tehran was echoing in the mind of the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire when he told a candlelight vigil Saturday that he’s instructed his clergy to get their affairs in order and make sure their wills are completed. “It is time to put our bodies between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable,” Rob Hirschfeld said.

You’ve almost got to hand it to Trump for being honest about his warped agenda, and for understanding what the war for the soul of America is really all about.

Morality.

If the American Experiment dies, it will be because we didn’t stop the immorality of a white supremacy that calls Somali refugees “garbage” and a patriarchy that mutters “f---ing bitch” as it murders a woman in ice-cold blood. If it lives, it will be because we embraced the higher morality of empathy and compassion for our neighbors — and for people we don’t even know.

The world must choose between the morality of one man’s damaged soul and those ancient hierarchies, or that of the millions who are risking bodily harm and even death out in the streets, here and on the other side of the world. There is no longer any middle ground.

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