Mass arrests, purges, show trials, our very own homegrown Gulag: Is this the U.S.A. or the Soviet Union?
Silly me. All this time I thought the director of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs was a bald man who wore little round glasses and was named Lavrentiy Beria. When did he become a woman with a gray streak in her hair?
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, appears to think of herself as running Donald Trump’s secret police in an American NKVD. On Monday, Gabbard got the Attorney General of the United States to sign an order directing that a grand jury be convened to hear evidence in her accusation that former president Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Former FBI Director James Comey committed “a treasonous conspiracy” in a “years long coup” against Donald Trump.
Trump almost immediately endorsed his NKVD chief’s accusation, declaring Obama not only a criminal, but guilty: “It’s there. He’s guilty. It’s treason.”
Coming on the heels of armed, masked, unnamed agents in full camo combat gear rounding up tens of thousands of people on the streets, out of schools, the hallways of court houses, and workplaces, this is Soviet style full-on political repression on steroids. I’ve seen the word “purge” a dozen times over the last week in stories about Trump’s “government.” I use scare-quotes around that word because it’s not a government that resembles anything we’ve had in this country over the last 250 years. It’s a political organization in the manner of the Communist Party of the 1930’s and 1940’s and 1950’s that took over a country and jailed opponents, subjected them to false charges in show-trials and either executed them or confined them in a country-wide Gulag of harsh concentration camps.
It's happening right here, right now, in the United States of America. Trump didn’t appoint a director of national intelligence and an attorney general. He appointed two lackeys to run a hastily thrown together system of secret police and domestic intelligence to go after his enemies, the officials who pursued investigations and prosecutions of the crimes he committed as a candidate and as president. Gabbard and Bondi throw around words like “irrefutable evidence” and “conspiracy” and “treason” in the same way that Stalin’s secret police chief, Beria, parroted his wild charges that he was betrayed at every turn by his enemies.
Bondi and Gabbard and Kash Patel don’t have any real evidence. That’s why Patel fired two more FBI leaders today: Brian Driscoll, the former acting director of the FBI who refused to compile a list of agents who worked on the prosecutions of January 6 insurrections, and Steve Jensen, the assistant director of the FBI Washington field office who oversaw nearly all the January 6 investigations. There isn’t any evidence that either man did anything wrong or illegal. What they did was their jobs. They investigated the crimes of those who attacked the Capitol on January 6 at the behest of Donald Trump, who turned them loose from the rally at the Ellipse, watched them assault the Capitol from his White House private office, and then pardoned every single one of them on the first day of his second term as president.
This is what Stalin did. You’re in favor, and you can do no wrong. In fact, you will be rewarded, no matter the crimes you commit. Like Stalin, Trump isn’t satisfied with setting free his stormtroopers. He’s giving them government jobs. NPR revealed earlier today that a January 6 defendant named Jared Wise, who was caught on video footage calling Capitol police officers “Nazi” and “Gestapo” and yelling at the crowd of rioters to “kill ‘em” as fellow insurrectionists were assaulting police officers, has been appointed to be a “senior advisor” to the Department of Justice. Wise even admitted at his own trial that he yelled “kill ‘em” to fellow rioters who were attacking police. Wise was not convicted because when Trump took office, he immediately ordered an end to all Jan. 6 trials and prosecutions, including that of Wise. Then he approved his appointment to an important job in the office Trump is using to persecute his enemies.
We don’t know if Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard and their team of secret police and prosecutors will ever succeed in getting a grand jury to indict Obama and the former directors of the CIA, FBI, and the former director of national intelligence. If they do indict them, it will be the first true show trial in this nation’s history. It will be a carbon copy of what Beria did for Stalin in the 1930’s when he oversaw the Great Purge of the Soviet military and enemies of Stalin’s within the Communist Party. Those rounded up and imprisoned and executed were declared – see if this doesn’t sound familiar – “enemies of the people.” The repression and imprisonment were so extensive that it seriously affected the Soviet economy and armed forces. See if this doesn’t sound familiar: Trump’s puppet at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, has fired more than a dozen senior military officers, most recently a three-star general who was up for promotion to four stars and appointment to a senior position at the Pentagon.
They’re doing it. They’re purging the military of leaders they have declared were promoted as part of DEI or have been involved in “woke” policies. They’re purging the FBI. They are purging the Department of Justice. RFK Jr. is purging the Department of Health and Human Services of anyone who has been involved in the study or development of vaccines. Trump, who oversaw the development of the mRNA vaccines that saved the lives of millions during the COVID epidemic, is cheering him on.
Trump’s other secret police director, Kristi Noem, is so desperate to fill the ranks of ICE agents that they’re offering a $50,000 signing bonus and doing away with age limits on who is eligible to become an agent. So if you’re waiting to sign your papers for Social Security and Medicare, you too can strap on your bulletproof vest and pull your camo mask over your nose and hit the streets as a certified Trump secret police officer. No matter what you do, no matter if you use excessive force and beat handcuffed arrestees or put your knee on an immigrant’s neck, nobody will ever know who you are, and you sure as hell won’t be prosecuted for abusing the trust of whatever “office” you’ve signed up to work for.
These aren’t the beginnings of a police state. We are already there. The horrors we studied in history class about the abuses of the Soviet Union under brutal dictators like Stalin and Khrushchev have now been embraced by the president of the United States and the government he has appointed to office. Using the machinery of the state to investigate and prosecute Americans to serve the ends of Donald Trump is fascism, pure and simple.
The Soviet Union was once our enemy. Now it is a model for the future of this nation. Soviet leaders like Stalin and Beria have their counterparts in our government. I’ve been a writer and a reporter for 57 years, and I cannot find the words to describe the existential danger we face and express my horror and sorrow at what they are doing to our country.
Your happytalk comment for a fine summer day, Part 1:
“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries.
We are at war.
Not a shooting war.
Not yet.
But something worse in its own quiet, choking way—a technical state of civil war. The kind of war that makes cowards of rules and turns procedure into shrapnel.
And in Texas, Greg Abbott is lighting the fuse.
On August 4th, Governor Abbott announced—proudly, defiantly—that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session of the Texas state legislature by August 5th will see their seat declared vacant.
This, in a bald attempt to force a quorum for an unscheduled redistricting effort that would gerrymander at least five new Republican congressional seats into existence.
Five seats.
Bought not with votes, but with ink and knives.
Five seats to hold the U.S. House hostage after a 2026 election that, by all current indicators, will be a biblical catastrophe for the Republican Party.
This is not about state politics.
This is not about Texas.
This is about power.
This is about permanently tipping the balance of national representation using the architecture of a dying republic to rig the new one being born behind its back.
It is a dagger aimed at the heart of the Constitution itself—and it is being sheathed in plain sight.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has responded in kind.
So have the governors of Illinois, Washington, New York.
They’ve declared their own intent to redraw maps, to counterbalance Abbott’s theft with a theft of their own.
And just like that, the pretense is gone.
The guardrails are being sawed off by both sides.
The game is rigged, the referees have joined the teams, and the field is splitting down the middle.
We are not drifting toward civil war.
We are being carried there—on gurneys, on motorcades, in armored trucks painted red, white, and blue and driven by men with no conscience and nothing left to lose.
Donald Trump—the increasingly frail, increasingly unhinged re-occupant of the Oval Office—has shattered the last illusions of presidential restraint.
His executive orders openly violate the Constitution.
He appoints judges who have lied under oath and dares the courts to stop him.
Senate Republicans, now functionally extinct as an institution of deliberation, confirm them without even pretending to vet.
Trump has begun personally selecting general officers in the U.S. military.
He is choosing his own warlords.
This is no longer political theatre.
This is war prep. This is banana republic shit.
And the punchline?
Half the country still thinks the Democrats are overreacting.
That we’re all just melting down because we lost a few court cases or that we’re mad we can’t get pronouns printed on our napkins.
No.
We’re reacting because we’re watching the United States be turned inside out by men who believe they should rule forever—or not at all.
Let’s be brutally clear.
This is not just about maps.
Not just about Abbott.
This is about a Republican Party that has now publicly declared—yes, publicly, and repeatedly—that if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they will refuse to certify the election.
Full stop.
That’s not politics. That’s war-by-other-means.
The plan is as clear as it is insane: gerrymander the House, win the majority through rigged maps, then throw the 2028 election to the chamber when no consensus can be reached.
Install a Republican president—possibly Trump, God help us—by congressional fiat, regardless of the Electoral College or the popular vote.
In other words: end elections.
Cement minority rule.
Burn the scaffolding of democracy and salt the earth where the ballots used to grow.
And here’s where we land.
If one side openly declares they will never accept a Democrat in power again—and backs that declaration with action—then the only rational, ethical, and self-defensive response is to make the same declaration in return.
That’s how we arrive at a technical state of civil war.
Not with cannon fire.
Not with a shot at Fort Sumter.
But with deadlines and district lines, and governors signing paperwork like generals drawing battle maps.
And yes, it leads—eventually, inevitably—to the real thing.
Because what happens when blue states stop sending taxes to a red federal government?
What happens when governors of California, New York, and Illinois say, flat out, “We no longer recognize the authority of a president elected by gerrymandered fiat”?
What happens when National Guard units are federalized and told to act against their own citizens?
We’ve already seen it.
Federal troops in Portland.
Federal agents in unmarked vans in Minneapolis.
And now, a sitting U.S. president selecting military leadership based not on strategy, but on loyalty.
This is what a soft coup looks like.
This is how republics become dictatorships—one signed order, one packed court, one nullified election at a time.
We are standing on the edge.
And I want to be clear: I’m not even opposed to the collapse in principle.
Because unlike the Abbott crowd, I’ve thought this through.
If the United States breaks apart—and God knows, we are dangling over that edge like Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of TNT—here is what happens next:
California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada—the spine of the West—will form a new nation.
They will be joined by Illinois, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and most of the northeastern corridor.
The population, economy, and military of this new Union will be vastly superior to anything the southern rump states can cobble together.
And yes, you can wave your little Wyoming flags, but the brutal math is this: once the U.S. Constitution is abandoned, so too is the notion that two Dakotas matter more than one California.
In the new post-America, power will come from population, productivity, and force projection.
Which means: the south is screwed.
(Continued…)
It is completely horrifying. The only thing that can stop them now is massive nonviolent resistance—millions in the streets on a very frequent basis. I attend a weekly protest against ICE outside the New England regional ICE detention facility in Burlington, Mass. Multiple former detainees have attested to the shockingly bad conditions inside. But the good thing is, the protest is growing significantly, every week. Last week 313 people attended. Yesterday the count was about 450. We are completely peaceful, but our signs deplore what Trump and ICE are doing. And many of us are seniors whose first experience of protest and civil disobedience was marching against the Vietnam war. What are they going to do—arrest and brutalize a bunch of peaceful retired grandparents?? Then watch the shit really hit the fan.