The one institution that threatens Trump is the media.
The msg is Fake News & Enemy of the People.
If he can shift the blame to the press, he can move without accountability.

His "precious". The thing he wants more than anything...To be praised without having to be accountable. https://twitter.com/AndyRowell/status/1266929335597965312

This from @HC_Richardson encapsulates the day, and the times.
This daily posting is becoming a necessary read to set the tone and context for understanding the complexity of the day. https://bit.ly/2XJdVOZ 

I wonder if Trumps fickle "love-you/hate-you depending if you just said something nice about me" continues to work?
He is attacking Fox for not being Trump-enough.
When the paragon of FakeNews is deemed not Fake enough by the most fake person on the planet...

It begs the question...just how low can someone actually go? How far down can a person take the country and still have a recognizable country?

Trump is a liar.
When we are finally released from this capture and if the books and reports are allowed to flow, and the nation is

allowed to know what has been going on these last years,I think we will be stupefied.
We may find ourselves like the German population who truly had no idea how horrible their government had become. Or like those in the middle, who knew, and said nothing.
The reckoning of this

era of Trumpism will be an opportunity to heal. But it will not happen if we think the problem was only Mr. Trump.

Like these police murders of black men (and a few women) there is a reason this happens. Of course it is some "bad apples". But the bad apples excuse is a dodge

if that is as far as the insight goes.
There is a reason the "bad apples" are able to function & occasionally burst out in some murderous event, that finally reaches to the level of the pubic awareness. [Many events do not. Even by the same person Especially if there is no video]

Nothing happens, or at least endures, in society without a context to support it.
There is a reason for everything that happens, good or bad, right or wrong. Without the underlying structures/systems evil cannot function. Not for long. Or the good.
When the underlying systems

become so corrupted that they no longer can support the positive, the good, the forward thinking... they are consumed by the dark, the compulsion to consolidate power. (just one aspect) In extreme cases they become the familiar (but not well understood) dystopias we like to toss

about, the Nazi's & the Soviets.

In our day, right now, May 2020, if we fail to come to grips with what is being told to us...if we are incapable of understanding the times we will descend into our own version of authoritarian hell. It won't look anything like the past examples.

Not in the way we are afraid of "what happened". The underlying principles will be in force, of course... That is what makes it all possible. But how it manifests? We can see the outlines of it emerging.
This is a thesis that needs to be worked out in detail.
For this thread

Just notice what is happening at the level of the press. One of the foundational, systemic, pillars of our freedom is the freedom of the press. As has been recognized from the beginning of the country.
And that is under severe assault. Now, today, literally, by forces that

do not wish to be accountable. Led by the chief anti-american...Mr Trump.

To wrap up this Pensees:
. we are in a crisis that is taking on multiple manifestations of malignant stage 4 cancers simultaneously.
. this is not an accident, though it was not specifically planned.

. the 'context' has been carefully built, like a game plan, and it has multiple principles. Some are old, some are new, most are old ones that are being renewed today.
. it is not an accident that the White Supremacist 's are on the rise.

. the hatred for the press, as an institution, is key to the game plan.
. violence is key. I call this moment in the Trumpism descent the time of the #brownshirts. That interregnum between what was and what is being borne. It requires random disruption of the existing

calm & comfortable safe lives most citizens live in. It requires a separation by fear of what may happen. It requires the threat and occasional implementation of random violence to shake up the notion that institutions, such as the police, are capable of protecting the society.

There are others. To get a working list see @TimothyDSnyder. To get a historical view see @AI_Solzhenitsyn. He shows how the force is applied to disrupt & utterly silence any contradiction to he "Party". (not unlike the GOP Senators today. Though they think
they are going to

become the new masters. Just as likely they will find they are the transitional creatures who end up creating the monster they cannot control that consumes them in the end.
And they will all lament, like @SenSusanCollins does, "Who could have possibly have known?".

And the answer, written by some future Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be "You.". "And because you did nothing you allowed everything.". "You were entrusted w the care of the nation and you failed. Utterly.".

And when the book of that failure of those whose oath was to serve the

is written... we will begin to emerge out of the stupor.
Hopefully healed. Healed enough to realize what happened, and how we will never let that happen again.

But for now...we are here.. at the head end of this pattern.
We still have choices that can determine a different

outcome. That may yet deflect the threatening "asteroid" from a direct hit.

We now have riots which seem to be #brownshirt co-opting of a peoples legitimate grief for ulterior purposes...if not directly planned, at least sanctioned, at least being used, by some high level

people, like Barr, and Trump (the visible ones, others like Bannon a little further back, and who knows what is behind them).
And a global pan epidemic. Also being used to attack integral institutions.
And the incremental victories by authoritarians globally in varying states

transforming once democratic governments/societies into something else.

All of this, and more, is part of the magnitude of what we, who would oppose these forces of destruction, are up against.