The dictatorship is here

Trump isn't just a controversial leader — to me he looks like a would-be dictator wrapped in reality TV showmanship. For most people life still hums along: warm coffee in the cup, the car has gas, and yesterday’s comforts feel unchanged. That normalcy is comforting — and dangerous, because it can blind us to the slow rot happening beneath the surface.

The rot is real. Trump and his followers are chipping away at the institutions that keep democracy intact. In a whirlwind of revenge and spectacle he has attacked decency and truth, trading sober leadership for staged theatrics. His long relationship with spectacle — the same theater that powers staged wrestling and television pageants — isn’t accidental. It’s the template he uses: showy performance, blatant exaggeration, and a crowdsourced willingness to treat fiction like fact.

People flock to that performance because it feels satisfying: clear villains, loud heroes, simple outcomes. But believing the theater is reality is dangerous. If you accept staged violence as real and cheer at scripted outcomes, you’re primed to accept manufactured political drama too. Trump’s brand of “authenticity” is often just carefully crafted illusion, and many buy into it wholesale.

What makes this especially frightening is who he’s allied with: powerful, wealthy interests who have the resources to loot public institutions while the rest of us are distracted by the spectacle. History is full of national delusions that ended badly. We ignore the termites at our peril — because once the structure is weakened by lies and greed, fixing it takes far more than a fresh cup of coffee.