DEMOCRACY DOOMSDAY CLOCK: Closer to Midnight, June 2025

Because of mortality or constitutionality, Donald Trump won’t be President after 1/20/29. So the existential question now is whether his preference for Monarchy over Democracy is irreversible or not.

Our Democracy Doomsday Clock will monthly track his reverse darwinism – a Red Hat going back to root for the Red Coats – and whether the damage can be stopped and repaired. Lacking any clear event like Mussolini marching on Rome in1922, we will periodically guesstimate how much closer we are to the midnight of Fascism to help inform our best strategies to avoid becoming Orban’s Hungary.

Among scholars, there are ten agreed-on variables that can determine whether we are backsliding from a constitutional-republic-for-all to an elected dictatorship run by corporate elites and militant reactionaries. These criteria include the levels of Truth, Economic Inequality, Political Money, Emolumental Corruption, Rule of Law, Free Speech, Other-ism, Violence, Militarism/Nationalism and Cronyism and whether any retreat appears temporary or permanent. Waiting until all are breached – maybe even just seven or eight – will be too late.

By our estimate, there were at least six big events in the past month that either accelerated or slowed the Clock ticking down to One-Man rule:

1. The Separation of Powers. The Founders established a separation of

powers so no one branch could swallow up the others, as the Supreme Court decided in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

Yet over two centuries later, a Roberts Court that had promised to be a neutral arbiter merely “calling balls and strikes” invented a theory and precedent that was called “The Unified Executive.” So just when America actually had the first openly monarchical president, this Court – which only last year gave presidents new immunity from criminal prosecution – decided that this was the perfect time to weaken public accountability.

Although federal district court injunctions proved to be the best method to block unlawful Trump Executive Orders, a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. neutered such “universal injunctions.” Now only the plaintiff(s) in a particular lawsuit could benefit, unless dozens of similar cases were brought in other districts or there was a bona fide national “class action” filed on behalf of other plaintiffs.

Since the Court never reached the substantive issue in CASA of “Birthright Citizenship” – which was right there in the words of the 14th Amendment – some people will now be considered citizens depending on the state where they were born. Which is nuts – we might as well allow different states to have different currencies. Whatever happened to “One Nation with Liberty and Justice for All”?

Justice Barrett’s majority opinion naively implied that the scores of overturned Executive Orders reflected judicial overreaching rather than the far more likely reason that – with Trump issuing a total of 143 Executive Orders in his first 100 days compared to Biden’s 42 and Obama’s 19 – a lifetime recidivist was happy to try to rule by fiat not law, as both numerous Republican and Democrat judges had previously ruled.

Justice Jackson was not buying Barrett’s search for 18th century precedent to allow a felon who had said “I can do whatever I want” under Article II to continue his regency. “[T]he degradation of our rule-of-law regime,” she wrote with stunning bluntness, “will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions.” ”https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/29/supreme-court-injuncti ons-birthright-citizenship-trump/

Last year’s New Yorker cover perfectly framed what happened and could continue to happen if the most reactionary Court in modern history keeps reading monarchical views into the anti-monarchy Constitution.

2. THE RECONCILIATION BUDGET BILL was certainly “Big” but then

Either “Beautiful” or “Ugly” depending on the eye of the beholder.

As has been widely reported, TeamTrump declared that it would generate a new “Gilded Age” of more GDP, more jobs, more tax revenue and lower inflation and, as Trump preposterously claimed, based on his time-tested philosophy that there’s “a sucker born every minjute”— that “it won’t affect anybody — no one would be hurt since it’s all fraud, waste and abuse.”

The evidence for this was the assertion itself…since an identical mantra had resulted instead in the opposite by the end of prior Republican administrations in 1984, 2008 and 2020. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office, created to be a nonpartisan tie-breaker in such debates, concluded that by 2034 Medicaid beneficiaries would lose $1 trillion, 12 to 17 million Americans would lose their health care, the debt would grow by $3.4 trillion dollars, and several million children would go hungry after losing SNAP (food stamp) benefits.

There really was one additional number that Trump surrogates kept waving around – “if” growth rose to three percent because companies invested more, then Trump would be vindicated. “If”, however, is a pretty squishy argument when you’re gambling with the economic health of a $26 trillion annual economy.

Except for the Council of Economic Advisors, which John Maynard Trump controls, what appears likely is a massive transfer of wealth to the top one percent and a decrease in economic security for the bottom 60 percent. Already, safety net cuts had so decimated the National Weather Service and NOAA that Texas authorities didn’t anticipate the extreme flooding last week taking the lives of nearly 100 people, including dozens of young female campers.

Economic inequality rose in the past 60 years from a 30-1 ratio of top earners to line-workers…to about 300-1 now. Let’s play “if” – if it grows to 1000-1 in a country run by oligarchs, then would a crushed middle class finally revolt against a party relying on “trickle down” economics and cultural resentments to win elections?

A sharp backlash against inequality occurred after 1789 in France and 1929 in America. Will average families notice their damaged prospects by the 2026 and 2028 elections? That depends on the data and the polemical skills of the two parties.

3. BOMBING IRAN – Militarization of American policy has long roots – from “Remember the Maine” in1898 to Trump sending federal troops last month to supposedly quell non-violent protests in a small corner of Los Angeles. But other than George Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq, it’s hard to think of instances when America unilaterally attacked a country not at war with us and without any Constitutional declaration..

“Mission Accomplished” this time?” The lying-ist President ever insisted that Iran’s hidden processing facilities had been “obliterated”, yet a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency analysis preliminarily concluded that Iran’s enrichment program had been set back only by a few months. Agreeing was Rafael Grossi, the chief U.S. nuclear inspector, who added that the country likely had moved its existing 880 pounds of enriched uranium before the bombing and still possessed the technical know-how to reconstitute it.

Authoritarian leaders enjoy their monopoly on state violence bolstered by condemnation of unpatriotic critics. Trump’s fury even included a threat to ignore the First Amendment by suing CNN and the New York Times for its accurate reporting and his refusal to admit that his own DNI director three months earlier found that there was no ongoing Iranian program to build nuclear weapons.

Then there’s the fact that the ONLY reason those facilities even existed was Trump’s rejection of the John Kerry-negotiated nuclear deal that would have frozen any such program — under international inspection – for at least 15 years.

4. BE VERY AFRAID. A 94 year-old Holocaust survivor said in an interview about a recent Netflix film, The World Will Tremble, that “people will turn into animals in an instant if they detect permission from their leaders.” A President needn’t imprison thousands or kill millions to coax tens of millions to self-censor – what the author called “anticipatory genuflection” in 2016 about Trump’s M.O.

His embrace of ‘stochastic violence” continued in the past month in four separate episodes largely linked by his yen for violence and disdain of minorities and Democrats.

E.G.: After a shooter in Minnesota killed two ranking Democrats and was found with a kill list of 70+ Democratic officials, Trump refused to call the Governor to offer condolences as “a waste of time”...said nothing publicly when the son of two MAGA parents – photographed in their hats posing earlier at the White House – shot two Idaho firefighters to death…and traveled to Florida for a press conference with Gov. DeSantis to celebrate the opening of an “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp for detained immigrants based on the Jim Crow trope – not unlike the dehumanization of Jews in the early 1930s – of feeding Black people to alligators.

And when a young Muslim Democratic Socialist won a landslide in his party’s primary for Mayor in NYC, Trump quickly called him a “communist” and discussed whether he might be subjected to criminal investigation or even deportation.

Especially after his pardons of hundreds of convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists, skeptics of the “Fascist” label should ideally first comment on the sadistic use of alligators for detained immigrants and acknowledge that Generals Milley and Kelly, both of whom appointed by Trump, had watched the President up close and labeled him a “Fascist.” (Fyi to a mainstream media allergic to the “F” word: “Facts don’t cease to exist,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “because they are ignored.”)

5. IMMIGRANT BEATDOWNS & DISAPPEARANCES had the virtue, to true Trumpists, of looking tough on “Law and Order.” But since a majority of those arrested lacked prior accusations or convictions of criminal conduct, the real-world result was that millions of Brown Americans were understandably afraid to leave their homes and be vulnerable to unjust arrests if not “disappearances” to other countries without adequate due process of law.

This is happening not in Argentina, Chile or the Philippines but today in America.

Trump himself started to “go wobbly” in mid-June on a program to arrest at least 3000 immigrants a day, admitting that he didn’t want to punish farm-workers and hotel staff who were “”good people” but may have “lacked a form.” He then almost immediately reverted to the Stephen Miller policy of trying to deport millions despite the human and economic costs.

A program that looks like Kristallnacht on TV may end up becoming a “poison pill” that reduces the GOP Latino vote in future elections. Menacing minorities both brings us closer to a police state yet undermines GOP political prospects.

6. WHO POLICES SPEECH? A foundational premise of MAGA-land is that they favor "free speech" and disdain "woke," which is conveniently defined as popular sentiment they disagree with.

There's a world of constitutional difference, however, between a private social consensus and big-brother coercion. For an easy example, there’s a near unanimity against using the “N Word” – because it’s seen as proof of racism, the speaker risks being "cancelled" or shunned in their social circles.

But that contrasts with governmental use of its immense coercive powers – to prosecute, tax, award or deny some discretionary benefit – to compel the adoption of a particular point-of-view. That’s as different as Democracy and Dictatorship.

Twice this past month a President who likes to brag that “I hold all the cards” compelled a private entity to change an internal policy under the threat of financial or personal ruin:

*first, the Trump administration is trying to redefine “civil rights” into an upside-down MLK “I Have a Dream Speech.” So the DoJ threatened to sue the University of Virginia for its program to further “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which led to the forced resignation of its popular president who apparently wasn’t gung-ho for the newspeak about white rights.

*second, Paramount Global needed a) Justice approval to merge with Skydance Media and b) FCC approval of the licenses of CBS stations (which it owned). This situation allowed TeamTrump to creatively shake down the parent company to pay $16 million to the as-yet unbuilt Trump library to settle a pending lawsuit alleging that CBS’s “60 Minutes” had unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris.

Here is a President who creates fake news daily by compulsive lying muscling the most popular news program of the past 51 years to, in the words of Sen. Ron Wyden, “force Paramount to pay Trump a bribe for a merger approval.“

Somewhere President Putin is laughing at how the American party of “small government” is imitating his autocratic rule over the media and education.

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Net-Net: Since Congress, the Extreme Court and the President over the past month normalized authoritarian methods when it came to Truth, Economic Inequality, Rule of Law, Free Speech, Other-ism, Violence and Militarism, the prospect of an American Fascism has gone from 10p at night to perhaps 10:30p. Credit this regression largely to three significant developments – Justice Barrett’s crowning decision + a budget that shifts trillions from the needy to the super-rich + a mass deportation policy that terrorizes Latinos.

There are two contrasting ways to assess these events. Trump rhetorically gloated, ““Has anyone had a better two weeks?” A different rhetorical question might be whether the MAGA playbook seemed written for the Mafia rather than Madison or Marbury?