One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of President [Donald] Trump and the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical. The Department of Justice, well, it's part of the administration, for sure, and the attorney general is an appointee of the president.
In the United States, we haven't yet seen rifles aimed at large crowds, but we do observe masked federal agents detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles, flashy ICE raids staged like military operations and pardons for political violence all clear warning signs. Ignoring this is the first step toward complacency, which can kill liberty. Fascism is often misunderstood. It is not just political oppression; it is a set of traits, as scholars and observers point out,
For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel's FBI seizing voting records from Fulton county, Georgia a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment.
"The global human rights system is in peril," wrote HRW executive director Philippe Bolopion. "Under relentless pressure from US President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed."
I lived in Argentina in the mid-1980s, just after the fall of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983. The country was taking its first, shaky steps back toward democracy. It was a time of great hope, but also of grave uncertainty - because while the generals were gone, the political culture that enabled them remained. Like most of the nation, I was captivated by the pioneering trials of the military generals that promised to restore justice.
In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I've seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services.
Meanwhile, signs that the planet's health is worsening are unmistakable. Last year was among the warmest on record globally, with average temperatures far above long-term baselines and heat driving more extreme weather worldwide. In 2025, brutal heatwaves baked much of the Indian subcontinent with temperatures near 48 °C, stressing health systems and agriculture across India and Pakistan. Europe and the Mediterranean faced record wildfires and prolonged heat, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate and worsening drought conditions.
The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story-but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation.
The speed at which Trump tore down a part of the people's house is also in keeping with the speed at which he's been tearing down democracy. Trump just assumes unrestrained power, and no one stops him, even if his actions are lawless. What we've learned from Trump is that it's easy to wreck something. But rebuilding something is going to be much, much harder. How do you put the rubble back together?
Illiberal populism has spread across the world, either challenging for power or entrenching itself in office, from Argentina to Italy, France to Indonesia, Hungary to Britain. But probably the most significant example of a relatively free, pluralist society and political system turning into something very different remains the US, now nine months into Donald Trump's second term. As it often does, the US is demonstrating what the future could be for much of the world.
Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can't pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN's New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: Life is not that simple.
We are all familiar with the Trump presidential strategy of "flooding the zone." Its premise is that the mainstream media is incapable of running with more than one or two stories at a time. Therefore, if you hit the system on multiple fronts simultaneously this will take the wind out of any opposition. Hence, the Trump regime's accelerating addiction to outrage upon outrage.
