The over reach has to come early, and be so overwhelmingly egregious that everyone agrees that it is egregious. It also has to be extremely poorly organized and executed. But this has been coming for a very long time, and there is very little accidental about any of it. Unfortunately, in the eighty years since the end of World War II, the US built intelligence and psychological warfare organizations which successfully initiated and executed coups in Chile, El Salvador, Vietnam, Iran, Honduras, the Republic of the Congo... the list goes on and on. Organizations like that are weapons. And like all weapons, it can be turned against itself.
Unfortunately the US citizen has become, over the last sixty years, inured to fascist ideology from the cradle, having bathed in it, in everything from situation comedies to westerns, to revenge movies, superhero movies, to the extent that a large number of them consider fascist ideas to be merely common sense.
The Fairness Clause was killed in the 1980s, allowing extremist propaganda to grow to dominate rural AM radio, and then cable, building the information silos which we see now working so successfully.
Meanwhile laws were gradually being rewritten to favor the amassment of oligarch-sized, imperial fortunes, like Musk's and Bezos' and Gates, etc, who also had the benefit of detailed knowledge of what we think, buy, watch, click 'like' on, etc... This created a fatal imbalance of power.
Simultaneously democracy was further eroded by the ever-evolving concept of the "Unitary Executive," which in time has given that office near kingly powers. The Supreme Court just about finished that job.
Once norms have been stressed to the degree that they have become meaningless ceremonies, as they largely have, the resistance to each increasingly egregious act becomes less and less.
On the other hand, these 'raw power' kinds of administrations are also breeding grounds for unrestrained corruption, cronyism, and incompetence. That mistake has crippled or killed countless coups.
It'll be interesting to see what happens to Boris Epshteyn, who tried extorting powerful Republican job-seekers in the Trump Administration. But Epshteyn's brand of raw, street-level corruption is endemic in these types of groupings.
Aggressiveness and ruthlessness are prized above all other qualities, and so that's what you get. Sharp-elbowed, shameless grafters and crooks, at every position. Just look at the Royal Court of France before the revolution, or Czar Nicholas's Russia. Con men, grifters, grafters, power-grabbers in every bureaucratic seat.
What we see, in Trump's Caligula-like political appointments, his celebration of lies, hate-mongering, and base vulgarity, is not a new phenomenon. It was even given a name in the 1930s by a Polish psychologist named Andrzej Lobaczewski.
"Pathocracy," he wrote. "The condition where government of a society is dominated by those with psychopathological disorders."
"It begins in any institution when one such disordered individual emerges as a leader figure; soon, their personality amplifies it. It filters out those appalled by their brutality and irresponsibility while attracting others who see it as charisma and decisiveness."
"Soon, others with psychopathic traits attach themselves to the power hierarchy, while responsible and moral people leave or are ejected, and before long, the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience." (see the Project 2025 hiring list.)
All I can say is hold on to your hat.
