Monopolize, Purge, Weaponize: Trump’s Three-Pronged Dictator War on Democracy

As is now clear to most reasonably attentive people of good faith with open minds, Trump and MAGA elites are hell-bent on establishing a kleptocratic dictatorship-oligarchy-bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy. America is well on its way to losing its democracy, rule of law and most of what’s left of civil liberties. Two moves by Trump exemplify the conversion of the US into a cesspit of authoritarian bigotry and corruption.

The app from MAGA hell

Government Executive reports that Trump has forced an aggressive MAGA propaganda app to be installed on all federal employee cell phones. Trump’s propaganda weapon, the “White House App”, is a direct way, in addition to demanding loyalty oaths, to further corrupt and politicize federal employees. Going forward, the civil service will be forced to deal with top‑down lies, slanders and authoritarian hate-mongering from Trump and elite MAGA propagandists. As an added bonus, the app’s security weaknesses include (1) silent JavaScript injection into third‑party sites, (2) location tracking every few minutes, and (3) oddly, data flowing to multiple for-profit third parties such as OneSignal, Mailchimp, Elfsight, etc., with dependency on a private developer’s GitHub for embedded content.** The security analysis concluded that MAGA propaganda and sleaze is the least alarming thing about the new app.

**  The private party embedded content problem comes from Trump’s app content being outsourced to an uncontrolled, un-vetted third‑party code source. That content could come from Putin, Satan, Iran, Israel, Melania, Jeff Epstein’s estate, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or anyone else because there’s no independent control on it. Well OK, maybe not Satan or Hunter’s laptop.

One can only wonder how much OneSignal, Mailchimp, Elfsight, etc. paid Trump to get preferred propaganda, sales and marketing access to our defenseless federal employees. Well OK, they’re Trump’s defenseless federal employees. They’re no longer ours. Regardless, this weaponized app is not a neutral IT tool. It’s a dictator-controlled presidential communications propaganda channel. It’s definitely an aggressive MAGA propaganda app.

Trump’s “Schedule Policy/Career” from hell

In other corrupt, bigoted Trump dictatorship news includes his Executive Order from Jan. 2025 regarding Schedule F. In his EO, he renamed Schedule F and now calls this purge, gut and loyalty effort Schedule Policy/Career. The policy under both names was and still is the same. Specifically, his this purge, gut and loyalty policy policy-related civil servants (experienced federal employees) out of the their service positions and gutted their civil service protections. That left Trump free to fire any federal employee for no reason whatsoever. Trump’s goal is obvious. he reclassifies about 50,000 federal employees, allowing mass firings of any perceived “disloyal” experts. They are to be replaced with corrupt, incompetent MAGA loyalist thugs. This is a common, well-known authoritarian patronage move. It’s a very popular tactic with tyrants, kleptocrats, and raging, brutal ideologues like elite racist Christian nationalist theocrats. Link, link

Very popular.

Dictators of a feather flock together

This Schedule Policy/Career dictatorship move is hidden behind and justified by a MAGA legal fiction called the “unitary executive”. That legal theory used to be fringe crackpot belief. But it now dominates among the six MAGA judges who control our now-authoritarian and kleptocratic US supreme court. The core idea is to directly undermine the now dying merit-based, politically neutral civil service built over the last century. It was built that way to limit and prevent spoils‑system abuses. Now there are powerful incentives for federal staff to demonstrate personal loyalty to Trump instead of loyalty to the law and the public interest. Link, link, link, link, link

Q: Do you approve of the kleptocratic dictator-oligarch-Christian bigot-theocrat regime that Trump and MAGA elites are turning America into, or (a) is it no dig deal because both parties are more or less the same, or (b) America has not been any kind of a democracy for a while, if ever?

But they voted for and supported him anyway

The Reductio Ad Absurdum: They Were Going to Install Ahmadinejad!

Regular readers of this blog know I have spent considerable time documenting the weaponization of antisemitism accusations as a tool for suppressing dissent, defunding universities, deporting students, and blacklisting academics. I have traced the organizational infrastructure behind it — the think tanks, the donor networks, the legal strategies, the federal enforcement pipeline — in detail that I won't rehearse here.

But sometimes history hands you something so perfectly, catastrophically self-refuting that extended analysis feels almost beside the point. This is one of those moments.

According to a May 19th report in the New York Times, the original Israeli war plan brought to Donald Trump — the one he enthusiastically endorsed and that has so far killed thousands of civilians, triggered a Strait of Hormuz crisis, and sent inflation surging — included a cornerstone political objective: the rehabilitation and installation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a pliable pro-Western puppet to lead post-war Iran.

Yes. That Ahmadinejad.

The man who called the Holocaust a "myth." The man who hosted an international Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. The man who — and this is not a paraphrase, mistranslation, or decontextualized slogan, but a direct, unambiguous policy statement — said Israel should be "wiped off the map." The man who is, by any serious measure, the most prominent state-level antisemite and Holocaust denier of the 21st century.

We were told Iran was "the head of the snake" — the controlling force behind Hamas and Hezbollah, the existential threat requiring military confrontation. Maybe so. But when you decapitate a snake, the stated goal is presumably something better. Liberation, perhaps. Democracy. The protesters in the streets of Tehran who actually despise the theocracy — the ones Trump occasionally invoked as "our friends, citizens of a great civilization." Surely the plan was to empower them? So we were told in Trump's speech and Netanyahu's right after the first bombs fell in Iran. Wasn't that the plan?

No. The plan was Ahmadinejad. A man so compromised, so despised — in Iran, in the West, in the Arab world, among Iranians in diaspora — that no American anti-Zionist activist, no Palestinian solidarity organizer, no campus protest group would go near him under any circumstances. The people being surveilled and deported wouldn't touch this man with a ten-foot pole. The people doing the surveilling were planning to install him as head of state.

 

That man was to be brought out of house arrest through "light bombing," rehabilitated on the world stage, and installed as the US-Israeli client of choice for a post-regime-change Iran.

Let's sit with that for a moment.

For the past two years, the federal government has been surveilling Jewish Voice for Peace members, deporting graduate students on student visas for attending protests, threatening to defund Harvard and Columbia, and designating "From the River to the Sea" a genocidal antisemitic slogan requiring federal enforcement action. Canary Mission dossiers — compiled by an anonymous far-right blacklisting organization — were fed directly to federal "Tiger Team" agents investigating 5,000+ protesters. Mahmoud Khalil was detained. Rumeysa Ozturk was detained. Faculty have been fired. Entire DEI offices have been dismantled under the banner of fighting antisemitism.

And it turns out that the architects of this campaign were negotiating the rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier they planned to seat in Tehran as their man.

The contrast does not require elaboration. It is its own argument.

"From the River to the Sea" — a phrase whose meaning is genuinely contested among scholars and whose users include Israeli leftists, Palestinians, and international human rights advocates — is treated as an actionable antisemitic threat warranting deportation.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — Holocaust denier, Israel-elimination advocate, architect of state antisemitism as explicit government policy — was to be the vehicle for American-Israeli regional order.

The students were the threat. The Holocaust denier was the plan.

If the goal were actually fighting antisemitism, this would be incoherent. But of course, fighting antisemitism was never the goal. The goal was suppressing dissent against a military and political project. Antisemitism was the instrument — the legal hook, the rhetorical bludgeon, the mechanism for turning "I oppose this war" into "you are a threat to Jewish safety."

The Ahmadinejad revelation doesn't just expose hypocrisy. It exposes the entire apparatus as a fraud. Not a well-intentioned overcorrection. Not a blunt instrument deployed with good faith. A fraud — one in which the people most loudly claiming to protect Jews from eliminationist antisemitism were simultaneously negotiating with its living embodiment.

I have written before about how the "new antisemitism" framework functions not as a sincere moral category but as an enforcement mechanism — one whose application correlates not with actual antisemitic content but with political inconvenience to Israeli state policy. This story is the proof of concept.

You cannot simultaneously deport a Tufts PhD student for a co-signed newspaper op-ed and negotiate the installation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Not if antisemitism is what you actually care about.

But you can do both, perfectly consistently, if what you actually care about is power.

A Trump corruption roundup

Trump corruption has progressed from horrific to worse. Among American presidents probably all elected American politicians, he is in a criminal class by himself. In addition to being a traitor, convicted felon, sex predator, and chronic liar, he’s a world class grifter. And now, much of his grifting is mostly out in the open. A few recent news reports give a glimpse of the vast criminal enterprise that Trump runs. His crime empire is called the federal government.

As part of a settlement agreement announced May 19, 2026, Trump’s Justice Department granted Trump, his family, and his businesses complete immunity from ongoing tax investigations and audits. This provision was quietly added to a broader agreement establishing a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for Trump supporters. Trump’s acting Attorney General and corrupt MAGA thug Todd Blanche says the government is forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing any outstanding tax claims against Trump, his relatives, and his business entities. This new immunity grant covers current audits, tax-related prosecutions, and any tax matters, including tax returns filed before the settlement’s effective date. Federal law explicitly prohibits presidents from directing the initiation or termination of IRS audits for specific taxpayers. That includes themselves, unless the USSC steps in and protects Trump again by saying the law does not say what it says. Link, link

Tax experts criticized the deal as probably illegal, but who is going to investigate or prosecute for this likely illegality? Not Trump’s FBI Or his DoJ. The USSC effectively immunized Trump for all crimes he commits while in office. So, why not go on a crime spree if you’re morally rotted enough to want to?

Although IRS attorneys prepared a 25-page memo identified weakness in Trump’s claims against the IRS, Trump’s IRS settled and gave Trump a huge gift worth about $100 million in the form of taxes and fines Trump will never have to pay to the US Treasury. Despite Trump’s lawsuit being without merit, Trump’s IRS recommended that the DoJ dismiss the case and give Trump a fat, juicy gift for his troubles. It’s unclear if the memo even reached its intended recipients at the DoJ. Presumably Trump simply ordered the IRS to back off and grift for him. In dropping the lawsuit against the boss, the DoJ gave no explanation for why it chose settlement over available defenses the DoJ simply threw away to serve the boss and created a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump.

Trump has disguised our $1.8 billion in tax money as an “anti-weaponization” fund for Trump supporters, but he will figure a way to sink his greedy claws into it in due course. Directly or indirectly, he will benefit from his sleazy slush fund. Acting attorney general Blanche has authority to appoint five commission members to oversee slush fund distribution, but not surprisingly Trump can fire any of them for any or no reason. Eligibility criteria for payments remain undisclosed, so Dog only knows how those tax dollars will be pissed away for Trump’s benefit. Link, link, link

Finally, an update to Trump’s criminal pardons-for-profit grift has spawned a new industry for grifters who are grifting criminals who want to pay Trump for a pardon for their crimes. This festival of sleaze has provoked warning to criminals seeking pardons to be careful about who they hire to Trump’s bribes for their pardons. Current estimates are that Trump will pardon criminals for a bribe of $1-2 million. The intermediary who approaches Trump’s operatives in his criminal pardons enterprise also gets paid. In a news article, How to [Buy] a Pardon in Trump’s Washington, attorney Josh Nass warns criminals that there are people out there falsely promising that they can get a pardon for them from Trump. Nass has been one of the intermediaries with real contacts with Trump’s underlings who run day-to-day operations for Trump’s pardons for bribe business.

The news article quotes Nass giving his warning for criminals to protect themselves from being scammed by grifters: “There are a lot of bad actors out there, promising prospective clients that they can get pardons. You have people who are in desperate straits, and they get taken to the cleaners by people who wind up doing nothing for them. The upside of these pardons is so great. People [convicted criminals] will do anything to get one.”

Those poor criminals. First they get caught and convicted. Then they have to worry about being scammed when they try to go to Trump to buy a pardon. Goodness gracious what is the world coming to when bad crooks are scamming honest crooks just trying to buy a simple presidential pardon? The world is going to hell in a handbasket. /s

For context, it should be noted that, as discussed here at BNR before, Trump’s pardons have cost crime victims and the US Treasury well over $1 billion in fines, fees and crime victim restitution payments. When Trump takes his payment and lets his criminal clients off the hook, he also forgives all payments the crooks were supposed to pay for their crimes. So, when Trump pardons criminals the bribery payment also buys him the satisfaction of shafting crime victims and the US Treasury, i.e., taxpayers. Now that is patriotic MAGA politics in action! /s

Q: Is Trump effectively serving the public interest by selling pardons to convicted criminals, including relieving them of their obligation to pay their victims, by teaching the victims to up their defenses so they’re not victims again?

Some other info sources:

The Trump regime should be covered as a criminal enterprise

President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes

Trump’s war against America’s public health infrastructure

The NIAID’s public interest agenda has been gutted, neutered and corrupted — now it serves Trump’s interests and the interests of pay-to-play players

In addition to putting incompetent, corrupt loyalists like the anti-vaxx crackpot RFK Jr. in positions of federal government power, Trump is gutting and corrupting the NIH and with it much of America’s public health infrastructure. Trump’s moves are a purely authoritarian political project focused on institutional capture. What Trump and MAGA elites are doing has nothing to do with neutral or good faith housecleaning or efficiency. Scientific American Nature and other sources report that eight of ten top officials at NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) have been pushed out for no solid reason. MAGA elites forced senior infectious‑disease experts to accept reassignment or resign. Meanwhile, COVID‑aligned scientists now face fabricated federal charges. Science reports that 14 of NIH’s 27 institutes now lack permanent leaders after Trump’s corrupted HHS blocked reappointments. MAGA elites installed corrupt Trump loyalists, which amounts to direct political interference in and corruption of scientific governance. These moves strip infectious‑disease institutions of autonomous expert leadership. Power over federal public health operations and planning is now centralized in the hands of corrupt, incompetent Trump‑aligned thugs working for special interests mostly at the expense of the public interest. Link, link, link

The pattern of targets and replacements show an effort to punish pro‑vaccine and pandemic‑response science experts while empowering a new health cabal built around crackpots who spout vaccine skepticism and anti‑regulatory ideology. Public Citizen’s profile of Trump’s health team highlights the elevation of RFK Jr., Mehmet Oz, and Jay Bhattacharya, who are all loony-toons with histories of undermining vaccine consensus, promoting privatization, and signaling willingness to use funding and personnel decisions to discipline perceived enemies. NIH whistleblower filings describe how officials who defended childhood vaccine programs or resisted canceling trials were marginalized or removed, while those aligned with administration narratives advanced. These purges of public health experts are not about policy disputes. Instead, this is about about giving power inside health agencies to corrupt, rigidly loyal Trump thugs. Link, link

Trump’s purges are coupled with elite MAGA efforts to control and corrupt information flows and weaken external checks. All of this make the underlying authoritarian motives quite clear. Oversight documents show that Trump and his MAGA elites have purged or restricted key CDC and federal public health datasets, especially ones related to vulnerable populations. At the same time inspectors general have been fired and advisory boards that previously provided independent scientific guidance have been dissolved or replaced. Attacks on scientific journals as MAGA’s latest target and calls to investigate editorial boards are also a part of MAGA’s campaign to destroy institutions that validate and disseminate scientific knowledge. By undermining data, journals, and watchdogs, Trump and his MAGA elites have gutted the capacity of outsiders (1) to contest false MAGA narratives, which are now everywhere, and (2) to document public health threats and harms. Link, link, link

Taken together, the evidence shows an old, coherent authoritarian strategy: purge disloyal experts, stack critical institutions with corrupt, incompetent ideological loyalists, kill off disfavored lines of research, e.g., vaccines, environmental health, and seize control over the production, corruption and circulation of health data. These changes dovetail with major special interests goals such as privatizing Medicare, weakening Medicaid and Obamacare protections, and steering public resources toward pay-to-play commercial and political interests and constituencies. The public rhetoric cynically emphasizes safety or draining the swamp, but the consistent throughline in all of this is the subordination of public health infrastructure to the demands of Trump’s coalition of corruption and the ongoing authoritarian project of delegitimizing expertise in the public interest.

Reasonable, open minds might be wondering about is how dangerous is all of this MAGA authoritarianism and corruption destruction of America’s public health infrastructure? Is my family going to be safe with crooks, cracks and crackpots in power?

Those are very good questions. One thing about it is certain, honest answers will never come from Trump or the elite MAGA thugs he put in power. We have to decide for ourselves how dangerous all of this is and how much danger MAGA’s incompetence and corrupt authoritarianism have put our families in.

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