The speed of American democracy failure seems apropos for the man who repeatedly went bankrupt faster than anyone in history, and the playbook feels familiar.

Once he established that norms don’t constrain him, and he fatigued the accountability systems, the violations naturally escalated and expanded rapidly. “Grab’em by the pussy” was his actual hat slogan.

Financial corruption → legal system weaponization → extrajudicial killings → unauthorized military action. Each step tests whether anyone can actually stop him from grabbing like an Epstein pervert.

For years I’ve had lawyers, true experts in democracy far more intelligent than me, tell me an information warfare history perspective doesn’t account for the complex control framework of America.

That to me has always sounded like the horse manure industry will somehow pivot to diesel emissions investigations. I predict the opposite. Indeed, we see clearly now how all these vaulted democratic “accountability mechanisms” that handled the Watergate-era crimes (at best) aren’t doing much today:

• Investigative journalism exposing hidden wrongdoing
• Congressional oversight responding to discrete violations
• Public outrage mobilizing around clear transgressions
• Courts adjudicating specific legal violations

Exactly none of them scale into Steve Bannon’s explicit “flood the zone with shit” strategy of simultaneous transparent corruption across dozens of vectors. A militant planned and distributed denial-of-service attack on democratic accountability itself is in full swing. And there’s a bizarre lack of response to the accelerated velocity, volume and variety (Big Data Three Vs) of breaches.

I suppose it’s kind of like being told by lawyers in the 1960s that foreign assassinations of state leaders by America would never happen at home, because of accountability, right before JFK and MLK were shot dead. So many Americans assassinated, so little accountability. Mondlane was American, right?

By the by, America still won’t release the files on who assassinated the UN Secretary General Hammarskjold.

Does anyone in America care about why the assassinations weren’t prevented? They even hit the UN leader. I mean does anyone even remember an “Ace of Spades” was found on the wreckage of his passenger plane after it was shot down?

America seemingly now borrows directly from Russian information warfare doctrine: the goal isn’t to convince people of some alternative truth, it’s to just curate rapid confusion and exhaustion that drives people to disengage entirely while being unable to look away. Physical presence comes without any of the usual mental clarity that should tell people to run away. First they came for A, and we did nothing…

Apathy becomes acceptance

Scandals are being operated now by Trump like his true currency: infinite supply creates dangerous hyperinflation for intentional destabilization of legacy systems. Watergate unfolded as an accountability mechanism as it was so singular and digestible. The public and institutions could focus their investigative resources, media attention, and political capital on one clear violation. The GOP spent decades picking apart what went wrong and how to avoid being caught again. Then came the racist bankruptcy con artist king Donald and his wrecking balls.

And that’s how being an historian suddenly puts me in a better position of describing and predicting moves in… what amounts to an information civil war:

• Attention fragmentation: Human cognition can’t process details of 42 simultaneous scandals. Each new outrage displaces the previous one from the news cycle before accountability mechanisms can engage. By the time Congress schedules a hearing on the calendar, there are twelve new more pressing crises.
• Normalization through repetition: The first pardon for a crypto billionaire would have been shocking. The fifteenth financial conflict of interest barely registers. You’re essentially boiling the frog but at TikTok and Zoom velocity of doom scrolling.
• Weaponized uncertainty: With so many claims flying, the average person can’t distinguish between:
  • Actual corruption (Qatar plane, UAE chip deal).
  • Hyperbolic partisan attacks
  • Outright disinformation

  So they default to tribal affiliation for filtering. “My side good, their side exaggerating.”

• Exhaustion as strategy: This isn’t accidental. Making resistance exhausting is tactical. Activists, journalists, investigators, prosecutors—everyone operates with finite energy. Keep them racing from fire to fire and they can’t extinguish any single blaze completely. I haven’t met a single person, not even in Austria, who understands that the Nazis lit over 100 buildings on fire in Vienna for 1938 Kristallnacht. That’s a ground-based bombing run impossible to fight, long before the threat of VBIED and… Tesla.

Trump’s privilege has always been failing faster and more completely than institutional responses are willing to track. Six bankruptcies that would have destroyed normal businesspeople became proof of his “comeback” narrative because the legal and financial systems couldn’t process the velocity of fraud as the opposite of surivival. He gamed the lag time between action and consequence, externalizing the suffering to his followers.

Now he’s showing how it can be done at constitutional scale, as if the corrupt liar Andrew Jackson is back in office, rounding up and killing Americans through false resource scarcity.

Lawyers live within a playing field that has law and order formalism, which makes sense if law and order can be enforced. They believe written rules and institutional architecture provide the field its protection, like engineering believes their code bugs are just delayed patches, rather than active exploits destroying the entire game.

Historians of information warfare, let alone hackers, however see how institutions are just people following norms, and norms have repeatedly collapsed under sustained attacks/pressure. Game over comes quick when the rules are unenforceable. The Constitution doesn’t enforce itself, and so a huge gap between written law and actual enforcement seems like where Trump’s authoritarian takeover happens regardless of law.

The Andrew Jackson tell

Jackson explicitly defied Supreme Court rulings (“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”) and weaponized presidential power for ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears).

The institutions existed, the laws were clear, but nobody stopped him commiting genocide. The formal architecture was irrelevant because America lacked the political will to enforce it.

Trump likely studied this, unlikely from history books, as he infamously was a child of a convicted Klansman. He understands Jackson’s adherents in the KKK have always celebrated moving fast to break things and maintainimg popular support within a tight coalition of secret militant groups. Unaccountable privilege for them was unlocked when enforcement mechanisms melted instead of congealed.

The formalist lawyer keeps talking about how intended behavior of the system will eventually form, like a bicycle rebalancing itself. The information warfare analyst in me instead describes actual behavior under attack conditions, pattern detection and prediction, like how to respond when a competitor brandishes a pump to jam in your spokes and throw you into a tree. These are two completely different assessment skills. Lawyers saying attacks will be “judged for cheating” isn’t very useful for those actually wanting to keep riding and avoid crashing, fatally.

Americans need to look immediately for that pump already taking swings at them. Think about an effective response to the parallel system setup by the GOP for sustained, deliberate, high-velocity bad faith political moves destroying the country even faster than Trump ruined the people who invested in his business scams.

Democratic Institution	GOP Replacement	Purpose
Independent judiciary	Federalist Society	Capture courts
Professional journalism	Fox/OAN/Newsmax	Control information
Campaign finance limits	Citizens United	Legalize corruption
Electoral accountability	Gerrymandering	Lock in minority rule
Academic expertise	Heritage/Cato/AEI	Manufacture alternate “facts”

Trump is the first president operating entirely within this post-Watergate parallel system that was setup to ruin democracy; build a unitary executive with unaccountable power that Nixon (and Ford) could only dream about. The GOP doesn’t need or want the legacy institutions to work—they built a system of replacements that will never check the annointed King Donald.

Each step, lawyers say to me “watch and see, he will cross a line soon.” And after each step, when no line enforcement comes, the Overton window shift leaves those lawyers grasping for the next chapter of Maginot’s playbook. By the time Trump’s constant disregard for law and order reaches predictable parallels with Nazi concentration camps, Nazi extrajudicial executions of civilians, and Nazi racist Christian Crusade rhetoric, people still seem confused and apathetic about mounting an effective resistance. France, you could have counter-attacked and crushed Rommel’s weak overstretched lines. Why, why did you not? But I digress…

Are you one of those confused people, or are you now able to understand?