Authoritarian movements have always championed “freedom” abroad while crushing dissent at home. This pattern is well-documented.

Trump is doing both publicly, lazily and simultaneously, assuming his audience either won’t notice or won’t care about the plain contradiction.

His hypocrisy is coherent once you understand the operating principle: protest is legitimate when it destabilizes enemies, unless he is the enemy. The language of liberation is only a weapon of control, and targets are decided by him alone. Same tool, his direction.

The “senseless killing of protesters” demands cancelled meetings and promised consequences. But not Renee Nicole Good. Her senseless killing is justification for threatening the protesters, not the killers.

The rhetoric is structurally identical. Protests, institutional takeover, naming names, retribution coming. The only variable is whose power gets threatened.