Alan Zendell, June 10, 2025

Sometimes, when the world appears to be spinning out of control, it’s valuable to take a step back. When chaos is everywhere, especially when it’s used as a political tactic, we need to be sure we see things clearly. Are events as they seem or are they part of a broader agenda, and if they are, whose agenda is it and what is their end game? Sometimes, it’s valuable to see who has addressed the subject in the past.

Hollywood producer Barry Levinson might shed some light on what’s happening in America today, and I mean TODAY. In 1999, he made a brilliant satirical film that asked: What would a president desperate to achieve his ends do if all reasonable measures failed? His answer was to create a fake war to distract the public. The film, Wag the Dog, was a hit, 86% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting that Americans found it both credible and entertaining. It was a study in how politicians and the media manipulate public opinion, well before Fox News turned journalism into a spin debate.

Another visionary tale to keep in mind is Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Its warning message is even scarier. In Atwood’s dystopian future, the United States is turned into a “Christian” autocracy, which is really a front for the rich and powerful to own and control women who can carry pregnancy to term, in a future in which fertility is near zero. As a science fiction writer, I appreciate her warning about the power an unscrupulous minority for whom morality, ethical behavior, and the rule of law don’t apply, can achieve if we do not vigilantly defend our democracy.

One aspect of Atwood’s story always disturbed me, however. She suggests America could be transformed from what we thought it was into a vicious fascist dictatorship, that is so well entrenched no one even remembers the past in just fifteen years. I always thought that was hopelessly unrealistic, but I wonder if she was a better predictor than I am.

It doesn’t take a visionary to see that Donald Trump is attempting what Atwood feared, minus the fictional fertility crisis – Trump would rather terrorize women who don’t want to carry a pregnancy to term, along with medical professionals who help them. During the eight years that viewers have been watching the popular television version of A Handmaid’s Tale, which coincidentally spans Trump’s whole political career, we were shown horrifying scenes of a Nazi-like police state, in which enemies of the  government receive no mercy, and the government defines an enemy as anyone who violates its edicts.

We’re about to find out if Atwood was right. Levinson, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert DeNiro convinced America that it was possible to use the media to make the public believe we were at war to distract them from a scandal that could bring down the president.

Trump, following the script of Project 2025, spent his first 150 days in office setting up violent confrontations with those who oppose him. His weapons are deceit and misdirection, and an instinct for tapping into the anger and fears of voters by flooding the media with lies that support a fantasy in which he is saving the country from extremists on the Left. Having created a level of confusion over immigration such that very few people know what’s true, and having identified California as the enemy of everything good and righteous about America, he set the stage for what’s happening in Los Angeles.

By usurping Governor Gavin Newsom’s control of the California National Guard and deploying active duty marines over civilian protests of ICE raids that obliterate due process and ignore court orders, Trump has thrown down the gauntlet approaching No Kings Day. This isn’t accidental. It’s the first major salvo in Trump’s goal to ensconce himself as the unquestioned leader of a fascist autocracy, formerly known as the United States.

If you’ve spent the months since he was elected avoiding the news and shutting down any suggestion of a political debate, your grace period is up. Americans need to engage right now, not by hundreds or thousands, but by tens of millions, marching in every city and agricultural town, on every university campus. Can you imagine what will happen when Trump tries to deploy the full force of our military against their own people? Do you think they would follow orders to attack their neighbors whose only crime is defending our Constitution?

Unless cooler heads than the lunatic Stephen Miller convince Trump to back off (don’t bet on it) we’re likely to witness something like that this summer. Trump knows he has one shot at this. If he’s not king by 2026, the midterm elections will end his power grab, but that only happens if Americans fight him, starting now.