Vores tætteste allierede

"Having silenced most institutional dissent within his first nine months, what could Trump accomplish in the next fourteen?" My column. www.ft.com/content/a284...

A large share of the American population and most of their political and economic elite decided to put a deranged, evil, and narcissistic grandpa in charge of everything from medicine to economics to nuclear weapons. Future historians will label it under one of the worst decisions of humankind.

The current war according to Trump

Det er simpelthen så spændende hvem denne mystiske kapable aktør er!??! Måske det starter med Rus og ender på land?

Trump is sounding less and less like a mobster and more and more like a mad dictator

That is awkward for Trump

Viktor Orban has made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the EU www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

The past week has shown us something scary — the concrete and specific outlines of a durable authoritarian state in America. Here's what this state would look like, and the precise policy levers Trump is pulling to get there from here. www.vox.com/politics/462...

Whether it's Obama wearing a tan suit, or Trump holding an Ultimate Fighting bout on the South Lawn, both sides have pushed the boundaries of presidential decorum.

If I put on my authoritarian politics researcher-glasses (which you always should with the Trump regime), one upside for him is that he gets more control over the economy, and that the fee can be waivered for preferred companies, allowing Trump to pick winners and creating loyalty from business

I dag er der opmærksomhed på, hvordan svenske myndigheder forbereder befolkningen på en mulig krig. Måske skulle vores egne myndigheder også være mere direkte/åbne omkring de mulige scenarier? Hvis svenskere, nordmænd og finnere kan tage det, ville danskere nok også klare det

Dutch late night TV has its take

You can only get a Nobel Peace Prize if you can pronounce the name of the countries you ended the war between (and remember which ones). That is in the Norwegian constitution.

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And if the media dare to report lower reductions, they will be banned

How am I meant to code this for WhoGov and Paths to Power?

"We cannot put the press in unreliable hands. It must be in the hands of the most faithful, most trustworthy, most politically steadfast people devoted to our cause." - Nikita S. Khrushchev, 1957 www.nytimes.com/1957/09/29/a...

Skider bjørnen i skoven?

Ja, det handler om ytringsfrihed, når regeringen truer et program til at lukke fordi det kritiserer præsidenten. Det er faktisk ytringsfrihed 101.

Silly Jimmy Kimmel. He should have just called for all homeless people to be killed and he’d still have a job.

These guys are million and billionaires, the only thing they stand to lose is becoming even more wealthy. And yet they shamelessly cower.

"The most important factor in reversing autocratisation is electoral defeat for authoritarian incumbents. Successful resistance also depends on unified opposition parties, vibrant civil society movements, and sustained public mobilisation."

Trump just designated “Antifa” as a terrorist organization, on par with ISIS and Al Qaeda. As a reminder, “antifa” is short for “antifascist”. They will use this lie to surveil, imprison, and kill Americans on the left. This may be our Reichstag Fire moment. Wake up. www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/p...

Det er altså ikke bare anklager for upassende bemærkninger om Kirks død, men også massivt pres fra den amerikanske regering. Altså repression og censur: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/b...

Exactly!

Først Stephen Colbert, nu Jimmy Kimmel. Læg dertil en åben klapjagt på statsansatte, der kritiserer Charlie Kirk, og du har den total afvikling af USA’s forfatningssikrede ytringsfrihed. Det er ikke længere hyperbolsk at tale om en amerikansk deroute mod at blive et autokrati.

Having written about the "autocrat's playbook" for many years now, I argue in this piece that Trump is fundamentally different to the likes of Chávez, Erdoğan, Fujimori, Modi, Orbán, Ortega, and Putin. His "mad king" persona means that he wrecks just about everything he touches...

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “The essence of President Trump’s pitch to the American people last year was simple: They could have it both ways. They could have a powerful, revitalized economy and ‘mass deportations now,’” our columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “In reality, this was a fantasy.”

Moreover, Trump needs polarization to keep pushing his far-right, corrupt and incompetent project. There is a long stream of research in political science showing that the more polarized a society, the more leeway the leader has to do unpopular things because it is harder for people to switch sides.

Of course, Trump will do nothing to condemn political violence and call for unity. Much of his political power stems from the threat of political violence and from polarization. The higher the threat of violence (against his opponents) and the more polarized the US is, the more powerful he is. 1/4

Just out at JOP (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....) : Why do so few working-class people hold office? It's not lack of interest. Noam Lupu and I ran 10 surveys in 8 countries and found no evidence of a social class gap in how often qualified people consider running.

I am now starting to suspect that people doom posting themselves into saying it doesn't matter that Trump is wildly unpopular because he is going to do a dictatorship are themselves an op. Dictatorships aren't stable by magic, they need people to buy in and go along with them. This matters.

The political juggernaut that Democrats cower in fear of

FOX news host suggests we euthanize the homeless, someone goes into two encampments and starts shooting. 13 people shot and Jacob Frey and the media are just talking about it as the new best reason to clear the encampments

Like I said after the first one, if you are out on a boat in the gulf fishing, Trump may blow you up and kill you. Then he will say you had drugs on board. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t - what he says is what goes and that’s the end of it. bsky.app/profile/atru...

The three most damning paras in the UN Report alleging that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza: Siege starvation, attacks on health care, direct targeting of children as patterns that cannot be explained except if group destruction is one animating purpose.

Trump er hastigt i færd med at omdanne USA til et personalistisk diktatur med stærke totalitære og facistiske tendenser. Og han møder kun meget begrænset modstand fra institutioner og civilsamfundet. Jeg havde - selvom jeg forsker i diktaturer - aldrig troet, at det kunne komme så vidt, så hurtigt.

This is extrajudicial execution, without any clear threat to the US, no authorization from Congress, and far beyond even Article II. The military is not the president's personal hit squad. Or wasn't, until now.

Genuinely feels like a tipping point for American democracy, if we can keep it.

Det er virkeligt, virkeligt uhyggeligt det, der sker i USA. Denne tale har klare paralleller til begyndelsen på nogle af de regimer, som har skrevet de mørkeste kapitler i menneskehedens historie.

These attacks are a massive attack on free speech and has nothing to do with preaching tolerance. It is about repression and silencing opposition. The distance between punishing people for wrong speak about Kirk to punishing people for criticizing the regime is short; and will surely be tested.

"There is no clear theory of growth steering the U.S. economy, just one man’s desire to colonize every square inch of American attention and experience, which happens to include international markets."

Poor young Britons. First the old give them Brexit, Boris Johnson, and now they are facing the threat of a Reform government.

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend