By The Daily Blast,The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent

Copyright newrepublic

If this sounds familiar, it should, because this was McCarthyism. This was criminalizing speech and association.

None of these groups that he is planning to investigate have anything to do with any sort of violence. These are advocacy groups that advocate everything from saving the planet to feeding poor children, to maintaining our First Amendment. And even going after them is a flashing red sign that we are in deep trouble. So this is where the NATO approach has to come into

play. And that means all organizations have to band together, all universities have to band together, all political figures who are worth their salt have to band together. Because if they stick together, they can fend this off. And they have to go to the courts again and again and again to expose this for what it is.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, you had a very good piece just today that pointed out that autocrats for all their outward expressions of strength and power and domination are often weak and brittle. And that’s the paradox of this moment. Trump is extraordinarily weak politically. He’s a failing president on every front. And he is at the same time consolidating all this autocratic power. How do you see that tension ultimately resolving itself?

Rubin: You see it in every authoritarian state.

Because authoritarians suppress dissent, they want no transparency, they want no debate, they deplore facts. Bad stuff happens all the time. They don’t catch errors, they don’t catch mistakes. They do dumb things because no one stops them from doing it. So they are constantly at odds with reality, with public opinion. They make mistakes. Look at DOGE. We’re gonna hire the bird flu people; no, we’re going to fire the bird flu people; no, we’re going to hire the bird flu people back. Over and over again, we saw this, whether it’s in making stupid policy decisions, whether it’s in his frenetic tariff policy, they are often very flighty, very capricious, very indiscriminate. And that on one hand makes them very weak. It also

makes the destructive power very great. When you have a tyrant who can’t even predict which way he’s going, that can be really terrifying. When you can, as Bill Poulty is doing, go after people for quote, ‘mortgage fraud,’ when they haven’t done what he said they did, then every American can be gotten by this guy. The facts will not support and will not defend you. So I think these are perilous, perilous times. And I hope and I pray and I deeply believe that the American people are ahead of the politicians, that they get this. We see it in the polls. We see it in the enormous turnout for protests events. We’re seeing it in special elections this year. I think we’re going to see it in November in Virginia and in New Jersey, which have both gubernatorial and other statewide races, as well as state legislative races. I think they will have their voices heard. And as we know, Greg, politicians are followers. And once they get a sense that they are going down the tubes if they keep this up, I think you’re going to see some fracturing on the Republicans’ side.