Dictatorship for Dummies
Anyone who truly loves books knows you’re not supposed to crack the spine; it’s a little taboo, like spilling coffee on the Bible. But if you actually want to learn from a paperback, you crack it, dog-ear it, highlight it, spill Red Bull across the pages, and keep reading even when there are red spots where you’ve bled on it. That’s what you do when a book is meant to be used. Steve Bannon handed Trump Dictatorship for Dummies because he knew Trump would never sit through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and told him, “Flood the zone—here’s the step-by-step guide.”
That’s the book we’re living in now: not reverently shelved, not respected, but cracked, bent, highlighted, dog-eared, and abused. And let’s be honest—Trump isn’t reading it himself. He doesn’t have the patience. Stephen Miller has been reading it aloud to him like Goodnight Moon, while Karoline Levitt diagrams it into connect-the-dots drawings in Crayola. Someone on staff is always doing the work of digesting authoritarianism into CliffNotes, because Bannon would have had better luck turning it into a 30-minute infomercial and pushing it onto Trump’s phone.
The spine is already cracked, the pages already sticky, because the playbook is in use. Executive orders aren’t treated as policy—they’re swung like baseball bats. And the only question left is what’s already been checked off the list.
If Trump had what it really takes, it would be obvious—but what’s even clearer is how he’s studied the shortcuts, learned the playbook, and covered it in gaudy gold leaf to make it look like his own.
✓ Pick a national enemy and point a finger. Weaponize the general population against that enemy. Cruelty is encouraged against that enemy, no matter how vulnerable. Families ripped apart, the poor turned into villains, and every safety net painted as a hammock for freeloaders. The cruelty isn’t a byproduct; it’s the feature.
✓ Troops recruited and fully funded, no need for training or uniforms. Tasers and flak jackets provided. Masks are acceptable facewear. No need for identifying, because nothing says “dictatorship” like a standing force that answers only to the man with the marker in his pocket.
✓ Normal life deliberately upended. A parade of shocks and disruptions, just enough to keep people exhausted and disoriented, unable to remember what it feels like to live without waking up every morning asking, What fresh hell now?
Check, check, check!
And where does the dog-eared page land next? The Enemies List. That’s the next chapter waiting to be read aloud.
Talking, Publishing, and Morning Raids with Coffee
On August 22, at 4:03 a.m. yesterday, Kash Patel jumped on X.com and dropped his little “bombshell.” He thought he was making history. What he was really doing was proving how middle-school petty dictatorship always starts.
By 7:00 a.m., FBI agents in full raid gear were storming the home and office of John Bolton, veteran of the U.S. State Department and Trump’s own former National Security Advisor. Cameras flashing, badges out, the complete dawn-raid circus. And why? Because Bolton got himself scribbled into Patel’s little Enemies List. They even leaked the story to one or two of the regime’s favorite papers.
But John Bolton is so woven into Washington that the FBI hadn’t even finished parking their SUVs before news crews, podcasters, and citizen reporters were livestreaming outside his driveway by 7:15 a.m.
Let’s talk about Bolton. He’s the cranky uncle at Thanksgiving who doesn’t shut up, the one you dread sitting next to. He’s insufferable, smug; his mustache alone deserves its own sanctions. And yet, he’s also the one person in the room who actually knows where Russia keeps the vodka. He’s the encyclopedia you don’t want to open, but you end up quoting anyway.
Bolton is one of the few figures in the U.S. government with decades of statecraft aimed squarely at Moscow. From the State Department to the United Nations to the White House, he’s dealt with Russia not as a puzzle to study, but as an adversary to contain. Which makes him uniquely dangerous. Not to the U.S., but to Russia. And to Putin. His patriotism has never been in question; Bolton bleeds red, white, and blue and has spent decades wrapping himself in the Constitution. The only thing that makes him suspect now is his refusal to bow to Trump. And that’s where the problem lies: Bolton likes to write and talk. He blasted Trump 1.0 and never hesitated to put his critiques into print for the whole world to read.
And Patel, bless his heart, thinks putting Bolton on an Enemies List makes him a tough guy. In 2023, Patel even wrote and published Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. The book contained what’s now infamous as the “Enemies List” as an appendix. During his confirmation hearing earlier this year, when Trump named him FBI director, Patel denied it ever existed. But here we are.
On one hand, it’s hilarious — Bolton couldn’t care less about Kash Patel. On the other hand, it’s terrifying. Because an Enemies List doesn’t stay a joke for long when a dictatorship is in the making, it starts as Mean Girls pettiness: eyeliner smudges, boyfriend drama, cafeteria politics. And then one morning, with a cup of coffee in hand, your name in the Enemies List comes with federal agents at your door.
Distraction - Dictator Standard Practices
The Bolton raid was the chyron story yesterday. It was not what was expected. News crews had arrived early because other things were brewing that required national attention. Everyone had actually been waiting for the first documents from the Oversight Committee’s subpoena of the Epstein files. They were late. Three days late. Chairperson Comer didn’t mind, “Oh, they’ll trickle in.” Trickle? This isn’t artisan syrup; it’s evidence that could shake the world, evidence that could crack the foundations of Washington.
The Oversight Committee had announced on Thursday it was opening a probe into Corey Lewandowski—not just for being Noem’s “friend with benefits,” but for his position as a special government employee with DHS. Yes, the same title Elon Musk had with DOGE. That should have landed hard on Thursday. It didn’t. And when it should have blown up Friday morning, it got buried under the Bolton storm.
Down in Texas, a whistleblower at the Bryan women’s facility who dared complain about Maxwell’s cushy treatment was suddenly shipped to a maximum-security prison. Speak out, get disappeared. Maxwell keeps her perks, her work pass, her silence. Makes me wonder about the woman, Kathryn Comolli, in the Tallahassee prison—the one who leaked that Maxwell tried to buy favor with Biden’s Justice Department by dangling dirt on Trump before the election. That was a flat “No” from the Biden Justice Department, based on reporting from The Daily Mail. Something Trump has used to his benefit: “If they had dirt on me, they would have used it.” No, Mr. Trump, some people have morals, and allowing a sexual predator back into society was a line they didn’t want to cross. So, where is that Tallahassee prisoner, Comolli, now?
And then there’s Trump’s giddy fixation with Putin. He met Vlad just over a week ago on Friday, August 15th, in Alaska—which, for the record, is an American state, no matter how many times he called it Russia in the days leading up to the meeting. Trump, in full fanboy mode, spent the week crushing on Putin like a just-18 girl sneaking onto the hair-metal tour bus and making sure everyone knew she was available. Trump wasn’t as brazen, but his “Notice me, Vlad. Please” was obvious.
So did Putin ask him to handle his decades-old Bolton problem? Putin has always despised Bolton. Bolton can predict his every move, and he’s spent years throwing roadblocks in front of Putin’s dream of stitching the USSR back together. So if you need a distraction, you’ve got an enemies list, and Trump’s “I want to be him when I grow up,” Vlad wants Bolton neutralized? You get a 7 a.m. raid.
Or maybe the raid on John Bolton’s house was the equivalent of a nightclub rollout—loud, smoky, chaotic—just enough to cover the sex and drug deals. Trump and his crew don’t want you to hear, see, notice, or talk about the other stuff. And we know Trump especially doesn’t want people talking about Epstein.
Trump’s Germania is a Golf Course
Next comes the chapter every dictator loves: rebuilding the world in your own image. Hitler didn’t just imagine a Reich. He wanted to carve it into stone. His architect, Albert Speer, drew up “Germania”—a new Berlin meant to outshine Rome, Paris, and even ancient Athens. Whole neighborhoods were bulldozed for boulevards wide enough to make armies look like toy soldiers. A domed “Volkshalle” was sketched so massive its interior would have its own weather system—rainclouds forming beneath a ceiling meant to last a thousand years. The Third Reich didn’t just want political dominance; it wanted marble permanence.
And Hitler had the perfect excuse: a Germany already shattered by World War I, crushed by reparations, inflation, and unemployment. Berlin itself still stood, but the nation was in ruins. He sold Germania as rebuilding, infrastructure, and jobs. The old city was bulldozed in the name of the new. He saw reparations and national humiliation as an opportunity, destruction as a blank canvas. Dictators love rubble—if they don’t inherit it, they create it.
Trump doesn’t have Speer. He has himself—well . . . that’s it. There is nobody else, because in Trump’s world, he’s the expert in everything. But the impulse is the same: leave behind a capital that screams his name in every stone, every lawn, every tacky arch. Only instead of cathedrals of marble, Trump dreams in sod and gold-plated sprinklers.
“I have a lot of golf courses all over the place. I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world. And we're gonna be regrassing all of your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy.
It'll look like Augusta. It'll look like, more importantly, Trump National Golf Club. That’s even better.
We’re gonna have all brand new, beautiful grass.”
It starts with grass. Not that Trump knows the difference, but in D.C.’s climate, it’s Bentgrass that holds—a cool-season turf that survives the winters. He’ll want Bermudagrass or, better yet, the ultimate Zoysia, but both would die before the first frost. That won’t stop him, of course. Trump wants what Trump wants. Don’t be surprised if he installs undersoil heating like they do in pro stadiums—turf conditioning for the long haul—to keep his dream lawn alive through every season. Gold-plated sprinklers, manicured lawns, and Trump-branded sod—an empire of fertilizer.
And the costs? Grass maintenance eats 50–70% of a golf course budget. Multiply that across D.C., and you’ve got a National Mall that costs more to water than the Pentagon to run. The District of Columbia alone has over 7,351 acres of parkland—more than 6,500 acres managed by the National Park Service and another 851 acres by the D.C. government—all of it suddenly on Trump’s watering schedule. At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if he announced an eighteen-hole course that weaves the monuments right into play—Lincoln Memorial as the back nine, Washington Monument as the ultimate flagstick, putt-putt dictatorship with a sprinkler system.
Who maintains it? Not government crews—those jobs are already hollowed out. Trump will put the work out for bid, wave around contracts, and then do what he always does: contest every invoice, drag every bill through court, and refuse to pay. The contractors will walk, and that leaves him with the labor pool he can’t stiff—ICE detention centers. Hitler drafted workers from conquered territories; Trump will draft his from immigrant prisons. Forced labor rebranded as landscaping. It’s absurd, but absurdity is the point.
Hitler built monuments to dwarf humanity. Trump builds lawns to bankrupt it. Both men want skylines that echo their egos. One sketched domes that would blot out the sun. The other brags about sod while slapping gold leaf on urinals. Different eras, different materials, same delusion: remake the capital in your own image, so the people who walk it know who owns them.
Dictators Will Be Dictators
We’re on step four of the dictator’s playbook, and Trump is two years ahead of schedule — maybe thanks to the accelerant of social media, maybe thanks to Palantir’s data-mining machine, perhaps just thanks to raw chaos. Autocracy usually takes patience; Trump’s is being fast-tracked like a reality show that refuses to wait for sweeps week.
So here comes step five. We’ve all seen it in the movies. Dictatorships don’t creep in quietly; they announce themselves with cartoonish flair:
Stage One: Kiss the ring and swear your loyalty.
Stage Two: Prove it with blood — put a horse head in the bed of anyone who won’t bend the knee.
Stage Three: Preach from the boat, floating and intoning the Lord’s Prayer while the cameras pan for the propaganda reels.
It’s a ritual—a pageant. The staging makes the rule permanent, the theater makes the cruelty palatable.
And Trump? He’s not angling for another four years, a gilded footnote in history. He wants permanent stewardship. He wants the map redrawn into the District of Trump. He is building a dynasty the way a narcissist builds a casino: with his name plastered on every surface, down to the exit signs.
Ivanka once looked like the natural heir, but despite having the “Trump look,” she’s female — and she and Jared have been ghosting him ever since he returned to office. Don Jr. and Eric have been demoted to mascots, waving pom-poms on the sidelines and hustling discount Cameos. Trump would sooner elevate one of their wives as a placeholder than trust the family dunces with his empire. And as usual, Tiffany is nowhere to be found. Trump has ignored her for years, treating her like a distant cousin who probably doesn’t even get a dinner invitation.
But Barron — Barron is the one who screams permanence. At 6’9”, sharp-featured, camera-ready, he’s the first Trump child who looks like more than a prop. He’s the only son Trump praises without a barb attached. To a man obsessed with legacy, Barron is a skyscraper with a heartbeat.
Trump has always been consumed with branding: hotels, steaks, water, vodka, and a fake university. He’s stamped his name on everything but oxygen. Now, with age chasing him down, Trump realized he can’t trademark immortality. So he’ll do the next best thing: slap the Trump name onto flesh and blood, brand his heir like the crown jewel of the franchise. A dynasty is the last product he has left to sell.
That’s the dictator’s playbook. When the man fades, the family takes the throne. The reality show refuses to get canceled. The empire is renamed for eternity.
Trump is planning for Trump to be his golden city. He isn’t just sketching policy; he’s carving his face into the skyline. Washington has Dupont Circle, but in Trump’s dreams, that’s the future site of Trump Circle. His statue? Bronze, of course. Polished with just enough alloy to shimmer like fool’s gold every day. The kind of monument that blinds you at noon, whether you want to see it or not. Twenty-four-hour crews will scrub away every speck of dirt, because nothing — nothing — can be allowed to tarnish the idol. And pigeons? Forget it. Armed guards will stand ready, blasting anything with wings that dares to roost on Dear Leader’s shoulder. A city remade, not in marble and monuments, but in gold-plated delusion.
First, the Loyalist
But first, he has to get rid of those last Constitutional entanglements. He has already ripped all the other ones.
Vance may be vice president, but history says that makes him first to go. He’s already puffing himself up with big speeches, pretending the spotlight belongs to him. Trump picked him because he had some appeal to the common folk, but let’s be real: Trump was never going to let eyeliner on a man slide. Trump was never going to let eyeliner on a man slide - badly blended foundation is fine, apparently. Eyeliner? Too far. The vice presidency isn’t protection; it’s the first chess move to scare the rest. Mike Pence can testify to that.
Next up is Rubio. He’ll either collapse under the mountain of departments Trump dumps on his desk, or Trump will decide his Hispanic percentage is a little too high and ship him back to Cuba. “Stay out of the sun, Marco. Keep that SPF high — you wouldn’t want to tan your way out of the cabinet accidentally.”
Then you’ve got Bondi and Noem, the surgically polished Trump aesthetic perfected. Long hair, bright smiles, camera-ready at every angle. But one wrinkle, one extra pound, one shot where the lighting doesn’t flatter, and they’re gone. This isn’t tenure. It’s an audition where gravity and metabolism are the casting directors.
And finally, Karoline Leavitt — the “acceptable face,” maybe even a VP test balloon. Trump can’t help himself when he talks about her: “It’s that face, it’s that brain, it’s those lips, the way they move.” He even compared her to a machine gun, rapid-fire at the podium, before crowning her the best press secretary any president has ever had. But listen closely — when Trump says “those lips,” you know the unspoken second line is “that ass.” That’s how he sees her, how he sees all of them: not as officials, not as colleagues, but as cast members auditioning for his approval. Leavitt is the temporary show pony, trotted out until a fresher model walks in.
That’s the lineup. That’s the order. Not loyalty, not competence, not experience. Just vanity, spotlight, and the whims of a man who treats the Constitution like a casting call.
But listen closer still and you’ll hear it — the soft scratch of nails in the background. The women may not wait for Trump to dismiss them; they may decide for themselves. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer are already clawing for MAGA’s spotlight like it’s a cage match, trading jabs on social media and circling the same stage. Bondi, Noem, Leavitt — they all know the audition never ends.
This isn’t loyalty. It’s a catwalk designed for sabotage. Every glance, every post, every pose is a test. And Trump? He’s the director who fires actresses the second they upstage him, even if the scratches come from inside his own house.
What I can’t shake is the women. The sheer dedication, the absolute willingness to destroy themselves for him. It’s the same kind of blind loyalty that kept three women orbiting Charles Manson, convinced he was some kind of messiah instead of a washed-up grifter.
What is it about this man that pulls women in so deep? Based on what we know—Stormy Daniels’ testimony, the ex-wives’ accounts, the sworn statements from women who crossed his path—it isn’t charisma. It isn’t charm. It’s menace dressed as magnetism, power wrapped in a transaction. Devotion is bought on credit, collected in humiliation, and repossessed the moment he’s bored.
Narcissism in Power
Trump built a lifetime on “You’re fired!”—cheap thrills, a game show catchphrase, the kind of power that evaporates the moment the cameras shut off. That’s how he clawed his way out of being just another bankrupt casino owner with a string of foreclosures, into a caricature of success. He didn’t earn greatness; he played at it until enough people bought the act.
But he isn’t just a failed businessman in a shiny tie anymore. He’s fused celebrity status with political power. That combination is volatile, and it makes him far more dangerous now. He isn’t even pacing himself. Trump is moving faster than traditional dictatorship timelines. Most dictators bask in glory before turning outward; Trump is already pointing fingers at maps. He’s said outright he wants Canada, he wants Greenland, he wants a Nobel Peace Prize for “settling wars” that ended decades before he ever held office. He doesn’t wait for history to write him in—he rewrites history to fit himself.
History sketches the pattern clearly. Dictators seize power, bask briefly, bathing in their own spotlight, convinced they’ve secured destiny. But basking never lasts. Hunger comes next. The need to expand, to claim, to conquer. Greece, Rome, empire after empire—it’s the same story. Alexander the Great couldn’t stop at one border; his ego demanded the world. Rome turned every general into a would-be Caesar, their Senate collapsing under men whose personalities bent nations. Hitler began with parades and Olympic torches before he turned to lebensraum and blood.
Narcissists, all of them. Personalities that demand validation through expansion. Trump has already been declared a narcissist. The diagnosis isn’t armchair—it’s written in his record, his words, his endless need for more. And once that need fuses with unchecked power, history tells us precisely what comes next.
Ask any game warden, in any region, any biome, and the story is always the same. When an apex predator gets a taste for human flesh, there’s no undoing it. Relocation doesn’t cure it. Fences don’t hold it. The animal learns the shape of its prey, remembers the thrill of the hunt, and sooner or later it finds its way back to human territory. Once that line is crossed—once they taste blood—instinct takes over. And that’s why, endangered or not, they’re put down.
Here’s the fatal flaw: Trump isn’t actually a predator. He’s a weak man elevated to power by people who thought they could ride his chaos into their own careers. First, his father. Then Roy Cohn. Then every contractor he stiffed, every employee he drained, every hanger-on who thought clinging to him was worth the gamble. And now Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have hoisted him higher, manufacturing a myth around a man who’s still just paper-thin chaos in a shiny tie.
So what happens when a spoiled millionaire has never needed for anything, never had to work for the things he wants, and believes he can take whatever he desires despite the rules or a simple ‘No’?”
So what happens when firing stops being enough? What happens when the cheap thrill of saying “You’re fired” no longer scratches the itch? Dictators don’t stop at pink slips. Paranoia creeps in. If you know where the bodies are buried, you don’t just get canned—you are eliminated. It becomes easier to nod to a henchman who loves the violence just to take care of someone he perceives as being a bother—no explanation of what services are no longer needed when explaining performance reviews and asking for a resignation.
But it only takes one or two before the fear of retribution kicks in. Traditionally, all dictators move past the primary target. Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Pinochet, Gaddafi, the Kim dynasty—they didn’t stop at rivals, they devoured family, friends, household staff, even doctors or drivers. The message is simple: loyalty doesn’t save you once the paranoia switch is flipped.
It’s the same as that apex predator metaphor. Once the taste for blood is there, relocation doesn’t work. There’s only one endgame. Trump’s not a bear, but weakness doesn’t make him less dangerous. He’s a toddler with a flamethrower, and once his narcissism decides blood’s the only severance package, it’s game over. Allies, families, everyone who thought standing in his light would keep them safe—blood starts to flow in the streets.
“It’s not a cliché, it’s historical fact.”
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Brilliantly written. Insightful - though I wish you were wrong.
I also like the toddler with a flamethrower description. I would only add that his cognitive abilities seem to be on a sharp decline. Wondering where that fits in. I think it probably makes this particular power hungry narcissist all the more dangerous. Your analysis gives me a little hope that maybe the Bannons and Millers of this s#@t show will end up in his crosshairs.
Trump = toddler with a flamethrower 🔥 love the comparison! Spot on with a giant wallop of pedophilia! Great article, Mechelle. Reposting for broader reach. Thank you!