The Friday Brief

December 8, 2023

The Big Picture

They’re not just saying the quiet part aloud now; they’re screaming it from the rooftops.

A second Donald Trump term will be a dictatorship.

That’s the thing about dictatorships; the bad guys tell you what’s coming over and over and over again. Political and media institutions make mistakes about intentions all the time. They conflate the dangerous promises of actual and aspiring autocrats as mere rabble-rousing or mere electoral rhetoric.

Ambitious mainstream politicians worldwide in every era have looked at populist and autocratic movements and whispered to themselves, “I can ride this dragon.”