Putin's Playbook for the Illiterate

Trump is hastily installing Russian-style fascism, and nobody cares

I guess, it was easy to miss amidst the intentional chaos and a flurry of scandals, outrage and other calculated distractions that the daily frantic activity in the White House provides in a constant stream, but the September 25 memorandum to the Secretary of State released by Donald Trump should have been top news in America. Should still be top news in America. Possibly, on par with the Epstein files, which is also incomprehensibly no longer any kind of news.

It should have been screamed about from TV screens day in and day out, the way the people responsible for the screaming did with Hillary Clinton’s emails and Joe Biden’s scandalous and incessant aging, simply because what said memorandum did was declare Trump’s intention to radically remake America into a carbon copy of his favorite nation on Earth - Putin’s Russia.

The memorandum, on the surface little more than hastily cobbled-together justifications for the military takeover of liberal cities, could in fact have been written by any randomly selected member of the Russian Duma. Instead, it was in all likelihood written by Steven Miller, which is probably worse. It reads as if someone tried to explain Putin’s playbook for destroying democracy domestically for someone illiterate or with a painfully short attention spell. As if someone has purposefully tried to cram the slow, deliberate buildup of Russian authoritarianism into the expected lifespan of one very old, very unhealthy, very stupid man. It’s Tyranny for Dummies. Crib-notes of Putinism. Back-of-the-envelope pathway to fascism. Which doesn’t make it any less scary or newsworthy.

Pictured: America’s eternal shame and the only politician he has never made a nasty nickname for.

The meat of this sickening document is undoubtedly in the fourth paragraph, following and preceding a litany of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”-like lies and conspiracy theories about a mythical organized network of murderous domestic terrorists America is suddenly at war with. This is where Miller, clearly visible through the orange makeup of his boss, enumerates all the hallmarks of what he considers domestic terrorism. This is where one gets the impression this sounded a lot better in the original Russian.

The list of all the characteristics that makes one an “enemy of the people” in Trump/Miller’s definition of the Stalinist term includes “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Read this slowly and try to estimate by yourself how many times this one sentence tramples all over the US Constitution.

So, according to Trump and Miller, capitalism is now America’s official state ideology that can not be disparaged or criticized in any way. Christianity is America’s official state religion whose adherents’ feelings must be protected from any alternative philosophy. And, of course, America now has some kind of defined traditional views on family, religion and morality, which you can deviate from at your own risk.

You will of course notice that all these apparent crimes, which can potentially bring the might of the US armed forces and law enforcement agencies upon you, are so broad and ill-defined that absolutely anything or anyone can be accommodated to fit the description. This is, obviously, by design and in emulation of similar edicts passed by Putin’s pocket lawmakers. Putin took several years to go from, for example, slowly suffocating the rights of gay couples to a law banning “homosexual propaganda” to criminalizing any manifestation of gayness or anything else that Russia’s justice system may consider a threat to “traditional values.”

Putin, it appears, walked so that Trump and Miller could fly. Whatever the hell “extremism on migration” is, you will probably be guilty of it if you espouse any view on the topic of immigration enforcement that deviates from that of the White House. I challenge you to find a constitutional lawyer who can define “extremism on race and gender”, but to Trump and Miller (who just unashamedly use Putin’s own term, “extremism”, as a stand-in for political opposition) this simply means that anyone speaking in defense of minorities can be labeled a “BLM terrorist”, “transtifa” or a propagator of the “extreme gay agenda.” And, of course, it’s utterly hilarious that they mention “support for the overthrow of the United States government” (this time quoting a Russian law almost verbatim), being that the only people who have actually attempted such an action in the last 160 years were their own supporters. Whom they have pardoned.

This single paragraph was probably the most terrifying statement issued by the US government I have ever read, purely because the intentions behind writing it are so clear. The fact that these proposed measures are justified in the text by nothing more than the inscription on the bullets used by Charlie Kirk’s assassin (who, after all, has not made his political affiliations, if there are any, clear and isn’t proven to be a member of any organization whatsoever) only underscore the real purpose. This is something they wanted to do anyway, and Kirk’s murder was only a useful pretext.

This is not an initiative designed to curb political violence. This is an attempt to unleash political violence on everyone Donald Trump and Steven Miller dislike. This is a license to crush political protests, bloodily if they can get away with it. This is outright othering and singling out for potential persecution of over half the country and a thinly-veiled threat to anyone who may have an unflattering opinion of Trump/Miller’s action to shut up or face the consequences. This is the path Russia started out on in 2000 and didn’t quite finish traveling until 2022, which Trump and Miller intend to complete before the former keels over or the 2026 midterms, whichever comes first.

And the most terrifying thing of all is that the American public and media have barely noticed it. Either we are perpetually disoriented by the chaos generator that is Trump’s White House or willfully disengaged due to sheer exhaustion of the daily Trump-related news, or, worst of all, we have already pre-capitulated. Considering how eagerly America has resubmitted itself to the rule of an egomaniacal liar who led an insurrection to overthrow democracy, I wouldn’t be too optimistic about our society’s ability to see the danger and act on it.

And then, one day, you may wake up and find out that Putin’s Russia is already here.