Donald Trump's Reign of Terror

For America, the danger isn’t just in what’s happening , but in what comes next.

AI image/prompting by author

There’s an eerie quiet now settling over the federal government, a silence that feels less like order and more like absence. In the past few weeks, agencies that once spoke freely, issuing health advisories, environmental reports, and economic analyses have been muted. The Office of Management and Budget, the nerve center of federal spending, has been frozen. The CDC no longer communicates with the public about emerging threats. The EPA, historically a thorn in the side of industry lobbyists, has been gagged. Across the government, the very institutions that exist to serve the public have been restrained, their voices stolen by an administration determined to operate in the shadows.

The overt excuse is efficiency, resulting in fewer voices, less red tape, a leaner government. But efficiency isn’t the absence of governance—it’s its refinement. What’s happening now is something else entirely. The dismantling of agencies, the mass firings of career civil servants, the forced removal of inspectors general all of it points to a deeper, more insidious shift. The destruction of institutions happens for a reason. A government that no longer speaks to its people isn’t just inefficient; it’s indifferent. And an indifferent government, one that neither explains nor justifies its actions, is the first step toward something much darker.

This isn’t the first time an authoritarian leader has sought to silence the machinery of government. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán slowly eroded independent institutions, replacing watchdogs with loyalists and turning state agencies into political weapons. In Chile, Pinochet ruled through fear, dismantling judicial oversight and stacking the bureaucracy with those too afraid or too complicit to resist. In each case, the playbook was the same: restrict information, discredit expertise, and consolidate power until the state serves not the people, but the person at the top.

Trump’s second term is following a similar trajectory. The plan isn’t just to control the government but to remake it entirely. The "Schedule F" initiative, a bureaucratic restructuring that would strip protections from thousands of civil servants, ensures that expertise is no longer a safeguard against political overreach. Federal agencies, once accountable to law and precedent, are being reshaped into instruments of loyalty. The Department of Justice, historically tasked with upholding the law, now flirts with becoming an enforcement wing of a singular political ideology. And Congress, the one institution capable of checking executive power, remains paralyzed; caught between feigned outrage and strategic inaction.

The danger isn’t just in what’s happening, but in what comes next.

If Trump can ignore court rulings, if he can sidestep Congress, if he can rewrite the function of federal agencies with nothing more than a signature, what remains of governance at all?

The answer isn’t a presidency, but a presidency in name only for an office untethered from law, where rules are dictated rather than debated.

The effects of this silence are already apparent. Without oversight, corruption flourishes. Without transparency, the public becomes dependent on propaganda rather than facts. Without independent agencies, decisions are no longer made in the interest of the people, but in service to those in power. And the longer the government remains silent, the more the silence begins to feel normal.

For now, the courts still hold some authority, though the question remains whether rulings against Trump will be followed or merely ignored. Congress, if it can muster the will, has the power to intervene, though it has done little to suggest it will.

The press continues to report but mainstream media have capitulated to Trump’s terrifying amount of power becoming more and more like propaganda spewed by state-run media. In addition, federal agencies muzzled, access to information is increasingly limited.

That leaves only the people, the public, the electorate—those for whom government was designed, now watching as it is repurposed for something else entirely.

A government that does not speak is a government that does not answer. And a government that does not answer is a government that no longer serves. The question now is whether anyone will force it to.