Thread by @TomLevenson

1/ The single biggest story US media has missed is that Trump's and the GOP's actions, both in the last few days and stretching back over 40 years, have been in response to the increasing probability that Republicans are a permanent minority in US politics...

2/ The GOP has not won a majority of votes in a non-incumbent presidential election since 1992. Control of the Senate, and hence the judiciary, turns on GOP dominance of small states. The federal courts reflect the will of a shrinking minority of those whose lives they adjudicate

3/ GOP resilience in the House turns on state-level gerrymandering. If just Texas and North Carolina had neutral maps, it would be nearly impossible for Republicans to gain a majority there.

Much of the same stuff has been happening at state levels...

4/ Combine those legal, if anti-democratic moves with the various ways in which the GOP has achieved extra- or illegal voter suppression and you see a nation-wide apparatus, funded by a handful of the richest, to preserve and protect minority rule, honed since Reagan...

5/ When all that doesn't work, there's the possibility of a straight-up judicial coup. See, most prominently, Bush v. Gore, decided on straight partisan lines in a decision so patently unsustainable the majority declared it was not precedential...

6/ Now take the last few years and months. Court packing, open financial corruption, and a declared, again open refusal to accept oversight by Trump and gang has pushed the US towards a system of executive, ultimately unitary presidential rule....

7/ You see it on the large scale: spending money in disregard of the supposed Congressional power of the purse (DoD funds to the border wall, e.g.), and on the small: refusing to allow Fauci to testify to the House...

8/ The Senate GOP's refusal to convict for crimes clearly on the record sealed the deal: the lesson GOP Sen. Collins was sure Trump had learned is that there is no check on his authority, and no demand for accountability for actions...

9/ Now flash forward to right now. The botched pandemic would seem to put a stake through Trump's and the GOP's hopes of retaining power through the facade of seemingly democratic elections. But...

10/...but the Trump adminstration is now operating with at least partly dictatorial powers, and the electoral college reality means that even a substantial majority vote for his opponent would still permit an EC victory (as we saw in 2016)...

11/ Everything he, his campaign and his allies are doing now aims to achieve that. See, e.g., the open admission by @RNC that it intends to spend $20 million on voter suppression, and to "sue the Democrats into oblivion" to keep D voters from casting ballots...

12/ Take all that (and the gazillion examples I didn't burden this overlong-thread with) and see the moment for what it is: the late, perhaps last stage, in a campaign to create an American dictatorship. Think juntas--coalitions of right wing armed power and wealth...

13/ Franco, then, more than Stalin; Pinochet, perhaps.

American democracy used to be the envy of so many. Now it is heading towards late-stage crony-capitalist "spoils" state. If Trump wins (or "wins") in November, we could well face that kind of misrule for a generation.

14/ It is that larger threat, the outcome of a long series of events, useful accidents, and purposeful decisions, that is the frame for each daily outrage. The Flynn decision is a response to a momentary challenge--but it also helps establish acquiesence in arbitrary justice...

15/ The infuriating and wrong habit of so many elite journalists has been to treat Trump administration behavior as an extreme end of normal in US politics. This has blinded them to the real impact of what's been happening. That needs to change in a hurry, or else...

16/ A notionally free press will be just one of the many casualties of the long-running, nearly-complete GOP coup that is threatening to destroy the American experiment.

/fin