The president*, installed at least in part by ratfckers in the employ of a former KGB thug now running a murderous kleptocracy, has at his easy disposal everything a dictator could possibly want. He has combined an instinctive contempt for democratic government with a swindler’s nose for easy cash and a junkie knifepoint robber’s reckless disregard for consequences. He has a tight, loyal cabal of flunkies who’d be chasing ambulances if it weren’t for their talents as sycophants. He has a largely impotent political opposition and a largely supine congressional majority. He is one vote away from a rubber-stamp Supreme Court.

He is succeeding in his campaign to delegitimize any criminal investigation of his various schemes; he’s managed to put Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the right side of things. Hostile press, he can easily ignore. He is consolidating power based on deceit at an alarming rate, and, worst of all, he is becoming more popular for doing so among the only voters that matter to him.

According to the good folks at Gallup, the president*’s approval rating among Republicans is the highest of any Republican president since World War II at this point in his administration* with the exception of where George W. Bush was at immediately after the attacks of 9/11. He stands at 87 percent approval among Republicans. (Administration remoras already are fudging this data to imply that the president* is the most popular president at 500 days since World War II. A considerable number of people probably believe that by now.)

I know I occasionally am criticized for being harder on the NeverTrump Republicans than I should be—any port and all that—but many of them played prominent roles over the past four decades in fashioning a political party 87 percent of which approve of the slow-rolling catastrophe that is only now really picking up speed. It is entirely possible that the momentum now is unstoppable. The country is hurtling toward the destruction of its most basic ideas about itself, and some of these people played a leading role in constructing the handbasket. There has to be an accounting for that, somehow.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21070090/trump-consolidate-power-lies-authoritarianism/