America on August 14 in a State of Emergency: Donald Trump: Beyond Fitness for Office

The images recall a war zone, yet it is Washington, D.C., in August 2025. Heavily armed National Guard members patrol in front of Union Station, Humvees block intersections, and in the early hours of August 14, 45 people are arrested - including 29 who are said to be in the country illegally. What is taking place in the American capital is unprecedented in the modern history of the United States: a democratically elected government has taken control of a city’s police and is turning it into a testing ground for authoritarian shows of force.

The systematic dismantling

What reads like a dystopian novel is the new reality. The federal government has not only taken control of Washington’s police but is orchestrating an unprecedented purge. Encampments of unhoused people are being cleared, their residents - people already living on the margins of society - are being driven out of the city. Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor for health and human services, is desperately trying to get ahead of this federal bulldozer by having the city clear some camps itself - at least then, in his tragic logic, social workers can still be involved before the National Guard rolls in. A semantic hair-splitting that recalls George Orwell’s Newspeak. Because what is the difference between an arrest and a “temporary restriction of movement” if, in the end, people are taken into custody?

Meanwhile, the situation in Texas is escalating, where Democratic lawmakers have been blocking the legislature for almost two weeks to prevent a Republican redrawing of districts. It is a desperate act of resistance against a machine designed to manipulate democratic processes. Governor Greg Abbott wants to create five additional safe Republican seats - a roadmap that California’s Governor Gavin Newsom now intends to counter with his own means. American democracy is degenerating into a chess game of gerrymandering.

The grand theater of illusion

In this surreal tableau, Trump stages an Oval Office performance on the 90th anniversary of Social Security. With his typical denial of reality, he claims his tax law would free Social Security from taxes - a bald-faced lie, as journalists immediately clarify. The actual truth is even harsher: Social Security will be insolvent as early as 2034, a year earlier than previously forecast, in part accelerated by Trump’s own policies.

While the president proclaims his alternative facts, wholesale prices explode by 0.9 percent - the strongest increase in three years. His import tariffs, sold as patriotic economic policy, drive inflation and burden American businesses and consumers. Yet Trump, unimpressed by economic realities, prepares for his meeting with Putin, which he calls a “big deal,” only to add in the next breath that the truly important meeting will be the subsequent one with Putin and Zelensky. The absurdity reaches new heights when the Pentagon has to explain that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of course supports women’s suffrage - after he shared a video in which Christian nationalist preachers questioned exactly that right. The fact that such a clarification is even necessary in 2025 speaks volumes about the state of American politics.

A glimmer of light in this bleak panorama comes, of all places, from the judiciary. Federal Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland ruled that the Department of Education acted unlawfully when it threatened schools and universities with the loss of all federal funds if they did not shut down their diversity programs. A small victory for the rule of law, which, however, feels like a drop in the bucket given the systematic dismantling of democratic norms.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of health and a notorious vaccine skeptic, meanwhile reactivates a body dissolved in 1998 to “improve” vaccine safety - a euphemistic cover for spreading anti-science propaganda. The grotesque is complete when Trump claims he saved Los Angeles from collapse by sending in the National Guard, and that without his intervention the Olympic Games would have had to be canceled.

The international dimension of this farce reveals itself in Trump’s upcoming meeting with Putin. Senator Jeanne Shaheen warns urgently that Putin has been playing Trump for months, crossing one red line after another. But Trump, blinded by his self-staging as a peacemaker, rejects any thought that the meeting could be a reward for Putin’s aggression.

In a particularly petty act of personal revenge, Trump has removed the official portraits of Presidents Obama and the two Bushes from the publicly accessible foyer of the White House. They now hang in the staircase leading to his private quarters - a symbolic act that demonstrates contempt for his predecessors and for democratic continuity.

What is happening in America on this August 14, 2025, is more than the sum of individual scandals and abuses. It is the methodical corrosion of democratic institutions, the militarization of public space, and the perversion of the rule of law. While unhoused people are driven out of Washington and the National Guard “secures” monuments, while districts are redrawn according to party calculus and the president declares his own lies to be truth, American democracy is not dying with a bang but in an endless series of small capitulations.

The 126 civil rights organizations calling on Congress to intervene may be the last defenders of a fading order. Their warning that this administration is “testing every boundary to find exploitable weaknesses in Congress and the courts” sounds less like a call to resistance than a eulogy for the republic. America, once the promise of freedom and democracy, is transforming before our eyes into a police state - and the world is watching. Donald Trump: Beyond Fitness for Office.

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