This Week and Next: Three Shots to the Face

The execution of Renee Goode marks the moment America crossed into authoritarianism. Between Kushner's shadow empire and Trump's dictator cosplay, we won't make it to the midterms…

Jan 10, 2026

Pay attention now, because we’re running out of time to ask the question that matters: How much damage can a democracy sustain before the word itself becomes merely decorative? Before the mechanics of self-governance are so thoroughly corrupted that repair becomes a fantasy we tell ourselves to sleep better at night? We’re not approaching that threshold. We’ve crossed it. And the truly terrifying part is how many people are still acting as though this is all somehow reversible, somehow normal, somehow survivable in any form we’d recognize.

Narco-terrorists, they said. Dangerous fishing vessels threatening American sovereignty. The narrative evaporated within days, revealing the skeletal truth underneath: the operation had been planned for months, executed without the congressional approval mandated by the War Powers Act, that increasingly quaint relic of constitutional governance. And of course - of course - it was about the oil. It’s always about the oil. The pattern is so established it barely merits comment, except that each iteration normalizes the next violation, makes the next overreach seem almost reasonable by comparison.

The MAHA report arrived. RFK Jr.’s contribution to what passes for public health policy, complete with an inverted food pyramid that nutritionists abandoned years ago. Yes, questioning ultra-processed food has merit, but a broken clock’s occasional accuracy doesn’t make it a timepiece. More tellingly, this supposed health crusade maintains conspicuous silence on alcohol, one of the most consequential substances Americans consume. Then, inevitably, came the revelations about Junior’s financial entanglements with the beef and dairy industries. There’s always a grift. Learn to spot the pattern: wherever you see sudden passion for reform, look for who’s getting paid.

RFK Jr. brought back the food pyramid- just inverted it. That’s science.

Transparency in American governance has reached near-total eclipse now. We’re operating in informational darkness so complete that Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre now looks like glasnost. And in this darkness, shadow players operate with impunity.

Which brings up Jared Kushner. Watch him carefully. The Grifter-in-Chief’s son-in-law moves across the global stage with the confidence of a man who knows he’ll never be called to account. This is the same Jared who failed security clearance during Trump’s first administration - couldn’t pass the background check required of mid-level bureaucrats. The national security establishment examined his debts, his foreign entanglements, his ethical quicksand, and rendered their verdict: No. Until Trump simply overrode them, because that’s what happens when institutions exist only as performance.

Now he operates entirely untethered, inhabiting some shadow space between private citizen and shadow diplomat. No official position. No oversight. No accountability. He conducts what amounts to a parallel foreign policy, jetting from Abu Dhabi to Riyadh and beyond on taxpayer money, while no one asks the essential question: Whose interests is he serving? When a man who failed basic security vetting freelances American diplomacy, perhaps someone should wonder about those two billion dollars the Saudis deposited into his investment fund. Perhaps someone should be screaming about it.

But opacity abroad enables brutality at home. While Kushner conducts his shadow diplomacy, ICE has evolved into something we’d call a paramilitary force in any other country. They’re not containing threats anymore. They’re creating them. They’re killing.

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Renee Goode was shot three times in the face. Before any investigation could begin, before her family could process the loss, Kristi Noem materialized before cameras to declare her a domestic terrorist. Then Trump himself had the audacity - the sheer, breathtaking audacity - to go on air and claim that Goode ran over an officer. This is a lie. A demonstrable, disprovable lie. But he said it anyway, on camera, with the confidence of a man who knows that truth has become optional, that his followers will believe whatever narrative he spins regardless of facts, evidence, or basic decency.

Here’s what crystallized for me this week, amid all the chaos and escalating madness: It was this execution that finally made it undeniable. This is the moment I understood that Trump and his administration will not tolerate dissent. Not criticism, not opposition, not even the passive resistance of simply existing outside their narrative. Every effective dictator understands the utility of the public execution - it hits that primal terror spot that no amount of propaganda can quite replicate. Three shots to the face. Immediate branding as a terrorist. Presidential lies broadcast nationally. The message isn’t subtle: this is what happens to those who resist.

This wasn’t collateral damage. This wasn’t an operation gone wrong. This was theater. Brutal, calculated theater designed to send a message that reverberates through every community, every activist group, every person who might consider standing in opposition. The dictator’s playbook is remarkably consistent across time and geography: make an example public enough, violent enough, wrapped in enough official justification that it normalizes state killing while simultaneously terrifying anyone who might challenge authority. We’re watching that playbook executed in real time on American soil.

And the woman running this operation? Consider who Kristi Noem is, what she represents. A woman who killed her own dog - not from mercy, not from necessity, but from disappointment. The animal wasn’t what she wanted, so she deemed it better off dead. Even abandonment would have offered a chance at survival. But Noem’s calculus is binary: useful or disposable. This is the moral framework now running Homeland Security - that Orwellian monument to Republican fear-mongering birthed in the lies of 2000. Perhaps it’s grimly fitting that an agency conceived in deception would eventually be helmed by someone whose psychology can only be described as plasticized sociopathy.

Meanwhile, Trump, Vance, and Miller aren’t even bothering to hide their inner Putins anymore. Greenland is being positioned as America’s Crimea - the blueprint laid bare for anyone paying attention. Watch as the green light flashes for Russia and China. Taiwan’s security guarantee? Gone. Ukraine’s sovereignty? Expendable. We’re witnessing the architecture of a new global order that looks remarkably like the old imperial model, except this time we’re the ones tearing up treaties and redrawing maps.

Renee Goode, who was killed by ICE this week.

The pace accelerates. Greenland. NATO disintegration. Venezuela. Each norm violated, each alliance fractured, each commitment betrayed. This is how America accumulated power - not through force alone, but through the reliability of its word, the strength of its institutions, the credibility of its commitments. Watch that architecture collapse in real time while a convicted felon in the White House systematically dismantles what remains, both metaphorically and literally.

We’re losing. The good fight, the one that determines whether self-governance survives its own darkest impulses, may already be over. This isn’t hyperbole. This is a sober assessment of the facts we’re living through.

We might not make it to the midterms. Not in any form that resembles a functioning democracy. The pace of destruction is too rapid, the guardrails too thoroughly demolished, the precedents too completely shattered. Every week brings a new threshold crossed, a new norm obliterated. The machinery of authoritarianism doesn’t pause for election cycles. It accelerates through them.

Kristie Noem, before an investigation claiming Goode was a domestic terrorist.

Even if we somehow limp to November 2026, even if the mechanics of voting somehow remain intact, what then? God only knows what Trump will claim if Congress changes hands. We’ve already seen the rehearsal: a defeated president refusing to concede, manufacturing fantasies of fraud, inciting violence to overturn results he doesn’t like. That was when institutions still had some structural integrity, when there were still Republicans willing to say no, when the guardrails, however weakened, still held.

Those guardrails are gone now. The Republicans who resisted have been purged. The institutions have been captured. When Trump faces a hostile Congress, do you really think he’ll simply accept the voters’ verdict? We already know that playbook. We already know he’ll call it rigged, stolen, illegitimate. The only question is how far he’ll go to overturn it - and who’ll be left to stop him.

The question isn’t whether you believe this can happen in America. It is happening. The question is what you’re going to do with that information while there’s still time to matter. Because the window is closing, and once it shuts completely, we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining to the next generation how we saw it coming and did nothing.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote this week that if 3% of a population protest - change can be had.

Wake up. Now.

Write about what is happening. Post about it. Find a march. Sign a petition.

Do something.

Coming this week: What about alcohol and public health? Also, I’ll be giving another “Ted Talk.” And for the rest of the week? Well let’s see what happens.