In April 2011, comedian Seth Meyers inflicted what was probably his most embarrassing humiliation on then-ambitious businessman Donald Trump. There's footage from the event, showing Meyers as a guest speaker at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, D.C., addressing a room full of distinguished guests. And everyone's laughing.
Except for one.
"Donald Trump says he's planning to run for president as a Republican," Meyers said from the stage. "Which is surprising, because I assumed he was running as a joke. Trump has his own line of ties," the comedian added. "You can find them at Macy's - in the flammable materials section."
Trump said he had a great relationship with “black people,” Meyers continued, before adding that he was probably referring to a white family with the last name Black.
After that last joke, the camera pans to President Barack Obama, who is shaking with laughter. And then to Trump - motionless. Stiff. As if he were a wax figure.
At that moment, many will tell you today, Trump decided to become the most powerful man in the world.
Time for sweet revenge
A few weeks ago, it was Donald Trump, now the most powerful man in the world, who was gloating. After the Walt Disney Company temporarily suspended popular host Jimmy Kimmel under pressure from high-ranking government officials, the US president wrote on the social network Truth Social that only Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers were left - "two complete losers, on NBC's fake news". Trump then called out: "Do it, NBC!!!"
Fourteen years after Meyers "poked" Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, it seemed the time for revenge had come.
The truth is that Trump and his supporters have already made a worryingly long journey toward imposing ideological uniformity in the "Land of the Free." And they have succeeded because much of the United States today is not in a spirit of resistance - but in a spirit of blind obedience.
The furious president didn’t just pour venom on award-winning TV comedians. He attacked anyone who dared to criticize his glorious tenure. The liberal media that still had the nerve to question his leadership, he claimed, “are behaving really illegally.” The comment came a day after he said “I would think maybe they should be de-licensed,” referring to networks that ran negative stories about him. He even took a step in that direction — unsuccessfully — by suing The New York Times for $15 billion in damages. The paper, he said, hated him enough. “That stops, NOW!”
Freedom of the press? Not really.
Trump and his aides, however, have gone further. Much further. Apparently spurred on by the assassination of MAGA advisor Charlie Kirk in Utah, members of the Trump administration have recently been racing to call for the prosecution of political opponents.
Call for a report
The investigation into the motives for the murder of Kirk, a man quickly proclaimed a martyr by Trump and his supporters, is still far from over, and the suspected 22-year-old attacker has so far remained silent.
Yet there is no doubt within the Trump administration that the attacker must have been from the “radical left.” At a recent memorial for Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, the president declared that the government would launch investigations into the “networks of radical leftist maniacs” behind attacks like the one against Kirk. A day later, he designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.
Vice President J.D. Vance, who has long considered himself a champion of free speech, encouraged Trump supporters to report anyone who expressed joy online over Kirk's death - and to report them to their employers.
As a result, many Americans lost their jobs shortly after the assassination. Disney also pulled award-winning host Jimmy Kimmel from its program for several days - ignoring the fact that he called the attack "horrific and monstrous."
Huge pressure on Disney
On the show, Jimmy Kimmel rightly noted that Trump’s MAGA supporters did everything they could to paint the perpetrator as a leftist and “profit politically from it.” Kimmel then added that Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death was far from sincere: “That’s like a four-year-old grieving over a dead goldfish.”
That was enough for the administration to put enormous pressure on Kimmel's parent company, and his show was pulled from the airwaves. After massive protests, Kimmel soon returned. But the message was clear: freedom of speech? None of that.
Freedom of speech and expression, both guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, have long been more deeply rooted in the United States than in almost any other democracy. Yet after Kirk’s murder, Attorney General Pam Bondi seriously proposed that this right be denied to certain groups, particularly those on the left. It is time, she said, to crack down on hate speech. Even Charlie Kirk himself, who has made racist and sexist statements part of his image, once said, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America.”
What Bondi seems to have forgotten in the heat of the moment - aside from her official duty to protect the Constitution - is the fact that numerous studies in recent years have shown that the propensity for political violence is greatest in right-wing and far-right circles, and that two groups stand out in particular: white evangelicals and Trump supporters from the MAGA movement.
What exactly do Donald Trump and his supporters want to achieve with their unprecedented campaign against satirists, the media, and real or perceived leftists? There is much evidence to suggest that the murder of Charlie Kirk is being used as yet another excuse to increase the intimidation of the president's remaining opponents.
America is currently not only suffering from attacks by a completely unbridled president and his administration on critics and political rivals. It is thought itself that is under attack. It is an attack that began nine months ago – and has been waged with increasing openness ever since. Only those who do not oppose Trump’s views and his worldview are welcome. Everyone else must fear punishment, expulsion and censorship – be it universities, publishing houses, museums, libraries or the media. In other words, all those who seek to enable the spread of knowledge and facts, even when they are controversial.
The wave of attacks has caused unease even in parts of Trump’s camp. If Kirk’s killing is used to impose drastic restrictions on free speech, warned Tucker Carlson — a once-vehement Trump supporter who now voices his views on a podcast instead of Fox News — then it’s time for “civil disobedience.” “If they can tell you what to say, they can tell you what to think.” And when that happens, he added, “there’s nothing they can’t do to you.”
The truth is that Trump and his supporters have already made alarming progress on the path to imposing ideological uniformity in the “Land of the Free.” And they have succeeded because much of the United States today is not in a spirit of resistance – but in a spirit of blind obedience.
"Criminal" journalists
One of the Trump administration's top priorities from the very beginning has been to establish control over a free media. And there is a method to this madness. Even former slave Frederick Douglass, one of the leading advocates for human rights and the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, said that freedom of speech is "a terror to tyrants." "It is the right they first trample on," Douglass said in December 1860.
Trump, who has never made much of a secret of his admiration for dictators, is no exception. Since the start of his second term in January, he has tasked his loyal spokeswoman, Carolyn Levitt, with publicly demonstrating her disdain for traditional journalists. Levitt has flooded the White House briefing room with representatives of the “new media” — including obscure MAGA influencers, radicals, and conspiracy theorists, many of whom give no hint of neutrality. They have enjoyed preferential treatment since they arrived.
The media regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - which Trump, like the Justice Department, has long since brought under his control - has launched a series of investigations into media outlets, many for "unfairly" promoting diversity and inclusion. And that's something Trump despises.
Back in May, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders published a report stating that there had been a “worrying deterioration in media freedom.”
The birth of the “wolf of the right”
What is shocking about this sudden reversal is how much Trump and his supporters now resemble caricatures of their political opponents. “Cancellation culture” was a relentless indictment of liberals, who, admittedly, sometimes went too far in their morally rigorous zeal to impose equality and right historical wrongs. In Trump’s testosterone-fueled, triumphantly confident America, there is no longer any room for “woke culture.”
Now, however, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has identified what he calls the “vogue right” — whose methods are strikingly similar to those used by the progressive left. “What they’ve learned from the left,” Rauch told The New York Times, “is that if you can control what people say, if you can make them afraid of being canceled, you can make a minority opinion look like a majority opinion.”
Yet there is one crucial difference. Under Trump, this new worldview is dictated from above - and implemented with a ruthlessness unprecedented in a democracy.
In recent months, for example, the Trump administration has been waging a veritable war on universities, accusing them of being hotbeds of anti-Semitism. Trump's real motive, however, is to prevent any form of student - and therefore, from his perspective, leftist - protests. Numerous student leaders and professors have been arrested and detained without any legal basis.
Memories of McCarthy
One of them, Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University in New York, spent nearly four months in immigration detention in Louisiana and now faces possible deportation to Syria or Algeria - allegedly because of "irregularities" with his green card. "This was never about me," Khalil told Der Spiegel. "The goal was to spread fear and stifle protest."
At the same time, the government has been pulling billions of dollars from universities to force them into compliance. And it has worked. In July, Columbia “bought back” its right to government funds, paying $221 million. The university has also pledged to better control student protests and allow an “independent monitor” on campus.
The University of California, Berkeley - once a symbol of free speech - caved in early September to pressure from the Department of Education over an investigation into alleged discrimination. The university's leadership handed over the names of 160 students, faculty and other employees to the government, who have since been trying to find out exactly what they were accused of.
Many professors say it all reminds them of 1950, when Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had declared war on communism, launched a witch hunt against alleged leftist enemies of the state.
"Truth and reason"
America's chief censor doesn't just want to suppress and criminalize opinions. Trump also seeks to completely eradicate entire worldviews from "his" America. By the nation's 250th anniversary, which falls in 2026, the president wants the country to be presented as one that, since its founding, has spread freedom, individual rights, and human happiness around the world - and nothing else.
In late March, Trump issued an executive order aimed at “restoring truth and reason to American history.” Museums, national parks, and other public monuments are to become “solemn and uplifting” places that honor the country’s “extraordinary heritage.” The true scope of this order has recently become clear—as has the fact that Trump, once again, can count on the obedience of countless of his compatriots.
For example, the Trump administration has called on all employees of national parks and monuments to report all “inappropriate material” in their workplaces by mid-September. The New York Times reported that attention quickly turned to, among other things, the gift shop at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center in Washington. The store is filled with books by Malcolm X, as well as titles about slavery and the Freedom Riders civil rights movement — which, as one anonymous employee noted, “maybe isn’t exactly uplifting.”
At the Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, an anonymous official reported an information board that described slavery as the “primary cause” of the conflict. This, he wrote, is “historically accurate” but potentially “out of step” with the executive order.
Forgetting the past
Such doubts are justified. Back in August, Trump declared that he was “tired of hearing about how bad slavery was.” And the revisionism has already begun. For example, at Fort Pulaski National Memorial Park in Georgia, according to media reports, plans are underway to remove an 1863 photograph called The Scourged Back. The image shows the scars on the back of a black man who had been repeatedly whipped—one of the most striking documents of the brutality of slavery. Elsewhere, inscriptions that recall the persecution and extermination of numerous indigenous peoples have been criticized.
Human trafficking and genocide, for Trump, seem to be nothing more than "a distorted narrative driven by ideology, not truth" - as stated in his March executive order.
What all this could mean for the Smithsonian Institution’s unique network of museums in Washington remains to be seen. Eleven buildings, packed with priceless collections, surround the nation’s institutions like admonishing cathedrals of knowledge. And nearly every one of them is a thorn in Trump’s side. Especially the Museum of African American History and Culture, whose very existence could be threatened if Trump’s executive order is implemented as written.
Some museums have already begun to make changes, apparently with the intention of appeasing the president.
Censorship, of course, but also self-censorship.
Banning books
How far Trump’s “thought police” are willing to go has been demonstrated most clearly by none other than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Shortly after taking office, and on Trump’s orders, the Christian nationalist banned a long list of “undesirable” books from schools operating on some 160 U.S. military bases around the world. Not long after, the Naval Academy in Annapolis—a place that trains future politicians, businessmen, and scientists—was forced to remove “questionable” titles from its prestigious library.
A total of 381 books were missing, including "Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?" by Abu Jamal's Mummy and the 1960s bestseller "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," in which poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou wrote about her experiences of racism in America. Almost all critical works on racism, political violence, and far-right religious fanaticism were removed from the library's shelves.
Among the books that were allowed to remain was Jean Raspey's The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 cult novel among white supremacists that is considered a cornerstone of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, according to which white people are being "replaced" by immigrants. Another book that was allowed was The Bell Curve, a "scientific" work that claims that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in terms of intellectual ability.
It's been eight months since Trump moved into the White House for the second time. And given the speed with which the 79-year-old has managed to bend the country to his will, it begs the question: Where is the resistance?
Dual state
A possible answer lies in a book first published in America 84 years ago, titled The Dual State. It was written by the German-Jewish labor rights activist Ernst Frenkel, who left Germany in 1938 and spent the rest of his life pondering why it was so easy to transform Germany from a democracy into a dictatorship.
After the Nazis took power, Frenkel argued that for some time there was a so-called "normative order" in Germany, within which the legal system continued to apply to most citizens, private property was protected, and businesses could operate unhindered - so that the capitalist economy could continue to function.
At the same time, however, a “prerogative state” developed - a state of “unrestricted arbitrariness and violence” directed against certain people and institutions, from whom basic rights were gradually being taken away. The majority could convince themselves for a long time that the excesses of state violence would not touch them. Until the prerogative state finally supplanted the rule of law.
“Today we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state,” writes University of Chicago law professor Aziz Hook in an article published a few months ago in The Atlantic. It should not be assumed, he warns, that America will necessarily follow the path that Germany once took — “but it is striking how Trump’s executive orders reject the basic principles of the American constitutional order.”
The American economy, writes Hook, is still largely functioning, and the judiciary—except in political cases—is still doing its job. Most people can ignore the establishment of the prerogative state because, for now, it does not affect their lives. “They can turn away and not look, while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political freedoms. But once the prerogative state is built (…) it can swallow anyone.”
Whether it's a student, a state attorney - or maybe just a television comedian who tells the wrong joke.
Prepared by: NB
Bonus video:
