What will happen to the United States?

Starving. Desperate. Shattered by grief. They had almost no fight left, and what little resistance remained was quieted by the promise of survival. They believed the lies because hope was all they had left. They didn’t know they were being sent to their deaths.

I was talking to a friend about a movie she’d just watched, about Jewish families starving in ghettos, stripped of food, dignity, and life. I told her I’d been to one of those places. In Budapest’s old ghetto district, people once boiled shoe leather just to survive.

At the Temple of Heroes, there’s a mass grave holding thousands where I read every plaque, trying to understand the horror that happened in a place that now looks peaceful. And when I thought that it couldn’t get worse, I learned about the final lies they were told.

After enduring unthinkable trauma, people were told they were being relocated, promised food, work, and dignity. They were handed paper and pencils, and told to write letters home saying everything was fine. Those letters became tools of deception, used to convince the next group to get on the train.

They were told to shower to prevent typhus, a disease spreading in the conditions they’d already been forced into. They labeled their bags, believing they’d get them back. They believed they were safe, right up until the doors shut. Many were mothers, holding children. Naked. Terrified. And broken.

We know how it ended. They died not knowing, until the very last moment, that they had been betrayed. And I can’t stop thinking about how none of this started with concentration camps. It started with lies. The same type that are being spread today in Trump’s America.

This isn’t Nazi Germany. But we’re closer than we should be.

Their suffering should have been enough for us to stop this, to shut it down before it got this far. It should have been the warning that stuck. But it wasn’t. So where did we go so wrong?

And I keep getting lost in my thoughts about how this is all a psychological war we’re living through. A war not with bombs or tanks, but with disinformation, manipulation, and emotional exhaustion. A war designed to wear us down until we forget what truth even feels like. Our minds are being used against us. The fear, the confusion, the constant lies, they are all part of the same strategy. We’re being isolated, disoriented, and told to ignore what we can see with our own eyes. And the longer it goes on, the more we start to question not just the facts, but our ability to trust anything at all.

Just like those who got on the trains to the concentration camps, thinking they were finally being rescued, not realizing they were being delivered to their death.

The same tactics are being replayed as if someone cracked open the original playbook and started checking each box, one by one. Promise. Reassure. Gaslight. Deprive. Isolate. Eliminate. We’ve seen this movie before, in Germany, in Chile, in Italy. And now, we’re watching it unfold in real time, through Trump’s lies, through ICE terrorizing communities, through Project 2025’s blueprint, a sweeping plan to dismantle civil rights protections, replace federal workers with loyalists, and centralize presidential power, and through the silence of the people who should have stopped him.

Trump tells us the economy is booming. That inflation is under control. That jobs are growing. He says we’re the “hottest country in the world.” But every week, we see layoffs. Credit card debt is surging. People are defaulting on car loans. Food prices are still up more than 25 percent since 2020. Rents are crushing families. Wages aren’t keeping up. And still, the lie is repeated: everything is fine. Just this week, his Republican Party publicly claimed that there is no affordability crisis, even as voters across the country, in red, blue, and purple states, rejected them at the ballot box. But instead of listening, they just keep circling blame and gaslighting us. Telling us what we’re seeing isn’t real. That what we’re feeling isn’t valid. They repeat the lies until we’re too tired to keep defending the truth.

This is how authoritarian movements operate: deny the pain, then blame the people for feeling it.

This is nothing new either. In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” That wasn’t just theory. It was a strategy. And we are watching it in real time, across media, politics, and the courts.

Trump says he “cares about children.” That he wants every child to be fed. But when the government shut down, and he had the power to release emergency SNAP funds that would help families feed their kids, he didn’t just drag his feet, he fought it. His administration took it all the way to the Supreme Court to block those funds, just to make sure struggling families didn’t get help. That’s not compassion. That’s cruelty as policy.

He says he supports law and order. But ICE, under his control, has become something else entirely. We’re not just talking about arrests at the border. We’re talking about early morning raids in American neighborhoods. No warning. No warrants. Families dragged from their homes, children terrorized. People thrown into vans, no access to lawyers, and no word of where they’re taken. Some are transferred to private facilities. Others are flown to offshore detention sites — outside the reach of U.S. courts. And sometimes, their families never hear from them again.

We’ve been here before. In the 1970s, Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet abducted thousands of people who were never seen again. They were held in secret prisons, tortured, and erased. Their families were told nothing. Their names vanished from the public record. That level of cruelty didn’t begin with barbed wire. It began with silence. With the public being told “Don’t worry. It’s being handled.”

And yet again, the Pentagon launched a strike on a so-called “drug boat” in the Pacific. Three people were killed. No charges. No trial. No evidence. Just a quiet report and a shrug from the government. We are now killing people abroad without process, without explanation, and calling it normal.

This isn’t law and order. This is propaganda as policy. And every time we don’t name it, it grows.

And while people suffer around him, Trump is more focused on enriching himself. We just learned he quietly bought $82 million in corporate bonds since returning to office. His government writes the regulations. He holds the power. And he’s using it to grow his personal fortune. In any other era, this would be career-ending. Today, it barely makes the news. Because this isn’t a government serving the people. This is a hostile takeover by the man who was elected to protect us from exactly what he’s doing, looting the country in plain sight.

I keep asking myself why my thoughts keep bouncing back and forth, from the atrocities Trump is committing now to the ones carried out by other dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and fascist movements throughout history. And honestly, it’s both a complicated and an easy answer. It’s clear as day what’s happening right now. But it’s harder to talk about the early signs of authoritarianism from nearly a hundred years ago, so people jump straight to the worst of it, the camps, the killings, the genocide. And that’s not a fair comparison, because we’re not there. Not yet. But we’re in this early in-between space, where I can feel it in my spine what’s coming next. And it’s a slippery slope, trying to honor those who suffered so much in the past while still calling out what’s happening right now. But then I look at the people who have already been rounded up and taken by ICE, the ones sitting in black site detention centers in unimaginable conditions, and for them, it isn’t some distant warning. It’s already here.

And what maybe hurts the most is that none of this had to happen. When Trump was voted out in 2020, the hope was that America could finally breathe. That we could heal and grow from that dark chapter. But instead, we’re right back where he left off, only worse.

Because now he controls the Supreme Court. He controls the House. He controls state-run propaganda channels like Truth Social and Fox News. And he controls a Republican Party too scared, or too loyal, to challenge him. He’s turning federal agencies into tools of personal revenge, just like Hitler did with the Gestapo, and just like Mussolini did when he merged corporate power with state power. And that is exactly what we’re seeing now: deregulation for donors, kickbacks for allies, censorship of critics, and Trump’s government spreading its roots inside American corporations like a virus. It’s not just corruption. It’s full-scale occupation.

And while some cracks are showing, like his public feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene, those aren’t signs of moderation. They’re signs of purity tests. Trump demands total loyalty. And anyone who slips, even slightly, gets crushed. That’s not a fracture. That’s a consolidation of power. We’ve seen this before, too. In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy built an empire on blacklists and loyalty oaths. Lives were destroyed based on whispers and fear. Facts didn’t matter. Allegiance did. Today, Trump’s loyalty tests are digital and violent, carried out through threats, doxxing, smear campaigns, and mobs of online enforcers. But the goal is the same: eliminate dissent, and make fear the only language anyone hears.

I’ll be honest, some nights I’m still struggling as I wonder if it’s already too late. If we’ve crossed too many lines, and lost too much ground. I think about the friends I’ve lost to this movement. The peace of mind we all had taken away. I think about what it’s done to our families, our kids, our sense of safety. And maybe this is something we don’t talk enough about. We used to feel safe. Not all the time, and not for everyone, but at the country level. Safe in the sense that when the system worked, it protected us. We had checks and balances. We didn’t wake up every day wondering if our government had bombed another boat as a distraction, or because someone in the White House wanted to live out their little GI Joe fantasies.

There is the nonstop, unsettled feeling of living under the leadership of an unstable man. The fear of waking up and finding out our troops have been sent off to war because our president feels like playing the part of a strongman. Or the fear of what it is to just live our everyday lives. Not far from where I live in San Diego, Border Patrol set up a checkpoint by blocking the road, forcing drivers to stop and prove their citizenship. I saw the images. And if that’s not the most Nazi thing I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. What exactly are people supposed to carry to prove their legal right to be here? A passport? Their birth certificate? Most Americans don’t have either on them, and a lot still use the old driver’s licenses that aren’t “Real ID.” Are we supposed to show our papers everywhere we go now? Or does that only apply to brown people? And if you are not brown or just don’t care about other people, remember, fascist rulers never stop at just one target. They always come for more. They’ll come for all of us, or the people we love, eventually.

And after my mind spirals into that dark place, I think about what it means if we didn’t learn from the ones who already lived through this. If we let their suffering, and the courage of those who fought back mean nothing. And if we saw the signs coming and still did nothing, what does that make us?

We still have power. I’m still here, still writing. No one’s come to disappear me. That’s something they never had. They didn’t get the warnings. They didn’t have the tools. They didn’t have a way out. But we do.

If Trump’s ties to the largest child trafficking ring are causing cracks in the MAGA wall, then we need to push those cracks wide open. Talk to your MAGA-aligned relatives, your neighbors, the people still trying to pretend this isn’t happening. Show them the way out. And welcome them when they come.

Because this story isn’t over. We still have a say in how it ends. And we’re going to fight like hell to stop it.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can help keep this work going by subscribing to my Substack; there’s a free option, or you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. Paid subscriptions help me reach more people, cover more ground, and keep telling the truth about what’s happening to our country.