Redburn Reads (June 9, 2025)

The alarm bells are ringing

Donald Trump is trying to build the United States into a corrupt police state. He may well succeed.

I’ve long felt that Trump, unlike the autocrats he admires like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban, was too immature and mercurial to pull off a self-coup. I’m no longer so sure.

In part, that’s because Trump, unlike in his first term, has fully unleashed two of his most ideological aides, Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and anti-immigrant overlord, and Russ Vought, chief of the Office of Management and Budget and the principal author of Project 2025.

(Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage)

A lot is happening right now to advance his cause, so I’m going to concentrate on simply presenting extending commentary from a few of those who are raising the alarm most clearly.

Jonathan Last, writing for The Bulwark, warns that we are in the midst of one of the most dangerous weeks in American history.

I want to apologize if I sound hysterical. I do not mean to. More than that: I am trying, hard, to be measured. The problem is that this week is bringing us closer to the sum of all fears and when you simply describe what’s happening, out loud, it sounds crazy.

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Three seemingly unrelated things are happening this week which will combine to take us to a place our country has not seen since Reconstruction. . . .

Last Friday the president of the United States broke the richest man in the world. . . .

Would you like to see the list of tech oligarchs and free-speech absolutists who rallied to Musk’s side after Trump leveled this overt threat? Here you go:

The message is simple: Money has ceased to be power. Only power is power. . .

The second event is Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard in California, against the will of the state’s governor.

It has been clear since Trump won the Republican nomination that if elected he would find a way to deploy military force against American citizens. He has had an unslakable thirst for this idea for at least a decade—and if we’re being honest, he’s probably fantasized about it since he was in his twenties.

The law gives the president extraordinarily broad powers to mobilize the National Guard because the twin assumptions have always been that (a) no president would want to deploy the military against American citizens and (b) if such a depraved individual did come to power, the public would swiftly repudiate him.

Both of those assumptions have been exploded.

Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, I expect Trump will repeat it until this once-unthinkable act is no more onerous than stepping over a brook.

First Trump normalized the use of masked, unidentified secret police. Now he has normalized the mobilization of the military against civilians.

The final piece will be Trump’s military parade on June 14. By now you have seen the video of hundreds of tanks arriving in Washington via flatcar.

If this scene strikes you as familiar, that’s because it is. You saw it four weeks ago when Vladimir Putin paraded tanks through Moscow to remind his countrymen of where power emanates from.

We are approaching the sum of all fears—a moment when the president of the United States directs the U.S. military to visit violence on American citizens, en masse. A moment when the presence of tanks in American cities is normalized. A moment when even a man with $400 billion of money armor is not safe.

And it’s all happening this week

Or consider the latest piece in The Atlantic by David Frum, who postulates that Trump’s ordering of the National Guard to Los Angeles is a possible dress rehearsal for an excuse to undermine the 2026 mid-term elections to prevent Democrats from retaking control of the House.

But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:

Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.

Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.

Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.

Since Trump’s return to the presidency in January, many political observers have puzzled over a seeming paradox. On the one hand, Trump keeps doing corrupt and illegal things. If and when his party loses its majorities in Congress—and thus the ability to protect Trump from investigation and accountability—he will likely face severe legal danger. On the other hand, Trump is doing extreme and unpopular things that seem certain to doom his party’s majorities in the 2026 elections. Doesn’t Trump know that the midterms are coming? Why isn’t he more worried?

This weekend’s events suggest an answer. Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried. But he might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him—and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.

Trump may not be very successful in delivering on his promises to voters to improve their material lives, but as Ben Rhodes writes in an illuminating essay for the New York Times, he is definitely succeeding in enriching himself and his family.

President Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 election campaign. Billions of foreign dollars have flowed into his family’s real estate and crypto ventures. A plane that doubles as a “palace in the sky” has been given for Mr. Trump’s use by the government of Qatar.

It is easy to dismiss this as just a bigger and more brazen version of the self-dealing we saw during the first Trump term. But it poses a more fundamental danger. Our political system is being transformed into something that no longer serves the people. Indeed, the United States is seemingly becoming just another country with a corrupt strongman personalizing and profiting from power.

Vladimir Putin pursued this playbook in Russia. The news media was forced into the hands of his political allies. Natural resources and lucrative contracts were turned over to his associates. Mr. Putin reportedly became one of the world’s richest men while creating a system in which the nation’s interests became indistinguishable from its leader’s.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a MAGA favorite, has pursued this playbook on a smaller scale, leveraging the power of the state to marginalize opponents while his associates became ostentatiously wealthy. As with Mr. Trump and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this includes Mr. Orban’s son-in-law. Family members and associates double as gatekeepers and deal makers operating outside formal government roles, which come with rules and oversight. . .

Americans are farther downriver than we seem to understand. Indeed, over the past several months, Mr. Trump has made moves that far exceed anything Mr. Orban has done. What separates Mr. Trump from an Orban or even a Putin is the awesome economic, technological and military power of the enterprise that he now leads: the United States of America.

Meanwhile, while Trump is openly pursuing riches for himself, Russell Vought and Steven Miller are more quietly pursing a different agenda, attempting to remake the American government . Here’s just quick summaries of two essays written earlier this year in the Substack “Critical Resistance” of what Trump’s most important aides are trying to accomplish: first in a profile of Vought and then in similiar profile of Miller. If you don’t know much about them, it’s really worth your time to dig into them further.

Russell T. Vought—once Donald Trump’s budget director, now the principal architect of the 920-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” [and once again Trump’s budget director]—is quietly assembling what may be the most radical re-engineering of the federal government in modern U.S. history. His blueprint would sweep away civil-service protections, concentrate executive power, and embed an explicitly Christian-nationalist worldview across every department.

He calls the idea “radical constitutionalism.” Critics call it soft-spoken authoritarianism.

Unlike headline-chasers and cable news firebrands, [Stephen] Miller operates quietly, methodically, and relentlessly behind the scenes. His power doesn’t rely on charisma or populist theatrics, just paperwork, legal maneuvers, and meticulously crafted policies designed to dismantle America’s democratic institutions from the inside out.

Many know Stephen Miller as the architect of family separation, the Muslim Ban, and other cruel Trump-era immigration policies. Fewer understand his long game, his ideology, or his obsession with demographic control. Miller’s goal isn’t merely to restrict immigration—it’s to fundamentally reshape America into a country governed permanently by a radical, reactionary minority.

One more thing is happening this week, on June 14, the same day as Trump’s birthday celebration of himself with his military parade. It’s the No More Kings protests around the country. I plan to attend the event here in Plymouth.