Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Friday, August 21, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 10amET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you can find the video at lucid.substack.com.

Our guest will be Barb McQuade, who is a professor from practice at Michigan Law School, and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, and the terrific new book The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.

Bring your questions about the conversion of our legal system to a personal tool of the president, corruption, disinformation, and more. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone.

If you’d like to take part in these informative sessions, you can upgrade to paid or premium here:

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During the Cold War, America played a double game, fostering democratic ideals and culture in Europe while backing coups to install right-wing dictators in other parts of the world. That game is over. Now, President Donald Trump and his fellow saboteurs are taking down the world’s most important democracy so that right-wing and selected Communist tyrants can prosper.

Autocrats often tell us what they intend to do, and Trump was no exception. He ran for president on a platform of helping some of the world’s most murderous leaders. During his campaign, he repeatedly “joked” about becoming a dictator himself, and declared at a June 2024 rally that a “smart president” would not consider North Korea, China, and Russia as enemies, and would “make them do great.”

In case this message was not clear enough, he asserted in October 2024 that America’s “enemy from within…the people actually running the government,” —United States Democrats—were “more dangerous…than Russia and China and other people.”

Then came the blitzkrieg tactics of early 2025. I spent those months writing essays to help us understand the unthinkable: America was being wrecked from within, at record speed, and was shifting from deterrent to enabler of autocratic expansionism. I forecast a “dialing back of America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world” to “create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.”

I also wanted us to have the right language to convey this exceptional moment in American history. I came up with four concepts that describe the qualities and operations of Trump’s government: Engineered Incompetence, National Sabotage, Plunder and Shakedown Operations, and Leader Self-Enrichment.

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