The Last Act of the Republic

As Trump’s clerics of control move at lightning speed, America must decide whether to follow Hungary into the swamp or Seoul into the sunlight.

They call it governance, but it looks an awful lot like test runs for aspiring authoritarians. The United States is once again auditioning for history’s least enviable role: the democracy that didn’t realize it was being dismantled until the nails were already halfway in the coffin. And leading this pageant of piety and paranoia are two men who seem hand-carved from the darker corners of twentieth-century memory: Russell Vought, the bureaucratic priest who blesses the spreadsheets of tyranny, and Stephen Miller, the walking Halloween mask of resentment who doesn’t even need a costume anymore.

Russell Vought moves like a man who believes the Book of Revelation was meant as a management manual. To him, government isn’t an instrument of public good but a vessel to be purified by faith and hierarchy. When he talks about “reforming” the civil service, what he really means is transforming it into a temple of loyalty where every acolyte swears fealty not to the Constitution but to the sovereign. He’s H.R. Haldeman with a hymnbook, David Addington with a devotional app, an ideologue who makes paperwork sound holy and purges sound efficient. If John Calvin had discovered Excel, he would have been Russell Vought.

Stephen Miller, meanwhile, has spent so long rehearsing his villainy that he’s become a caricature of himself, a sentient press release with the emotional range of a granite gargoyle. He crafts fear the way a perfumer blends scent: carefully, obsessively, with notes of xenophobia and undertones of smirk.

When Miller takes the podium, you can almost hear the ghosts of Joseph Goebbels and John Ehrlichman whispering, “Now that’s commitment.” He doesn’t write policy; he writes sermons for the Church of Perpetual Siege, where every migrant is a crisis and every headline proof of persecution. He is the pyromaniac who believes the fire department works for him.

Together, they form the perfect authoritarian dyad: the priest and the pyromaniac. Vought builds the cathedral of obedience; Miller lights the torches around it. One sanctifies control in the language of procedure, the other sells cruelty as patriotism. It’s Nixon’s domestic team re-skinned for the algorithmic age, Ehrlichman and Haldeman with Wi-Fi and even fewer scruples. They’ve learned from the past that totalitarianism doesn’t need jackboots if you can replace the entire HR department instead.

Yet, for all their discipline and dark ambition, they suffer from the same flaw that doomed every would-be autocrat from Rome to Seoul: velocity without durability. Authoritarian projects depend on speed. They must overwhelm the public, seize institutions before resistance organizes, and legislate their own legitimacy in the same breath. But speed is also their curse. They can’t pause to govern because governing requires stability, transparency, and competence, three things their creed forbids.

South Korea just proved the point. In December 2024, President Yoon Suk-yeol tried his own lightning-round power grab, declaring martial law under the banner of “national security.” It was a self-coup in the classic mold—part paranoia, part theater, all hubris. But within twenty-four hours, the South Korean parliament nullified the order, the courts stood firm, and the press broadcast the farce to a furious public. By April, Yoon was impeached, indicted, and ultimately prosecuted for insurrection. A whole authoritarian fantasy collapsed under the weight of a functioning democracy. The institutions didn’t blink, and the citizens didn’t freeze. That’s what resistance looks like when it works.

It’s a reminder that democracies die fast when nobody fights back, but they don’t resurrect themselves out of habit. South Korea’s miracle hinged on working institutions, a parliament that convened, a court that ruled, a press that refused to be intimidated. We can’t pretend those conditions exist here anymore. Our Supreme Court now flirts openly with theocratic revisionism. The legislative branch can barely be bothered to show up for its paycheck, much less its oath. And the mainstream press, once the oxygen of democracy, is choking on its own profit margins, chasing ad impressions instead of accountability.

But institutions aren’t the only guardrails. Like Korea, the United States still has the people, the teachers, scientists, lawyers, union organizers, librarians, nurses, and bureaucrats who simply won’t back down. They are the last functioning branch of government: the moral one. When officials refuse illegal orders, when reporters publish leaked memos, when military leaders refuse illegal orders, when voters line up in the rain because cynicism hasn’t yet replaced citizenship, that’s resistance. It isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t trend, but it works.

Hungary offers the mirror image, the cautionary tale of what happens when the guardrails don’t hold. Viktor Orbán didn’t seize power in a single dramatic stroke; he hollowed it out slowly, one law at a time. He rewrote the constitution, gerrymandered the press, packed the courts, and declared the ruling party synonymous with the nation itself. His cronies bought the newspapers they didn’t already control, the oligarchs built media empires, and the public was lulled into thinking this was merely “reform.” By the time the Hungarians realized what had happened, it was no longer a democracy with corruption; it was corruption with a flag. That’s the model Vought and Miller are chasing: authoritarianism achieved not through tanks but through templates, not by breaking the law but by rewriting it in real time.

We don’t have all the same defenses South Korea used. What we have left is raw public will, sometimes disorganized, definitely exhausted, but still capable of catching fire. It’s the will of teachers who refuse to lie to students about history. Of civil servants who won’t falsify a report just to appease a demagogue. Of journalists who publish the truth even when their bosses would rather they didn’t. That’s the firewall now. The question isn’t whether Trump’s clerics of control can move swiftly; it’s whether the rest of us can remember what courage looks like before they rewrite the definition.

Russell Vought can polish his edicts, and Stephen Miller can rehearse his ghoulish monologues. They can build their little shadow-government in think-tank basements and dream of a Christian executive utopia where dissent is heresy. But every would-be despot forgets the same thing: resistance is contagious, and history has an excellent immune system.

And let’s not forget how the Nixon saga ended. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, the whole coterie of paranoid geniuses who thought they’d perfected the art of permanent power, wound up disbarred, disgraced, and in prison jumpsuits. They went from whispering in the Oval Office to writing memoirs no one wanted to read. Their downfall wasn’t inevitable; it was earned by a system that, for once, remembered how to defend itself. It took a Congress that showed up, a press that refused to be cowed, and prosecutors who still believed the law applied to everyone, even the President’s men. That’s the part Vought and Miller always skip when they rehearse the Nixon playbook: the credits roll with the henchmen in handcuffs.

The world is watching, and America still gets to choose its character in the next act. We can be the cautionary tale that followed Hungary into the swamp, or the headline that declared, “Democracy fought back, and won.” The script isn’t finished yet. Let’s show the world what we’re made of, pick up the pen, and write the ending ourselves.