The Pre-Crime Presidency

Trump’s apocalyptic Iran rhetoric, MAGA’s authoritarian machinery, and the growing sense at home and abroad that America is being governed by a dangerous man in obvious decline.

Good morning! Except for the people trying to convert the federal government into a political pre-crime machine while simultaneously threatening to vaporize a civilization on social media and calling it the art of the deal.

We begin with paperwork, the sort of paperwork that makes you put down your coffee and say, “Ah, yes, the secret police budget appendix.” Ken Klippenstein published deeply alarming reporting on what looks like the Trump administration’s latest attempt to turn the federal government into a political pre-crime machine. Buried in the FY 2027 FBI budget request is a newly created FBI-led “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center,” established under Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 and staffed by personnel from 10 federal agencies. Its job, according to the budget language, is to integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to “proactively identify” domestic terror networks and help prosecute them. Because this administration never met a dystopian noun phrase it didn’t want to staple to a budget document, the ideological markers associated with this so-called threat include “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” support for overthrowing the U.S. government, “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and hostility toward “traditional American views” on family, religion, and morality.

A neat trick, really: take broad political disagreement, dump it into a counterterrorism blender, and call the puree “national security.” The real danger here is that the administration is not confining its focus to actual criminal conduct. It is smearing dissent, cultural disagreement, and ideological opposition with the language of terrorism, which creates a ready-made excuse for surveillance, infiltration, financial scrutiny, watchlisting, and intimidation. The budget language also fixates on social media, smaller websites, and encrypted chat apps as pathways to radicalization, because apparently using the internet while not being a MAGA crank is now something the FBI would like to put on a flowchart.

Klippenstein places this in a broader pattern under FBI Director Kash Patel, including a dramatic increase in domestic terrorism investigations, the expansion of federal threat-screening infrastructure, and a growing domestic watchlisting apparatus. He also notes that administration figures have already shown a habit of hyping shaky or outright bogus domestic terror narratives, only to quietly backpedal later after the damage is done. Which is why this budget language is so sinister: it suggests that mindset is no longer just rhetorical froth from the usual authoritarian loudmouths, but is being formalized into the federal bureaucracy itself. This does not mean dissent has literally been outlawed on paper. It does mean anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pro-migrant, feminist, anti-authoritarian, or simply non-MAGA views can be folded into a framework designed to treat belief as suspicion and suspicion as justification for state scrutiny. Methinks I might fall into one or more of these categories.

Once you have set the domestic mood with that pleasant little scene from the early chapters of every regime that later insists it was merely trying to keep people safe, you are fully prepared for the foreign policy portion of the program, where Donald Trump has apparently decided that the appropriate tone for discussing war is somewhere between doomsday cult leader, casino pit boss, and a man live-blogging Armageddon from the upholstery section of a Florida furniture outlet.

Trump posted one of the most deranged and openly authoritarian statements of the conflict so far: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” It was the language of apocalypse delivered like reality TV promotion: mass death as spectacle, regime change as a punchline, and the destruction of an entire society treated as a possible prelude to something “revolutionarily wonderful.” This is a man fantasizing about annihilation while pretending to bless the people who would suffer under it.

The appalling part is not only the threat itself, but the theatricality of it. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is apocalyptic spectacle. It turns the possible destruction of millions of lives into a dramatic reveal, then pivots almost immediately to “Complete and Total Regime Change,” as though civilizational annihilation and political opportunity are just two exciting features in the same premium war package. Then comes the grotesque little shrug: “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” It is the kind of phrase you reach for only if you have entirely detached the human consequences from the words leaving your mouth. Even the closing line, “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”, makes it darker, not softer, a fake note of sympathy tacked onto a vision of obliteration. It is blood-soaked grandiosity, genocidal-adjacent rhetoric delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who thinks devastation is just another marketing campaign.

Trump is now being likened to Vladimir Putin because the comparison is not just about temperament but about method. Once Trump starts threatening the same kind of attacks on civilian infrastructure that the West has denounced as barbaric in Ukraine, he stops looking like a democratic leader using rough language and starts looking like yet another strongman who views civilian suffering as leverage. It is a moral indictment.

The view from abroad is becoming increasingly blunt in ways that should terrify Americans who still retain some sentimental attachment to the idea that the presidency ought not resemble the final act of a collapsing petrostate. Foreign commentators are no longer merely describing Trump as vulgar, reckless, or inflammatory. They are openly asking whether he has “lost whatever was left of his mind” and, even more damningly, “what would Donald Trump have to do for his own cabinet to find a spine and remove him from office?” That is where we are now. Can the United States jerry-rig a functioning mechanism for stopping a visibly deranged chief executive before he drags the country and a good chunk of the world into catastrophe or kakistrophe?

What makes that outside perspective especially devastating is the collapse of euphemism. The commentary is not tiptoeing around “concerns” or “questions about tone.” It is asking outright whether “this president of the United States is suitable or appropriate to remain in the office,” whether “the president of the United States is senile,” and whether there is now “no mechanism left either from the Congress or from his own cabinet to remove him, no matter how mad or deranged or bad he becomes.” The rest of the world is increasingly talking about Trump the way people talk about the leader of a failing state with nuclear weapons: a man issuing contradictory threats, rambling through apocalyptic fantasies, relishing cruelty, and surrounded by flatterers too spineless or too opportunistic to intervene. We spent years hearing that it was impolite, overwrought, or hysterical to describe Trump in these terms. Well, the overseas commentary has now arrived at the same destination, only with fewer inhibitions and better accents.

Authoritarianism eventually sends a bill; we then arrive at the oil market, where Trump’s war brinkmanship is now hitting people where they actually live: at the pump, on utility bills, and across the broader cost of living. Oil prices climbed again, with Brent topping $111 a barrel and U.S. crude hitting roughly $116, while the national average for gas rose to $4.14 a gallon. Diesel, naturally, is climbing even faster, because there is apparently no suffering too mundane to be made worse by the vanity projects of men who imagine themselves carved into mountains. The closer Trump drags the region toward a wider catastrophe, especially around the Strait of Hormuz, which carries about a fifth of the world’s oil supply, the more this stops being abstract geopolitical chest-thumping and starts becoming another inflation bomb dropped directly onto ordinary people.

This is no longer just a military story. It is a cost-of-living story, a supply-chain story, an energy story, a “why does filling my tank now require a minor act of spiritual surrender” story. The economic fallout is already rippling outward, and markets are reacting not just to current damage but to the possibility of wider disruption if Trump’s threats around Hormuz harden into action. Again, the strongman fantasy comes with a receipt, and working people are the ones expected to cover it.

Then there is the broader cost of the war itself, which the Financial Times reports is already staggering. Analysts estimate that Trump’s war on Iran is burning through roughly half a billion dollars a day, with total costs ranging from $22.3 billion to $31 billion over five weeks. Even worse, some of the destroyed or damaged equipment includes sophisticated radar systems and other assets that are scarce, expensive, and not easily replaced, precisely the sort of materiel the United States would want available in any serious future confrontation with China. So this is not just another forever-war cash bonfire. It is also a strategic self-own of impressive proportions, eating through money, equipment, and readiness all at once.

Iran has targeted radar and communications systems at U.S. bases as well as refueling aircraft and other critical assets. Among the systems reportedly damaged are AN/TPY-2 missile-defense radars that cost hundreds of millions of dollars each and can take years to replace. Trump is not merely torching lives and treasure in the usual imperial style, he is also degrading the very military posture his own people never stop screaming is needed for the next great-power showdown. It takes a special kind of genius to set fire to both the present and the contingency plan.

The international authoritarian fan club continues its awkward networking brunch. JD Vance is in Hungary, schmoozing Viktor Orbán and backing his re-election bid, because of course he is. Orbán is not just another European leader to this White House; he is a MAGA prototype, a nationalist strongman who has spent years gutting liberal institutions, attacking independent media, demonizing minorities, and wrapping it all in sermons about civilization and family values. Vance is not there for the paprika. He is there because Trumpworld sees Orbán as both ideological soulmate and proof of concept. The message is simple: here is what they admire, here is what they want, and here is the sort of regime they are prepared to openly support.

Orbán is facing what looks like his toughest election in years, which makes Vance’s visit look less like routine diplomacy and more like an election-season rescue mission for one of the international right’s favorite mascots. It is another reminder that MAGA is not an isolated American pathology. It is part of a broader authoritarian ecosystem, a cross-border exchange program in which the participants share messaging, grievances, enemies lists, and occasionally the same dead-eyed conviction that democracy is acceptable only when it ratifies their permanent rule.

Back at home, the law-enforcement purge is also getting less subtle. Fired or forced out FBI agents have now filed a major class action lawsuit in federal court in Washington, alleging they were purged for overtly political reasons by the Trump regime. According to the complaint as described in the transcript, agents were targeted for working January 6 cases, being tied to Jack Smith’s investigations, refusing unlawful directives, making protected disclosures, and even being perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump, Patel, or Bondi. Some employees were reportedly singled out for being women, non-white, or displaying LGBTQ pride symbols. That the people who spent years accusing everyone else of politicizing federal law enforcement have apparently settled on the elegant policy of politicizing federal law enforcement beyond all parody.

What makes that lawsuit especially explosive is the quote attributed to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at CPAC, where he allegedly bragged that there was not “a single man or woman with a gun” left in the FBI who had anything to do with the prosecution of Donald Trump. If that quote holds up, it is the sort of evidence plaintiffs usually fantasize about but almost never get: the named official standing at a podium, spiking the football, and more or less confessing the animating purpose of the purge. It looks exactly like what it is, a loyalty cleansing inside federal law enforcement carried out in retaliation against people for doing their jobs.

And that really is the connective tissue this morning. The same mindset that wants to label dissent as terrorism also wants to purge investigators for pursuing politically disfavored cases. The same movement that idolizes Orbán is perfectly comfortable with war rhetoric that sounds increasingly Putin-esque. The same administration that cannot stop screaming about national strength is cheerfully driving up oil prices, burning through military hardware, and making the rest of the world ask, with diminishing tact, whether the President of the United States has lost his mind.

So here is the call to action, because hand-wringing is not a plan. Flood the White House with calls demanding the immediate release of Trump’s full medical records so the public can know whether he is actually fit to hold the most dangerous job on earth. If this man is going to speak in apocalyptic fantasies, threaten mass civilian suffering, and lurch from incoherence to bloodlust in public, then the country has every right to demand proof of his physical and cognitive fitness. No more vague doctor notes, no more propaganda physicals, no more ridiculous North Korea-style reassurances about boundless vigor. Release the records.

Do not stop there. It will only take a handful of Republican senators and representatives rediscovering that they are supposed to serve the country rather than the ego of one deteriorating authoritarian to force a real crisis of accountability. Flood their offices too. Call the House. Call the Senate. Call the Republicans who still occasionally pretend to have doubts, and the ones who know better but keep hiding under the furniture. Tell them to stop enabling this madness, stop behaving like extras in a collapsing strongman pageant, and start acting like officials with a constitutional duty to the public.