Ultimatums and Autocrats

As Trump bluffs through deadlines on Putin, Palestine, and the economy, Brazil shows the world what accountability really looks like.

Good morning! September has arrived, and Donald Trump is already staggering under the weight of his own deadlines. The month reads like a cursed calendar: a government shutdown looming at the end of September thanks to his illegal foreign aid clawbacks, a Supreme Court battle over tariffs that could blow up his entire economic agenda, the expiration of his emergency control over D.C.’s police force on the 10th, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. headed to the Senate with a pseudoscientific “health manifesto” after presiding over a purge at the CDC. Congress is back in session too, and they aren’t just preparing to fight over spending; they’re sharpening knives over the Epstein files. Trump promised September would be “historic.” He might get his wish, just not the kind of history he wanted.

Today marks the expiration of Trump’s self-imposed two-week deadline for Vladimir Putin to “show progress” toward peace in Ukraine. Kyiv Post reports the White House has scheduled a 2PM announcement, billed as a pivotal moment. Zelensky has already pre-empted it, bluntly noting that Russia has shown no readiness for genuine talks, only “investing in further war.” Putin just clasped hands with Xi and Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation summit, not exactly the posture of a man trembling under Trump’s ultimatum.

And yet, when the time comes to wield the only real leverage available, sanctions, Trump balks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News yesterday, condemning Russia’s “despicable” bombing campaign against Ukrainian civilians and insisting “everything is on the table.” But everything has been “on the table” for months. Trump hasn’t actually implemented new sanctions, preferring instead to wave deadlines around like magic wands while Putin shrugs and doubles down. Even the language is hollow: I’ll know in two weeks what I’m going to do, Trump said. Well, the two weeks are up. The world is still waiting.

The White House is engaged in a bizarre campaign of “proof of life.” Circulated photos show Trump with mottled hands, swollen ankles, and the pallor of a man embalmed before burial. Golf shots from August are repackaged as fresh weekend outings. Football game photos from last year are pushed out as if they just happened. It’s Weekend at Donny’s, except the corpse keeps reposting Woody Allen endorsements on Truth Social. Yes, Woody Allen, Epstein’s dinner companion and writer of letters about young girls at “Castle Dracula.” This passes for presidential distraction strategy in 2025.

While Trump stages zombie photo ops, his administration has escalated its war on Palestinians. The State Department quietly ordered consular officers to refuse nearly all visa applications from Palestinian passport holder students, academics, medical patients, families. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further, revoking the visas of dozens of Palestinian officials including Mahmoud Abbas just weeks before the UN General Assembly, where U.S. allies like France, Canada, and the UK plan to recognize Palestinian statehood. The cruelty is deliberate. The symbolism is grotesque. Washington is slamming the door on Palestinians while Gaza starves.

Even America’s billionaires are starting to whisper what the rest of us have been shouting. Ray Dalio, the hedge fund titan, told the Financial Times that Trump’s America looks less like a democracy and more like the 1930s descent into authoritarianism. The wealth gaps, the debt spiral, the collapse of trust? “Analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930–40 period,” Dalio warned. He predicts a “debt-induced heart attack” for the U.S. economy within three years, and blasted Trump’s interference with the Federal Reserve as a threat to “the monetary order as we know it.” Perhaps most damning was his confession that business leaders are too scared of retaliation to criticize Trump. America’s wealthiest know the country is drifting into autocracy, and they’re too cowardly to stop it.

If you want a glimpse of what accountability might look like, don’t look to Washington. Look to Brazil. Today Jair Bolsonaro, Trump’s closest ally in Latin America and his spiritual twin, goes on trial before Brazil’s Supreme Court for attempting to use the military to overturn his election loss. The evidence includes decrees he personally edited authorizing the “correction” of the vote, and even an aborted assassination plan against Lula, his vice president, and a Supreme Court justice. Bolsonaro is under house arrest with an ankle bracelet. Generals are in the dock beside him. Trump, naturally, has been screaming “witch hunt,” sanctioning Brazilian officials and slapping tariffs on their goods, but Brazil isn’t flinching. For a country with fourteen coup attempts in its history and a long tradition of sweeping the generals’ crimes under the rug, this is revolutionary. Chile and Argentina tried their juntas decades ago. Brazil is finally catching up. And in the cruelest irony of all, America, the country that fancies itself democracy’s beacon, can’t even put its own coup plotter on trial.

Trump wanted September to be his month of triumph. Instead, it’s shaping up to be his month of reckoning. He is mocked abroad, protested at home, medically decomposing before our eyes, hiding behind recycled golf photos, and cornered by a calendar of crises that grow more dangerous by the day. The only question is whether America will follow Brazil’s example and confront its would-be dictator, or continue to let him rot in plain sight.