Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Friday, May 29, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 10amET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. If you’d like to join these weekly informative sessions, you can sign up as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paid with the link below.
This summer’s guests include former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi, former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Barb McQuade, former CBP official Jenn Budd, North Korea specialist Jung Pak, and anti-authoritarian social movement expert Scot Nakagawa.
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On Friday I had a great conversation with Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News. You will know Adam as a recurring guest on Lucid and incisive legal commentator. Backfire against the Trump administration’s many corrupt and lawless actions was the guiding theme.
We started with his analysis of the then-breaking news about the dismissal of criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which followed the April 9-0 Supreme Court decision that the Trump administration must work for his return home from the Bukele CECOT gulag in El Salvador.
Then we discussed the (wink-wink) $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate Trump allies, including the thugs who assaulted the Capitol on behalf of Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. You can read Adam’s analysis of the 1776 symbolism.
The critical point for me, as a historian of coups and Fascist revolutions, is that the payouts are not just to reward past actions. They should instead be seen as retainers for the foot soldiers and elite backers of future violent actions. The pardons also had this double function: tying people to Trump by making their legal problems go away, and freeing them up to serve the movement and the leader.
Such retainers are common in organized crime and autocratic corruption around the world. I agree with former national security operative Steven Cash’s assessment that the “settlement” “resembles the kind of state-funded loyalty network or private militia support system often seen under rising authoritarian regimes overseas.”
The idea of MAGA as a revolution that continues the energies of 1776 was integral to the Stop the Steal movement that fueled January 6 and served as a recruiting and radicalization ground for those who assaulted the Capitol and wanted to harm Republicans and Democrats alike. 1776 rhetoric and images run through in the January 6 documentary Fight Like Hell (Jon Long, 2024) which follows the flow from Stop the Steal to the tragic events of that day (I consulted on the film).
The need for a revolution to “return government to the people” was also a theme of Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America, with a foreward by J.D. Vance. Roberts is President of the Heritage Foundation, sponsor of Project 2025 and a nerve center and shadow government preparing for American autocracy during the Biden years.
As Roberts famously said in 2024 on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, referring to this revolution in the making, this second American Revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
While the U.S. armed forces is to all appearances doing Trump’s bidding, and ICE is developing in the direction of being a state-funded revolutionary guards operation, there is nothing like having a private militia that is loyal to you personally. With this slush fund, Trump signals to violent extremists that their service to him has not ended.
“America could evolve into a national brand of electoral autocracy in which election subversion is backed up by grassroots violence,” I wrote in the fall of 2021. The 2026 midterms could present an opportunity for this militia in the making to serve the leader again.
