In an emotionally jarring and disorienting week where you might wake up to a televised, tear-gas haze of cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd of college students in the blackness of a Southern California night, the scariest thing came wrapped in the cover of a magazine.

Donald Trump, locked in as GOP presidential nominee even as he spends his days in a Manhattan courtroom in the first of his four felony trials, spoke at length to a reporter for Time magazine for a piece headlined, “How Far Trump Would Go” — aimed at addressing the growing talk that a second presidential term would look more like a dictatorship.

Trump’s way of addressing the dictatorship controversy was essentially to confirm it.

A 47th presidency under Trump, he told Time’s Eric Cortellessa, would start with dead-of-night raids to round up as many as 12 million undocumented immigrants currently scattered across the United States, some of whom might be placed for a time in mass-detention camps. He only encouraged red states empowered by the Trump-flavored Supreme Court to step up their abortion bans and punishment for women who seek them. Trump’s Washington would be solely populated by loyalist zealots in the remaining government jobs that haven’t been eliminated. Justice in the wannabe president’s vision for 2025 and beyond would mean prosecution for his political enemies and freedom for the thugs who attacked police officers and tried to stop the certification of election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

Pragmatism means a painful moral choice of ignoring Biden’s near-fatal blind spot on sending bombs to Israel by clinging to the good — such as his support for reproductive rights — and voting for him in November as the only real option for stopping Trump.

Of course, Trump tried to have it both ways by claiming that his remark to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator, “on day one” of his presidency was only a joke — just like in 2016 when he asked “Russia...if you’re listening” to find Hillary Clinton’s emails (which wasn’t really a joke). But the ex-president also explained that he can get away with such comments about an American dictatorship because, “I think a lot of people like it.”

Indeed. The never-ending barrage of polls continues to show Trump in a virtual dead heat with President Joe Biden, perhaps leading slightly in the key swing states, despite the almost daily embarrassment of his Manhattan trial pegged to paying hush money to an adult-film star, as well as growing awareness of his open desire for autocracy. Trump’s shocking oratory of retribution, coupled with his recent promise in Wisconsin not to accept the 2024 election result there if he loses, prompted Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein to declare: “This is how fascists campaign.”

And yet, two of the most tumultuous weeks in American society in over a half-century have only brought the nightmare of a second, more authoritarian Trump presidency closer to becoming a reality. The violent crackdown on campus protests against Israel’s U.S.-backed campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000, many of them women or children, has dominated TV screens with scenes of domestic strife not seen since the 1960s and early 1970s. In the most shocking clash, at the University of California-Los Angeles, a generation raised on active-shooter drills looked up to see its own government firing rubber bullets at its pro-Palestinian encampment.

In the alternate world of a Trump victory, the necessity for continued protest, for accountability journalism, and for future fair elections will be crushed.

The police-state repression of college protests with more than 2,000 arrests sharply divided Americans yet also brought us together in one sense: No one is happy. Many Americans — myself included — are shocked and dismayed by images such as New Hampshire state troopers in riot gear storming a small, peaceful protest at Dartmouth College, tossing a 65-year-old Jewish studies professor to the ground, and arresting her.

But that sense of alarm over the threats to free speech has little support from either Republican or Democratic leaders appealing to a not-particularly-silent-majority — some who say the police response was needed because of antisemitism, real or perceived, in the encampments, and some who simply prefer law and order and disdain protests. This was the group that Biden appealed to Thursday when he told the nation that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

Seen through the lens of politics, Biden’s statement felt like an effort to avoid another 1968, when that year’s Republican, Richard Nixon, ran ads showing campus chaos and promising “law and order,” and narrowly won. The 1968 analogies seem apt, especially as Biden’s Democrats prepare again to gather for a Chicago convention and large-scale protests loom. But I’m thinking an even better comparison is the year 451, when another morally decadent empire stood on the brink of collapse.

Much like the end of ancient Rome’s long run as the world’s lone superpower, the fight to save American democracy is foundering not because of outside agitators but from the decay of corrupt institutions, not just on Capitol Hill. Universities, the news media, and police departments that are supposed to protect a civil society are failing miserably. An utterly broken nation that’s currently firing tear gas and pepper spray to shut up its own children is easy prey for the various Vandals and Visigoths poised on the outskirts to sack the American empire, much like Attila in 451, and perhaps to eventually topple it. Trump is merely the barbarian at the gate.

In 2024, the chickens that were hatched in a response to the late 1960s upheaval — privatized universities that would be run more like........

© Common Dreams