Trump Goes Mask Off With Chilling Comment About Dictators

Donald Trump claimed the American people are asking for a dictator—and he seems more than happy to give them what they want.

While signing executive orders in the Oval Office Monday morning, Trump whined that people were up in arms after he suggested that he would deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, following his federal takeover of Washington D.C.

Not everyone in Chicago was unhappy with this plan, he claimed.

“A lot of people are saying ‘maybe we’d like a dictator,’” Trump said.

The president then attempted to course-correct. “I don’t like a dictator, I’m not a dictator,” he quickly said. “I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.”

It’s not clear that there is any meaningful difference between a dictator, and a leader pleasing the people who are asking for one. What is apparent, however, is that Trump’s plan to move federal forces to other American cities is so unpopular that he’s concocting consent for tyranny as a means to justify it.

Crucially, Trump gets closer to becoming a dictator everyday. On Monday, he signed an executive order which would criminalize flag burning, an act of political expression protected by the First Amendment, claiming that it incited riots.

If Trump truly believed that inciting a riot earns you a year in prison, then the president himself is well overdue for a stint behind bars.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general to pursue criminal charges against anyone caught burning the American flag, blatantly violating basic freedom of speech and expression laws.

“Flag burning. All over the country they’re burning flags. All over the world they burn the American flag,” Trump said at his press conference, where he signed another executive order revoking cashless bail in Washington, D.C. “What happens when you burn a flag is, the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people they go crazy…. When you burn the American flag it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before.”

“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing. You get one year in jail,” Trump said. “You don’t get 10 years, you don’t get one month, you get one year in jail. And it goes on your record. And you will see flag burning stopping immediately.”

The president claimed the Department of Justice would “investigate instances of flag burning” in situations where “prosecution wouldn’t fall afoul to the First Amendment.” But the order does exactly that. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that flag burning is a protected right under the Constitution.

Trump also made unsubstantiated claims that flag burning is a rampant practice in America right now (it is not) and that anyone doing it is being paid by the “radical left.”

It’s extremely unclear how exactly the administration can throw American citizens in jail for burning a piece of fabric without “running afoul” of the Constitution. This is a move that would be relentlessly vilified if someone like Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did it. Instead, Trump is using this despotic tactic to crack down on protesters and further push his dark MAGA agenda.

The Covid vaccine could be off the shelves in a matter of months.

Despite the coronavirus shot saving millions of lives during the pandemic, the Trump administration is planning to nix nationwide access to the vaccine “within months,” a close associate of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed, contrary to scientific evidence, that the vaccine has more ramifications than the disease it is intended to treat, told the Daily Beast that people around Kennedy “cannot understand” why the vaccine is still on the market. Malhotra noted that the administration intends to remove it from shelves even if it sows a “fear of chaos,” or sparks major legal consequences.

“It could [happen] in a number of stages, including learning more about the data,” said Malhotra. “But given the increased talk of vaccine injuries in the past few weeks among the administration, it could also come with one clean decision.”

The skepticism stems from a 2022 paper, published in the science journal Vaccine, that examined “serious adverse events” that occurred during clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The widely dismissed study found that individuals who had gotten the jab were at a 16 percent higher risk of “excess serious adverse events” than those who did not.

Critics of the paper claimed that the researchers underestimated the benefits of the vaccine, overstated methodological risks, selectively chose data, and ignored the broader public health impacts of the vaccine.

It wouldn’t be the first vaccine that Kennedy has canceled on the grounds of his unscientific doubts. Earlier this month, the health secretary said his agency would divest $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since—according to Kennedy—the vaccines “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

Instead, Kennedy said that his agency would shift the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate”—which apparently does not include the latest and greatest medical advances.

The problem with Kennedy’s approach is twofold: It will result in a sacrifice of time and money. Traditional vaccines injected a weakened or dead version of a virus, triggering the body’s immune response and the development of antibodies. Researching and developing these vaccines is a “lengthy and costly” process that becomes further complicated when researchers have to respond to mutations in the virus, according to Penn Medicine.

mRNA technology, meanwhile, employs a synthetic genetic code that instructs the body to produce proteins akin to the viral protein, training the body’s immune system without ever actually exposing the individual to the disease. Once the response is initiated, the synthetic genetic sequence breaks down in the body, according to Medline Plus. The result is a “plug-and-play” vaccine technology that offers rapid development times at a lower cost to traditional vaccines.

In the years since mRNA technology debuted on the U.S. market, biomedical researchers have also framed mRNA as a potential cancer treatment. But its sudden emergence in the U.S. prompted suspicion from anti-vaxxers, including Kennedy.

After Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

Vice President JD Vance on Sunday botched World War II history in an attempt to support the Trump administration’s stance on Russia-Ukraine.

On Meet the Press, NBC host Kristen Welker asked Vance whether the administration’s plan to allow Russia to keep illegally seized Ukrainian territory as part of a negotiated resolution to end the war would embolden other countries to invade smaller powers.

Vance replied that territorial concessions would ultimately be up to Ukraine, before rewriting history to suit his narrative.

“Kristen, this is how wars ultimately get settled,” he said confidently. “If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”

World War II ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in Berlin as Soviet forces advanced on the city, and the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan.

Vance’s historical illiteracy was roundly mocked online, with some social media users simply sharing images of historic newspaper headlines from V-E Day and V-J Day.

“Imagine using as your example the biggest example of the exact opposite in the modern era,” wrote English journalist David Aaronovitch on X.

“Just wondering, who negotiated Hitler’s suicide,” tweeted Polish journalist Marek Magierowski.

On Bluesky, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic refuted Vance with iconic images of the execution of Benito Mussolini, the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, and the Soviet victory in the Battle of Berlin.

“I assume he means this,” Nichols wrote. “Some negotiations are harder edged than others,” joked Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo in response.

“This guy is the vice president, a venture capitalist, and a Yale Law grad,” journalist Mehdi Hasan said of Vance on X. “And completely ignorant about the basics of World War 2. Sheesh.”

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order ending cashless bail for detained suspects in Washington, D.C. This is yet another aggressive move in his federal takeover of the nation’s capital.

Cashless bail allows people who are suspected of a crime to avoid spending time in a cage before they’ve actually been convicted just because they can’t meet bail. In states with cash bail, having money determines whether or not you’ll be behind bars.

Trump and U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro have framed a cashless bail system, which D.C. has had since 1992, as a “disaster” that leaves hardened criminals running rampant.

“Every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster,” Trump said at his press conference earlier this month announcing the federal takeover of D.C. “That’s what started the problem in New York, and they don’t change it. They don’t want to change it. That’s what started it in Chicago … We’re gonna end that in Chicago. We’re gonna change the statute.”

Pirro echoed Trump’s sentiments.

“I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the [heck] out of you or anyone else,” she said at the same press conference. “We need to go after the D.C. Council and their absurd laws. We need to get rid of this concept of ‘no cash bail … We need to recognize that the people who matter are the law-abiding citizens.”

The numbers don’t support this framing. There is no significant documented increase in violent crimes among arrestees out on cashless bail.

Even still, Trump’s order threatens to revoke funding from D.C. city projects if it doesn’t eliminate cashless bail, and will “work to ensure” that those detained are kept in federal custody instead of local. Trump eventually wants to force this order upon the entire country, banning cashless bail in every single state. D.C. is just the testing ground for this show of federal force.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has yet to comment on the order.