The timeless, impactful quote “democracy dies in darkness” was an oft-repeated line after Donald Trump won his first term, but it’s not circulating nearly as much these days.
Maybe its the sheer exhaustion of facing another four years of Trumpian policies, near-miss global incidents, and escalating violence against othered groups. Or maybe it’s because a new quote has become much more fitting for our current era: “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”
Democracy is no longer dying in darkness. It’s dying in broad daylight, in front of millions of eyes, as figures like Elon Musk and Trump loyalist Steve Bannon light our country aflame to keep their cold hearts warm.
Trump is at the root of our national turn toward fascism, but it’s the bold actions of figures like Musk and Bannon that underlines how successful that push really is. While most of us sit to the side, biting our nails but assuring our neighbors that our country is stronger than this, some of the nation’s most influential figures are embracing authoritarianism without a second thought.
Musk’s mid-January Nazi salute — no, it was not an “awkward gesture,” — and, in particular, the national response to it, clearly emboldened more of Trump’s allies. Decade-old corpse Steve Bannon is sure feeling daring as he stands up in front of the world at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference and salutes fascism with a lame flick of the wrist.
That’s right, folks, a second Trump ally just threw out a freaking Sieg Heil in front of cameras and thousands of in-person attendees. Bannon feels so cozy in the America Trump is creating that he’s not afraid to let his true colors shine through, and boy are those colors anything but red white and blue.
Bannon’s salute didn’t contain an ounce of the enthusiasm packed into Musk’s, but there’s still no denying exactly what that was intended as. He may not be quite as brave as Trump’s billionaire boss, but Bannon is signaling to the MAGA base — and, truly, to the world — that fascism is on the rise in America, and it’s being welcomed with open arms by a certain portion of the populace.
The salute came near the tail-end of Bannon’s speech, in which he called for Trump to make an illegal and unconstitutional bid for a third term. After encouraging the MAGA masses gathered to “fight,” and insisting that the “hardest, toughest days are ahead,” Bannon threw a lazy, half-hearted salute that none-the-less spoke volumes, greeted as it was by scattered — but consistent — applause.
So this is what America has come to. We clap for Nazis now. We applaud anti-American values at a so-called “America first” conference, and we stomp on the liberties this nation was supposedly built on.
That’s the America Trump is forging, bit by bit, in his second term. All those promises he made on the campaign trail won’t matter soon, because there will be no one left to hold him accountable. Because make no mistake, Trump doesn’t see himself as president, he sees himself as king — and when America has a king, it ceases to be America.
