Donald Trump signed an executive order that, essentially, would make truth a crime. He wants to use the Department of Justice to make truthtellers criminals.

He wants to govern the United States the way that Vladimir Putin rules over Russia, the way that Kim Jong Il uses internment in North Korea, the way that dictators from the last century, like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and You-Know-Who in Germany, sought to criminalize honest criticism or any opinion that didn’t please Dear Leader.

This should not just trouble you; it should make you sick to your stomach.

Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general and the Homeland Security secretary to investigate Chris Krebs, a former cyber security official who oversaw the 2020 election, and Miles Taylor, chief of staff at the department of Homeland Security during Trump’s term, who anonymously wrote an opinion article for The New York Times in 2018.

Krebs and Taylor are under fire for telling the truth

In that op-ed, Taylor described how he and others within the administration believed in much of Trump’s policies but tried to keep Trump from going off the rails.

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For example, he wrote, “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

Essentially, Trump wants to make a criminal of Krebs for telling the truth and make a criminal of Taylor for publicly expressing an honest assessment of Trump. One that, given Trump’s actions, seems 100% accurate.

Krebs declined to comment on Trump’s actions.

Taylor wrote on social media, “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path.”

He added: “Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

What is Trump’s end game with these investigations?

What is the end game of these ridiculous investigations? Stripping the men of their citizenship and shipping them off to prison in El Salvador?

Would Congress and the courts, who’ve done nothing to rein in Trump so far, allow such a thing to happen to American citizens?

Trump is taking the first baby step on the bloody path worn by his dictator pal in Russia.

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Opposition voices don’t last long over there. Google the name of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Murdered. Consider what happened to dissident Alexei Navalny in prison.

Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Memorial, a Russian human rights group, said, “Russia is no longer an authoritarian state -– it is a totalitarian state. All these repressions are aimed at suppressing any independent expression about Russia’s political system, about the actions of the authorities, or any independent civil activists.”

That doesn’t happen all at once.

A dictatorial regime like that begins, for example, when a leader uses the justice system to investigate a man for telling the truth and makes a criminal of another for publicly expressing an honest assessment of that leader.

Reach Montini at [email protected].

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