"You're Fired." Trump Can Now Say That to the People Who Protect You From Fraud, Nuclear Risk, and Unsafe Products.

How step 1 of the Strongman's Playbook made today's ruling possible, what I wrote yesterday, and what Morning Compass reported this morning.

The playbook, two steps at once

There is a pattern to how authoritarian leaders consolidate power. It is not chaos. It is not improvisation. It is a set of techniques, applied in a recognizable sequence, that historians have documented across different countries and different eras. The Strongman’s Playbook is a series examining those techniques one by on…