The Don's Death Decree: How Dissent Became a Capital Crime in Trump's America
It arrived not as a law passed by a legislature or a judgment handed down by a court, but as a decree from on high, blasted out across the digital ether from the strange, paranoid kingdom of Truth Social. On November 20, 2025, Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States, appeared to call for a sentence to death against six of his fellow citizens. Their crime? They were Democratic lawmakers, military veterans all, who had dared to remind U.S. service members of a simple, foundational truth: their oath is to the Constitution, not to a man, and that oath requires them to refuse illegal orders (PolitiCo, 2025).
For this, Trump declared their actions “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He then, in an act of random terror, reposted a supporter’s frothing demand to “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!” (PolitiCo, 2025).
This was a ritual of psychic violence, a piece of political theatre designed to terrorise and to control. In those few, stark words, the mask of presidential decorum did not just slip; it was torn off, thrown to the ground, and stomped into the dust. What was revealed underneath was the snarling, undisguised face of the Mafia boss, the Don, for whom there is only one currency - loyalty - and only one punishment for its absence: elimination. This is the logic of the protection racket, not the republic. In the America that Trump is actively building, dissent is not a democratic right; it is a capital crime. And this decree, coming just months after the political assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and the killing of a right-wing activist in Utah, is a terrifyingly clear signal that the state itself is being weaponised to enforce that brutal logic.
The Architect and His Holy War
Behind every throne, there is a brain, and in this iteration of the American experiment, that brain belongs to Stephen Miller. As we have explored previously in this series, Miller is the true architect of American fascism, the quiet, bloodless bureaucrat who translates the fever dreams of the authoritarian right into the cold, hard machinery of state-sponsored oppression (L&A, 2025a). He is the man who builds the cages, drafts the executive orders, and whispers the poison into the ear of power.
Following the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk in September 2025, it was Miller who stepped forward to declare a holy war. He did not call for calm or for justice. He called for vengeance. He announced the existence of “a vast domestic terror movement” of left-wing organisations, a shadowy conspiracy that, he claimed, was “well organized and funded” and “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general” (NBC News, 2025). With the chilling fervour of a modern-day inquisitor, he vowed, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks” (NBC News, 2025).
This is the classic authoritarian two-step: invent a monstrous internal enemy and then grant yourself unlimited power to destroy it. Miller’s rhetoric, dutifully echoed by Vice President JD Vance, who blamed liberals for the political climate and encouraged his followers to get those who celebrated Kirk’s death fired from their jobs, was not an analysis. It was a blueprint. It created the narrative framework for a brutal crackdown on any and all forms of dissent. The “Charlie Kirk purge,” as it became known, was the immediate and inevitable result. As Reuters documented in a chilling investigation, over 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or placed under investigation not for committing violence, but for the thought-crime of expressing the wrong opinion online about Kirk’s death (Reuters, 2025). A school librarian in Ohio, a 25-year veteran, was fired for a single Facebook post that, while condemning the killing, questioned Kirk’s martyrdom. Her personal information was spread across right-wing networks, and she was hounded from her job by a wave of manufactured outrage. The message, enforced by a marriage of state power and corporate complicity, was brutally simple: any deviation from the approved narrative will be punished.
Subscribe to Notes From Plague Island and join our growing community of readers and thinkers.
The Reality Protection Racket
The entire narrative of a rising tide of left-wing violence is a deliberate and cynical falsehood. It is a masterclass in the playbook of Roy Cohn, Trump’s ghoulish mentor, whose core principle was to always accuse your opponents of that which you are most guilty (L&A, 2025b). It is the Don, torching a rival’s warehouse and then demanding protection money from the shopkeeper next door. The reality of political violence in the U.S. paints a starkly different picture. For years, the most “lethal and persistent” domestic terrorist threat has come not from the left, but from the far-right (NPR, 2025). This is not a matter of opinion, but of data, compiled by the very law enforcement agencies Miller now commands.
The assassination of Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June 2025 was a clear act of political terrorism from the right. The attacker, who also targeted another Democratic politician, was steeped in the paranoid, anti-government rhetoric that has become the lingua franca of the MAGA movement (BBC News, 2025a). The brutal, near-fatal hammer attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in 2022 was carried out by a man consumed by right-wing conspiracy theories (BBC News, 2025b). These are not isolated incidents; they are the bloody fruits of a political movement that has systematically dehumanised its opponents and normalised the idea of violence as a legitimate political tool.
A controversial study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which claimed a statistical rise in left-wing terrorism in the first half of 2025, has been seized upon by the administration as proof of their narrative. But the study itself is a house of cards. It has been widely criticised by counter-terrorism experts for its laughably small sample size and highly subjective methodology (NPR, 2025). The study’s own author, Daniel Byman, admitted as much, noting that the supposed “increase” in left-wing violence (a grand total of five incidents) was still less than half the historical rate of right-wing violence, and that the most striking finding was, in fact, the decline in right-wing attacks (NPR, 2025).
And here we arrive at the truly sinister core of the matter. Why has right-wing violence apparently declined? Byman offers a chilling hypothesis: the Trump administration has “operationalized policy objectives, such as increased immigration enforcement, that previously animated violence on the right” (NPR, 2025). The violence has not disappeared. It has been nationalised. It has been absorbed into the state itself. The vigilante with the AR-15 has been given a badge, a budget, and the full backing of the federal government. Why freelance when you can get paid to do the same work on behalf of the Don?
The Banality of Complicity
This brings us back to Trump’s death threat against the six Democratic lawmakers. Their video, a simple appeal to constitutional principle, was a direct challenge to the loyalty-based system of governance that Trump and Miller have so painstakingly constructed. In a functioning democracy, reminding the military of their oath to the Constitution is a profoundly patriotic act. But in Trump’s Mafia state, it is “seditious behavior” because it posits a loyalty higher than loyalty to the Don himself. As we have seen in the ‘Teflon Don 2.0’ model, the entire apparatus of government is being systematically transformed into a protection racket, where loyalty is the only coin of the realm and dissent is crushed with theatrical cruelty (L&A, 2025b).
The reaction of the Republican establishment is perhaps the most damning indictment of all. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about Trump’s post, did not express horror or concern. He defended it. He claimed, with the dead-eyed stare of a man who has sold his soul for a seat at the table, that Trump was simply “defining the crime of sedition,” and that this was a “factual statement” (PolitiCo, 2025). This is the language of a captured state, the legalistic gibberish of Vichy France, where the law is no longer a set of neutral principles but a cudgel to be wielded against political enemies. The fact that Johnson admitted he had not even seen Trump’s repost of a call to hang the lawmakers is not an excuse; it is a confession. It speaks to the wilful blindness, the determined moral cowardice, that is now a prerequisite for a career in the Republican Party.
This reflects the complete moral and intellectual collapse of a major political party. The GOP has become a chorus of enablers, the capos and soldiers in the Don’s crime family, whose job is to enforce his will and rationalise his most depraved excesses. They are the ones who launder the threats, who nod along to the lies, who look the other way as the foundations of the republic are systematically dismantled. They have traded their principles for power, and in doing so, have become complicit in the construction of the very authoritarian state they once claimed to oppose.
The Road to Ruin is Paved with Fear
Trump’s declaration that six sitting members of Congress should be tried for treason and put to death is not a random outburst of temper. It is the logical, inevitable culmination of a political project that has been years in the making. It is the unholy fusion of Roy Cohn’s ruthless legal thuggery, Stephen Miller’s bureaucratic fanaticism, and the paranoid, grievance-fuelled politics of a man who sees enemies under every bed. The fear is no longer that more politicians will be assassinated by lone wolves radicalised online. The fear is that the state itself will become the assassin, and that it will do so with the full, public blessing of the President of the United States.
When the head of state can openly call for the execution of his political opponents, and the leader of the legislature can defend it as a “factual statement,” the line between a democracy and a dictatorship has not just been blurred; it has been erased. The question is no longer whether it can happen in America. It is happening now, in plain sight, broadcast for all the world to see. The silence of good people has become a roar of consent. And the road ahead, for anyone who still believes in the quaint, outdated ideas of liberty and law, leads not to a shining city on a hill, but to a shallow grave in the desert.
Or support us with a one-off tip → Buy Me a Coffee
References
BBC News (2025a) ‘Minnesota shooting suspect went to homes of two more politicians, prosecutors say - follow live’, BBC News, 16 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgv4y99n7rt [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
BBC News (2025b) ‘Paul Pelosi attacker sentenced to life in prison in California trial’, BBC News, 29 October. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje09qx348do [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
L&A (2025a) ‘Part 10: The Architect of American Fascism: How Stephen Miller Is Building the Authoritarian State’, Notes From Plague Island, 8 October. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/part-10-the-architect-of-american [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
L&A (2025b) ‘Teflon Don 2.0: How Roy Cohn’s Playbook Created Trump’s Mafia State’, Notes From Plague Island, 26 February. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/teflon-don-20-how-roy-cohns-playbook [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
NBC News (2025) ‘Stephen Miller vows vengeance for Charlie Kirk’s murder’, NBC News, 15 September. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/stephen-miller-vengeance-charlie-kirk-murder-rcna231329 [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
NPR (2025) ‘A report claims left-wing terrorism is rising. The data paints a complicated picture’, NPR, 25 October. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/25/nx-s1-5583997/political-violence-left-right-wing [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
PolitiCo (2025) ‘Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’’, PolitiCo, 20 November. Available at: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/20/congress/trump-democratic-lawmakers-sedition-00661504 [Accessed: 20 November 2025].
Reuters (2025) ‘The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown’, Reuters, 19 November. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/charlie-kirk-purge-how-600-americans-were-punished-pro-trump-crackdown-2025-11-19/ [Accessed: 20 November 2025.]