We thought it was a political contest. To them, it was war.

Notes on Inauguration Day 2025.

I began researching and writing Sowing Hate and Chaos when, in the middle of another writing project, I ran across a “handbook” outlining a specific form of propaganda intended to pit citizens against citizens, create hatred and division, and ultimately, to collapse democracies. It was written 50 years ago by a noted French neuropsychiatrist. He laid it out in three phases.

We were in the midst of the first round of Donald Trump rallies. They were like nothing we had seen before. I could not miss the fact that they were right out of the handbook. I knew I had stumbled across something important for my country.

As I was researching, translating, and writing during Donald Trump’s first term it became chillingly clear to me that the United States was in Phase 1, the Propaganda of Recruitment and Indoctrination, exactly as the neuropsychiatrist had outlined. As I continued working, the country moved into Phase 2, the Propaganda of Agitation. I watched on January 6 as the phase unfolded before our eyes. I knew I was not writing fast enough.

Today is the first official day of Phase 3: The Propaganda of Integration. This is the phase where uniformity becomes the battle cry, where the outliers are brought into the fold, by force if necessary. It is where education, the media, and the arts are reshaped to meet the narrative of the new regime, where the justice system is unraveled and reshaped to become a tool for elimination of opposing voices.

Integration was completed in the Republican Party years ago, when Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were run out of the party with pitchforks, when virtually every leader and hero of the party was written out of the narrative, when the history of the party was rewritten and old heroes became new villains. The Republican party became the party of one man.

But creating uniformity is easier with a political party. To eliminate the opposition, you simply send them off, primary them, retire them, mock them until the party is united against them. Achieving the same effect in a country is going to be much harder, and much uglier.

I am one of the Democrats waking up this morning to the full realization of defeat. I’ve had many conversations with friends, and have read countless Op Eds and blog posts about the reasons for the defeat. Some are helpful and open a door to a next phase, some are just armchair quarterbacking. Others are just bitter.

Certainly there are things we did that lost us ground, things we should have done that we didn’t. I believe the most dire, the most costly error, was not recognizing what we were up against, and not recognizing the weapons that were being used against the American population— because they were weapons, weapons used by military forces in the last century, used now to drive the wave of hatred and division that Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, etc. were able to ride.

It was psychological warfare. We thought it was politics and we responded with politics. And we’re still saying, if we had only been better at politics.

We are pulling back and looking inward, looking to ascertain what we did wrong, trying to figure out how to come back better. When Donald Trump and his group lost an election in 2020, did they do the same? Was there one word in any right wing media about what they might have done wrong, and what Donald Trump might need to correct to come back? Hell no. They planted a completely false reality among their followers, through their propaganda channels on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, talk shows, and social media channels, repeatedly telling followers, from multiple directions, that the election had been criminally stolen from them and it was time to rise up and save their nation. They fabricated outlandish stories of Venezuelans and Italians changing voting machines, and phantom drops of tens of thousands of votes in the middle of the night. They propagated this “reality” with a completely uniform message on all channels. Then they sent militia and other blind followers into our Capitol Building to defecate on the floors, tase Capitol police officers with their own weapons, and try to get to the Vice President so they could hang him.

Like I said, to us it’s politics. To them it’s war.

Yes we made some mistakes. And we did some things so well. Kamala Harris commanded the stage in the debate. Her qualifications were on full display. I have watched many presidential debates, and I cannot remember one as impressive (I was too young to remember Kennedy and Nixon). We were excited and hopeful. We didn’t realize that to Donald Trump, this was never even a debate. It was a platform to validate and continue to paint the false reality that the United States is failing (it’s not), that illegal immigrants were overrunning Midwestern towns (they’re not), running people out of their apartments, on a kind of crime rampage that includes eating your dogs, and it could be coming to your door next. It was an international platform used to agitate people to fear, anxiety, to create the visceral reaction that one must act to protect themselves against this (non-existent) threat if they want to save all that they hold valuable. It was social engineering, used with the intent to topple an existing government.

We answered with politics, with hope, with infectious joy and optimism. It was fun. It was uplifting. But you don’t answer war with joy.

As Elon Musk has moved out into Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Brazil, while what Donald Trump does next is anyone’s guess, only some people are realizing that this is the third World War. It is not a war against nations. It’s a war between the autocrats and oligarchs who have seized power from the citizenry and replaced it with lies, propaganda, and manipulation, and on the other side, those who continue to believe that the power of government comes from the bottom up, that reason and truth matter.

Today needs to be the day when we stop eating our own and picking away at our own leaders, and start refreshing ourselves on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Clausowitz’s On War. Because in this war, we have just ceded a massive territory, the most powerful democracy on Earth. And others are in danger. The question is not what someone did wrong or failed to do last year or last decade, but what hill we can take back and hold, and how the enemy’s momentum can be weakened. We have taken enough time for reflection. It’s time for strategic action.

The missteps of our leaders over the last ten years can be forgiven by the fact that none of us really knew what we were up against. Now we do.