Ezra Klein

With every norm-busting move, with every boundary-busting decision, you get this debate around Donald Trump.

Is it authoritarianism now?

Has the nature of the American state finally changed into something else?

It's not going to be that clean.

There's no one moment where we phase from one thing to another.

But I think what we can say, what can't even really be argued, is that the authoritarianism is here.

It's just unevenly distributed.

But you can see it.

You can see it in the video of an ICE officer shooting and killing Renee Goode in Minneapolis.

You can see it when you watch a disabled woman dragged out of her car.

on her way to a doctor's appointment.

You can see it when a family of eight on its way home from a basketball game is tear gassed and needs to give CPR to their six-month-old child.

You can see when Border Patrol agents tackle and detain a U.S.

citizen who is filming their activities, and then they accuse him of assaulting them.

You can see it when masked men walk up to people with brown skin and just ask them to prove that they are American.

And you can see it spreading every day, distributing itself more widely to more kinds of people.

— In Minnesota, local law enforcement officials held a press conference to announce that their own officers were being racially profiled by federal immigration agents.

But we are at the beginning of this.

We are one year into this administration.

And now, thanks to the unprecedented $170 billion windfall from immigration enforcement and Trump's one big, beautiful bill, the administration has essentially a blank check to build the police state of its dreams.