About Civics Unhinged
Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...

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This essay marks a shift in Mr. Dunneagin Speaks from documenting events to naming the governing logic that connects them. It was prompted by recent episodes of state violence—including the killing of civilians by federal agents in Minneapolis—that made unmistakable how fear, narrative preemption, and force now operate together as tools of domestic governance, with implications far beyond any single city.
What follows is not an escalation of rhetoric, nor a departure from earlier analysis. It is a clarification. Across Trump’s second term, permissioned violence and the inversion of threat have emerged not as isolated excesses but as a coherent method of rule. This piece names that method directly and establishes the frame through which the rest of Volume 3—and the normalization arc that follows—should be read.
Once named, the pattern no longer needs to be argued each time it appears. It can be traced.]
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Domestic Terrorist in the Oval Office (seventeen minutes, eight seconds)
The Refusal to Name
Democracies rarely fail from a shortage of facts. They fail from a shortage of courage in language. Long before institutions collapse, a subtler failure sets in: an aversion to calling things what they are, especially when accuracy would be disruptive to comfort, power, or habit.
In the American political vocabulary, terrorism has been carefully externalized. It is something that arrives from abroad, emerges from shadows, or announces itself through spectacle. It is never something that wears a suit, commands a podium, or insists—loudly and often—that it alone represents law and order. The word is treated less as a description of conduct than as a marker of identity: who does it, not how it works.
This reluctance has consequences. When terrorism is defined by costume rather than function, a society blinds itself to forms of political intimidation that do not resemble the caricature. Violence must be theatrical to qualify; coercion must be explicit. Anything subtler—anything that operates through implication, permission, or anticipation—passes beneath the threshold of recognition.
It is in that gap that this essay sits.
The claim here is not rhetorical, and it is not metaphorical. A political leader can function as a domestic terrorist without committing violence personally, without issuing orders, and without ever acknowledging responsibility. Terror, at the level of governance, is not a matter of personal action but of systemic effect. It is measured not by what a leader does with his own hands, but by what others feel authorized to do in his name.
Refusing to name that reality does not preserve democratic stability. It erodes it.
Terrorism as Function, Not Costume
Terrorism, stripped of its cinematic associations, is a method of political control. Its defining features are not the tools used but the outcomes produced: fear as a governing instrument, intimidation as a substitute for persuasion, and violence—actual or threatened—as a means of shaping behavior beyond democratic consent.
Three elements recur across contexts and eras. First, a population is taught to perceive threat everywhere, particularly from those who dissent or refuse allegiance. Second, force is framed as defensive and regrettable even when it is preemptive or excessive. Third, responsibility is diffused—through proxies, rhetoric, or ambiguity—so that accountability never quite finds a target.
Crucially, none of this requires a leader to issue direct commands. Modern political terror rarely works that way. It relies instead on permission structures: signals that indicate which actions will be tolerated, excused, or retroactively justified. Violence becomes not an instruction but an inference. Those inclined to act do not need orders; they need assurance that consequences will be uneven, delayed, or waived entirely.
This is why focusing exclusively on lone actors or explicit directives misses the point. The most effective practitioners of terror do not brandish weapons. They cultivate atmospheres. They create moral weather systems in which fear feels rational, force feels necessary, and restraint feels naïve.
It is also why legalistic arguments alone are insufficient. Law concerns itself with proof, jurisdiction, and culpability. Terror, as a political method, concerns itself with behavior—who feels safe, who feels targeted, and who feels empowered to act with impunity. A society can meet the formal requirements of legality while still living under conditions of intimidation.
This essay is not an exercise in psychological diagnosis, nor is it an attempt to assign criminal liability by fiat. It does not argue that all political violence is equal or that intent can be inferred casually. It argues something narrower and more precise: that when a leader repeatedly mobilizes fear, names internal enemies, and signals tolerance for violence committed in service of his authority, he is employing a recognizable and dangerous governing method.
That method has a name. Avoiding it does not make the method disappear.
Permission Without Orders
Trump rarely tells anyone to commit violence. That fact is often offered as exculpatory, as though leadership responsibility ends at the absence of explicit instruction. But this misunderstands how power operates when it is both centralized and disavowed.
Trump governs through implication. He names enemies relentlessly and ritualistically: judges who rule against him, prosecutors who investigate him, journalists who report inconvenient facts, election workers who certify results, protesters who dissent, immigrants who exist as symbols rather than people. These are not offhand insults. They are repeated designations, reinforced across rallies, interviews, and social media, until hostility feels not reactive but habitual.
Alongside this naming comes moral laundering. Violence is not condemned outright; it is contextualized. Threats are not disowned; they are reframed as jokes, exaggerations, or understandable reactions to provocation. When harm occurs, responsibility slides sideways—to the media, to political opponents, to the victims themselves. The aggressor is always responding, never initiating.
The genius of this approach lies in its ambiguity. Trump leaves just enough distance between his words and others’ actions to claim innocence, while remaining close enough to signal approval. Supporters learn quickly where the lines are—not through rules, but through observation. Who is defended. Who is excused. Who is celebrated. Who is forgotten.
This is not a failure of leadership discipline; it is a leadership strategy. Ambiguity functions as insulation. It allows violence to scale without attribution and intimidation to spread without command. Those inclined toward force understand the message clearly, while critics are left arguing over phrasing.
The result is an atmosphere in which violence feels both exceptional and inevitable—exceptional enough to deny responsibility, inevitable enough to excuse it. Trump does not pull the trigger. He loads the atmosphere, then insists he had nothing to do with the storm.
That is why focusing on intent alone is inadequate. Intent is often private; effect is public. The effect here is a political culture in which fear is normalized, enemies are internalized, and force is treated as a regrettable but acceptable tool of domestic order.
This is not accidental. It is how permission works when orders would be too revealing.
When the State Learns the Lesson
Political language does not remain rhetorical for long. When repeated from the highest office, it becomes instructional. Institutions listen. Personnel adapt. Over time, what begins as implication hardens into practice.
Under Trump, the state increasingly learns to act before facts are established and to justify force beforeaccountability can intervene. Threat is asserted first; evidence is gathered later, if at all. This inversion is not merely procedural. It is philosophical. It reflects a governing assumption that legitimacy flows from decisiveness rather than accuracy, from dominance rather than restraint.
In this environment, civilians are no longer presumed innocent participants in a democratic order. They are potential risks to be managed. Protest becomes provocation. Dissent becomes instability. Presence itself becomes suspicious. The burden quietly shifts: it is no longer the state’s responsibility to justify its force, but the citizen’s responsibility to prove they did not deserve it.
This is not the result of a single policy directive. It is the downstream effect of a presidency that treats threat inflation as prudence and regards ambiguity as an asset. When leaders repeatedly frame internal populations as dangerous, enforcement arms absorb the message. They learn that speed will be rewarded, caution second-guessed, and error forgiven so long as the narrative of danger holds.
What emerges is not chaos but a grimly efficient shortcut to legitimacy. Fear does the work that persuasion once did. Violence, or the credible threat of it, becomes a tool of narrative stabilization. Once the label terrorist is applied, facts struggle to catch up. The story is already written.
This is how permission migrates from speech to policy. Not through memo or statute, but through expectation.
Truth Spoken Too Late
In a functioning democracy, accountability interrupts harm. It does not merely document it. But under Trump’s governing logic, truth increasingly arrives only after it has been stripped of its power to correct.
Investigations proceed. Testimony is given. Reports are written. The machinery of oversight continues to turn, producing records of misconduct with admirable thoroughness. Yet these truths are delivered post hoc—after elections have passed, after violence has occurred, after institutions have adjusted to the new normal. Law speaks, but only when its voice can no longer compel action.
This creates a fatal civic illusion: that knowing is equivalent to governing. Citizens are offered clarity without consequence, revelation without repair. The system preserves its appearance of seriousness while forfeiting its capacity to deter.
For Trump, this arrangement is ideal. He does not need to prevail in court if he can prevail in time. Delays become victories. Findings become footnotes. The truth, once safely contained, poses no threat to power. It can even be cited as evidence of institutional health—proof that the system still works—precisely because it no longer restrains.
The result is a public trained to confuse exposure with accountability. Wrongdoing is acknowledged but normalized. Each episode becomes precedent for the next. Violence no longer shocks; it instructs. The lesson absorbed is not outrage but adjustment.
This is not justice delayed. It is justice neutralized.
Why the Word Matters
At this point, objections surface—not because the pattern is unclear, but because the name is uncomfortable. Terrorism, readers are told, is too strong, too incendiary, too imprecise. Better to soften. Better to qualify. Better to invent a safer phrase that reassures rather than alarms.
But words do not merely describe reality. They shape the boundaries of response. To refuse the term is to refuse the implications that follow from it. Euphemism is not moderation; it is protection—offered not to the public, but to power.
Calling Trump’s method what it is does not equate him with every violent actor who has used terror as a tool. It does something more disciplined. It identifies a governing strategy that mobilizes fear, implicitly legitimizes force, and dissolves accountability through ambiguity. It recognizes terrorism as a function rather than a costume.
The insistence on softer language often masquerades as civic responsibility. In practice, it is civic evasion. Democracies do not preserve themselves by being polite to threats. They preserve themselves by recognizing them in time.
The danger here is not rhetorical excess. It is a habitual understatement. When intimidation is normalized and violence is preemptively justified, refusing the appropriate name does not lower the temperature. It guarantees escalation.
To misname this moment is not cautious. It is complicity.
One Governing Logic, Two Domains
It is tempting—comforting, even—to treat Trump’s behavior as bifurcated: intemperate rhetoric on one side, policy on the other. That division allows critics to condemn the language while debating the merits of enforcement, appointments, or executive action as though they were separable. They are not.
The presidency supplies permission. Domestic policy supplies force. Together, they form a single governing logic.
Trump’s presidency establishes the moral framework: enemies within, threats everywhere, loyalty elevated above legality. His domestic policy program operationalizes that framework through immigration enforcement, protest response, policing posture, and the steady rhetorical criminalization of dissent. What looks, in isolation, like overreach or misjudgment becomes, in context, coherence.
This is why treating Trump’s conduct as a personality problem is analytically insufficient. Personalities do not scale. Governing methods do. What Trump offers is not chaos but an alternative order—one in which fear substitutes for consent and force substitutes for legitimacy.
Once that order is in place, individual policies matter less than the atmosphere they reinforce. The presidency teaches the public who deserves protection and who does not. Domestic policy enacts the lesson. The loop sustains itself.
What This Produces Over Time
The consequences of this governing method are neither abstract nor sudden. They accumulate quietly, altering expectations until what once seemed unthinkable becomes procedural.
Evidence standards erode. The presumption of innocence weakens, especially for those already marked as suspects. Violence becomes background noise—tragic, regrettable, but no longer disqualifying. Each episode is absorbed as context for the next.
Citizens adapt. Some retreat from public life. Others recalibrate their speech. Still others accept intimidation as the price of order. Fear does not need to dominate to succeed; it needs only to persist.
Institutions, too, adjust. Enforcement learns that decisiveness will be defended. Oversight learns that speed is the enemy of relevance. Accountability becomes ceremonial rather than corrective. The system continues to function, but its purpose subtly shifts—from protecting democratic participation to managing risk.
None of this requires mass repression or open dictatorship. It requires only repetition, ambiguity, and time. Terror, in its most effective form, is not spectacular. It is routine.
The Obligation to Name
Democracy depends on accurate language. Not dramatic language. Accurate language.
When intimidation is mislabeled as strength, when violence is reframed as necessity, and when fear is treated as a reasonable governing tool, a society does not merely lose its moral bearings—it loses its capacity to respond. Naming is not an act of outrage. It is an act of maintenance.
To say that Donald Trump functions as a domestic terrorist is not to indulge in provocation. It is to describe a governing method that relies on fear, authorizes violence by implication, and weaponizes the state against civilians while denying responsibility for the outcome. Avoiding the term does not make the method less real. It makes it harder to confront.
A democracy does not fall when violence occurs. It falls when violence becomes routine—when it is explained away, absorbed, and finally expected. At that point, the failure is not only institutional. It is linguistic.
The obligation, then, is simple and demanding: to name what is happening while naming still matters.
~Dunneagin
🎧 Find Civics Unhinged on your favorite platform:
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🗣 Political satire that stings. Essays, mock memos, and podcasts chronicling the slow implosion of the American Republic — in English, French, and German.
💬 On Bluesky? Join the conversation at @dunneagin.bsky.social
📚 Support this work — and get three free eBooks!
Paid subscribers help keep this circus running without corporate ads, think tank donors, or truth-averse billionaires. Join them.
As a thank you, all yearly paid members receive:
📕 Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus
📕 The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy
📕 Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Volume 2
☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at: https://f-p-dunneagin-shop.fourthwall.com
👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.

This essay marks a shift in Mr. Dunneagin Speaks from documenting events to naming the governing logic that connects them. It was prompted by recent episodes of state violence—including the killing of civilians by federal agents in Minneapolis—that made unmistakable how fear, narrative preemption, and force now operate together as tools of domestic governance, with implications far beyond any single city.
What follows is not an escalation of rhetoric, nor a departure from earlier analysis. It is a clarification. Across Trump’s second term, permissioned violence and the inversion of threat have emerged not as isolated excesses but as a coherent method of rule. This piece names that method directly and establishes the frame through which the rest of Volume 3—and the normalization arc that follows—should be read.
Once named, the pattern no longer needs to be argued each time it appears. It can be traced.]
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Domestic Terrorist in the Oval Office (seventeen minutes, eight seconds)
The Refusal to Name
Democracies rarely fail from a shortage of facts. They fail from a shortage of courage in language. Long before institutions collapse, a subtler failure sets in: an aversion to calling things what they are, especially when accuracy would be disruptive to comfort, power, or habit.
In the American political vocabulary, terrorism has been carefully externalized. It is something that arrives from abroad, emerges from shadows, or announces itself through spectacle. It is never something that wears a suit, commands a podium, or insists—loudly and often—that it alone represents law and order. The word is treated less as a description of conduct than as a marker of identity: who does it, not how it works.
This reluctance has consequences. When terrorism is defined by costume rather than function, a society blinds itself to forms of political intimidation that do not resemble the caricature. Violence must be theatrical to qualify; coercion must be explicit. Anything subtler—anything that operates through implication, permission, or anticipation—passes beneath the threshold of recognition.
It is in that gap that this essay sits.
The claim here is not rhetorical, and it is not metaphorical. A political leader can function as a domestic terrorist without committing violence personally, without issuing orders, and without ever acknowledging responsibility. Terror, at the level of governance, is not a matter of personal action but of systemic effect. It is measured not by what a leader does with his own hands, but by what others feel authorized to do in his name.
Refusing to name that reality does not preserve democratic stability. It erodes it.
Terrorism as Function, Not Costume
Terrorism, stripped of its cinematic associations, is a method of political control. Its defining features are not the tools used but the outcomes produced: fear as a governing instrument, intimidation as a substitute for persuasion, and violence—actual or threatened—as a means of shaping behavior beyond democratic consent.
Three elements recur across contexts and eras. First, a population is taught to perceive threat everywhere, particularly from those who dissent or refuse allegiance. Second, force is framed as defensive and regrettable even when it is preemptive or excessive. Third, responsibility is diffused—through proxies, rhetoric, or ambiguity—so that accountability never quite finds a target.
Crucially, none of this requires a leader to issue direct commands. Modern political terror rarely works that way. It relies instead on permission structures: signals that indicate which actions will be tolerated, excused, or retroactively justified. Violence becomes not an instruction but an inference. Those inclined to act do not need orders; they need assurance that consequences will be uneven, delayed, or waived entirely.
This is why focusing exclusively on lone actors or explicit directives misses the point. The most effective practitioners of terror do not brandish weapons. They cultivate atmospheres. They create moral weather systems in which fear feels rational, force feels necessary, and restraint feels naïve.
It is also why legalistic arguments alone are insufficient. Law concerns itself with proof, jurisdiction, and culpability. Terror, as a political method, concerns itself with behavior—who feels safe, who feels targeted, and who feels empowered to act with impunity. A society can meet the formal requirements of legality while still living under conditions of intimidation.
This essay is not an exercise in psychological diagnosis, nor is it an attempt to assign criminal liability by fiat. It does not argue that all political violence is equal or that intent can be inferred casually. It argues something narrower and more precise: that when a leader repeatedly mobilizes fear, names internal enemies, and signals tolerance for violence committed in service of his authority, he is employing a recognizable and dangerous governing method.
That method has a name. Avoiding it does not make the method disappear.
Permission Without Orders
Trump rarely tells anyone to commit violence. That fact is often offered as exculpatory, as though leadership responsibility ends at the absence of explicit instruction. But this misunderstands how power operates when it is both centralized and disavowed.
Trump governs through implication. He names enemies relentlessly and ritualistically: judges who rule against him, prosecutors who investigate him, journalists who report inconvenient facts, election workers who certify results, protesters who dissent, immigrants who exist as symbols rather than people. These are not offhand insults. They are repeated designations, reinforced across rallies, interviews, and social media, until hostility feels not reactive but habitual.
Alongside this naming comes moral laundering. Violence is not condemned outright; it is contextualized. Threats are not disowned; they are reframed as jokes, exaggerations, or understandable reactions to provocation. When harm occurs, responsibility slides sideways—to the media, to political opponents, to the victims themselves. The aggressor is always responding, never initiating.
The genius of this approach lies in its ambiguity. Trump leaves just enough distance between his words and others’ actions to claim innocence, while remaining close enough to signal approval. Supporters learn quickly where the lines are—not through rules, but through observation. Who is defended. Who is excused. Who is celebrated. Who is forgotten.
This is not a failure of leadership discipline; it is a leadership strategy. Ambiguity functions as insulation. It allows violence to scale without attribution and intimidation to spread without command. Those inclined toward force understand the message clearly, while critics are left arguing over phrasing.
The result is an atmosphere in which violence feels both exceptional and inevitable—exceptional enough to deny responsibility, inevitable enough to excuse it. Trump does not pull the trigger. He loads the atmosphere, then insists he had nothing to do with the storm.
That is why focusing on intent alone is inadequate. Intent is often private; effect is public. The effect here is a political culture in which fear is normalized, enemies are internalized, and force is treated as a regrettable but acceptable tool of domestic order.
This is not accidental. It is how permission works when orders would be too revealing.
When the State Learns the Lesson
Political language does not remain rhetorical for long. When repeated from the highest office, it becomes instructional. Institutions listen. Personnel adapt. Over time, what begins as implication hardens into practice.
Under Trump, the state increasingly learns to act before facts are established and to justify force beforeaccountability can intervene. Threat is asserted first; evidence is gathered later, if at all. This inversion is not merely procedural. It is philosophical. It reflects a governing assumption that legitimacy flows from decisiveness rather than accuracy, from dominance rather than restraint.
In this environment, civilians are no longer presumed innocent participants in a democratic order. They are potential risks to be managed. Protest becomes provocation. Dissent becomes instability. Presence itself becomes suspicious. The burden quietly shifts: it is no longer the state’s responsibility to justify its force, but the citizen’s responsibility to prove they did not deserve it.
This is not the result of a single policy directive. It is the downstream effect of a presidency that treats threat inflation as prudence and regards ambiguity as an asset. When leaders repeatedly frame internal populations as dangerous, enforcement arms absorb the message. They learn that speed will be rewarded, caution second-guessed, and error forgiven so long as the narrative of danger holds.
What emerges is not chaos but a grimly efficient shortcut to legitimacy. Fear does the work that persuasion once did. Violence, or the credible threat of it, becomes a tool of narrative stabilization. Once the label terrorist is applied, facts struggle to catch up. The story is already written.
This is how permission migrates from speech to policy. Not through memo or statute, but through expectation.
Truth Spoken Too Late
In a functioning democracy, accountability interrupts harm. It does not merely document it. But under Trump’s governing logic, truth increasingly arrives only after it has been stripped of its power to correct.
Investigations proceed. Testimony is given. Reports are written. The machinery of oversight continues to turn, producing records of misconduct with admirable thoroughness. Yet these truths are delivered post hoc—after elections have passed, after violence has occurred, after institutions have adjusted to the new normal. Law speaks, but only when its voice can no longer compel action.
This creates a fatal civic illusion: that knowing is equivalent to governing. Citizens are offered clarity without consequence, revelation without repair. The system preserves its appearance of seriousness while forfeiting its capacity to deter.
For Trump, this arrangement is ideal. He does not need to prevail in court if he can prevail in time. Delays become victories. Findings become footnotes. The truth, once safely contained, poses no threat to power. It can even be cited as evidence of institutional health—proof that the system still works—precisely because it no longer restrains.
The result is a public trained to confuse exposure with accountability. Wrongdoing is acknowledged but normalized. Each episode becomes precedent for the next. Violence no longer shocks; it instructs. The lesson absorbed is not outrage but adjustment.
This is not justice delayed. It is justice neutralized.
Why the Word Matters
At this point, objections surface—not because the pattern is unclear, but because the name is uncomfortable. Terrorism, readers are told, is too strong, too incendiary, too imprecise. Better to soften. Better to qualify. Better to invent a safer phrase that reassures rather than alarms.
But words do not merely describe reality. They shape the boundaries of response. To refuse the term is to refuse the implications that follow from it. Euphemism is not moderation; it is protection—offered not to the public, but to power.
Calling Trump’s method what it is does not equate him with every violent actor who has used terror as a tool. It does something more disciplined. It identifies a governing strategy that mobilizes fear, implicitly legitimizes force, and dissolves accountability through ambiguity. It recognizes terrorism as a function rather than a costume.
The insistence on softer language often masquerades as civic responsibility. In practice, it is civic evasion. Democracies do not preserve themselves by being polite to threats. They preserve themselves by recognizing them in time.
The danger here is not rhetorical excess. It is a habitual understatement. When intimidation is normalized and violence is preemptively justified, refusing the appropriate name does not lower the temperature. It guarantees escalation.
To misname this moment is not cautious. It is complicity.
One Governing Logic, Two Domains
It is tempting—comforting, even—to treat Trump’s behavior as bifurcated: intemperate rhetoric on one side, policy on the other. That division allows critics to condemn the language while debating the merits of enforcement, appointments, or executive action as though they were separable. They are not.
The presidency supplies permission. Domestic policy supplies force. Together, they form a single governing logic.
Trump’s presidency establishes the moral framework: enemies within, threats everywhere, loyalty elevated above legality. His domestic policy program operationalizes that framework through immigration enforcement, protest response, policing posture, and the steady rhetorical criminalization of dissent. What looks, in isolation, like overreach or misjudgment becomes, in context, coherence.
This is why treating Trump’s conduct as a personality problem is analytically insufficient. Personalities do not scale. Governing methods do. What Trump offers is not chaos but an alternative order—one in which fear substitutes for consent and force substitutes for legitimacy.
Once that order is in place, individual policies matter less than the atmosphere they reinforce. The presidency teaches the public who deserves protection and who does not. Domestic policy enacts the lesson. The loop sustains itself.
What This Produces Over Time
The consequences of this governing method are neither abstract nor sudden. They accumulate quietly, altering expectations until what once seemed unthinkable becomes procedural.
Evidence standards erode. The presumption of innocence weakens, especially for those already marked as suspects. Violence becomes background noise—tragic, regrettable, but no longer disqualifying. Each episode is absorbed as context for the next.
Citizens adapt. Some retreat from public life. Others recalibrate their speech. Still others accept intimidation as the price of order. Fear does not need to dominate to succeed; it needs only to persist.
Institutions, too, adjust. Enforcement learns that decisiveness will be defended. Oversight learns that speed is the enemy of relevance. Accountability becomes ceremonial rather than corrective. The system continues to function, but its purpose subtly shifts—from protecting democratic participation to managing risk.
None of this requires mass repression or open dictatorship. It requires only repetition, ambiguity, and time. Terror, in its most effective form, is not spectacular. It is routine.
The Obligation to Name
Democracy depends on accurate language. Not dramatic language. Accurate language.
When intimidation is mislabeled as strength, when violence is reframed as necessity, and when fear is treated as a reasonable governing tool, a society does not merely lose its moral bearings—it loses its capacity to respond. Naming is not an act of outrage. It is an act of maintenance.
To say that Donald Trump functions as a domestic terrorist is not to indulge in provocation. It is to describe a governing method that relies on fear, authorizes violence by implication, and weaponizes the state against civilians while denying responsibility for the outcome. Avoiding the term does not make the method less real. It makes it harder to confront.
A democracy does not fall when violence occurs. It falls when violence becomes routine—when it is explained away, absorbed, and finally expected. At that point, the failure is not only institutional. It is linguistic.
The obligation, then, is simple and demanding: to name what is happening while naming still matters.
~Dunneagin
🎧 Find Civics Unhinged on your favorite platform:
Apple Podcasts (accepts PayPal if available in your country)
Spotify (accepts PayPal if available in your country)
Prefer RSS feed? Copy and paste this URL (https://dunneagin.substack.com/feed/podcast) into your preferred RSS reader
Prefer video, short-form excerpts, or visual essays? Copy and paste this URL (👉 https://www.youtube.com/@civics_unhinged)
🗣 Political satire that stings. Essays, mock memos, and podcasts chronicling the slow implosion of the American Republic — in English, French, and German.
💬 On Bluesky? Join the conversation at @dunneagin.bsky.social
📚 Support this work — and get three free eBooks!
Paid subscribers help keep this circus running without corporate ads, think tank donors, or truth-averse billionaires. Join them.
As a thank you, all yearly paid members receive:
📕 Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus
📕 The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy
📕 Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Volume 2
☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at: https://f-p-dunneagin-shop.fourthwall.com
👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.
About Civics Unhinged
Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...

The Real Heirs of the Republic
Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit

The World Is Not a Real Estate Listing
Trump, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Cramping His Scene
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
F.P. Dunneagin
F.P. Dunneagin
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