He Stopped Hiding It. That’s the Story

Erdoğan did it in 2019. Orbán does it every week. Mussolini did it before the war. The pattern has a name, and we’re in it.

He Stopped Hiding It. That’s the Story.

Erdoğan did it in 2019. Orbán does it every week. Mussolini did it before the war. The pattern has a name, and we’re in it.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,062: Wednesday, October 21st, 2026.

Strongmen go through two phases. In the first, they deny. In the second, they perform. Trump just crossed the line, and history is very clear about what comes next.

In this article, I’m not going to tell you Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

I don’t have to. I don’t know what’s in the files at Langley, and neither does anyone who says that word with confidence. “Asset” means recruited, directed, controlled. Nobody has proven that…at least in a courtroom…and I’m not going to pretend I have.

Here’s what I can prove.

For nine years, Trump has treated Vladimir Putin the way a man treats the one person in the room he’s afraid of.

Helsinki, 2018: standing next to Putin, asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the man beside him, he picked the man beside him. On camera. In front of the world.

Back then, that moment was a scandal. His own people walked it back within forty-eight hours. There were corrections. Clarifications. Somebody got him to read a statement saying he meant “wouldn’t” instead of “would.”

Watch what’s different now.

There are no corrections anymore. No walk-backs. No aide sent out to explain what the president really meant. The deference that used to get hidden behind a door…is now the show.

And that…not the relationship itself…is the thing you should be paying attention to.

Every strongman has two phases. Learn to tell them apart.

Political scientists who study how democracies die have documented this pattern over and over.

I think of it as the shift from deniability to performance.

Phase one is deniability.

The leader has something he needs hidden: a foreign patron, a corruption pipeline, a plan for the courts. He denies it. He deflects. He fires the people who get close. Concealment costs him effort, and he pays it…because he still believes he can be made to answer.

Phase two is performance.

Same relationship, same corruption, same plan. But now…he does it in the open. He doesn’t hide the patron. He stands next to him. He doesn’t bury the deal. He brags about it.

Nothing about the underlying behavior changed. What changed is the calculation. Concealment is a cost. He stopped paying it.

Erdoğan hid his drift from NATO for years. Then in 2019 he bought Russian S-400 missiles…while still a NATO member…and dared Washington to do something about it.

Orbán spent a decade quietly courting Moscow. Now he does it on stage…with EU money in his pocket.

Putin kept the Wagner Group at arm’s length for years. Then he let the whole country watch him use it…right up until it turned on him.

Vladimir Putin tours the Concord catering factory near St. Petersburg with its owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in September 2010. Prigozhin, later the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, built his fortune on state food contracts before his 2023 mutiny and death in a plane crash.

The pattern is older than any of them. Mussolini performed independence from Berlin as long as he needed Rome to look sovereign. Once the alliance was locked…the performance flipped. He flaunted it.

Here is the rule those cases teach, and I want you to write it down:

A leader hides what he thinks he can be punished for. He flaunts what he thinks he can’t.

So when the hiding stops…he’s not being careless. He’s telling you something. He’s telling you he believes nobody will make him pay.

Three reasons a man stops hiding. Only one of them is good news for him.

Now…be careful here, because the lazy version of this argument says, “He’s flaunting it, so he must have total control.”

That’s not what the record shows. The record shows three different things that produce the exact same behavior.

One:

Real consolidation. The courts are captured, the press is cowed, the security services are his. The flaunting is a victory lap. Putin after 2012. Erdoğan after the failed coup. This is the dangerous case.

Two:

A bet on the base. He hasn’t captured everything. Courts still rule against him. Elections still happen. But…he’s concluded that his supporters will swallow any explanation he gives…and that the institutions won’t move without public pressure his supporters will never supply.

The openness isn’t proof of control. It’s a wager that the people who could stop him won’t bother.

Three:

A bluff. The position is shakier than it looks…and the display is meant to project an inevitability he doesn’t have…to keep allies from defecting. Historians read late-1930s Mussolini this way. Bravado as life insurance.

Which one is this?

Honest answer: it’s number two. Which is the only one of the three where the ending is still being written.

We have midterms in thirteen months. We have federal judges who keep ruling against this administration…and some of them were appointed by it.

We have a press that… battered as it is…still prints things he doesn’t want printed. The constraints are real. They’re just untested at the level he’s now testing them.

That’s what the performance is. It’s not a victory lap. It’s a probe.

The flaunting always comes before the crushing. Never after.

This is the part that matters most, and it’s the part people get backwards.

They think the strongman consolidates first and then shows off. Look at the files. It runs the other way.

The open display is the test. If it draws no serious response…if the courts shrug, if the opposition sputters, if the public gets used to it…then the harder moves follow. Every time the probe goes unanswered…the next probe goes deeper.

The moment a leader stops hiding is the moment historians later circle in red. Not because the worst has happened. Because the worst has been announced…and it’s waiting to see who objects.

What this means for you. Today. Not after the next election.

A bet only pays if nobody calls it.

That’s the entire ballgame. He’s wagering that you’ll get tired. That the fourth outrage will land softer than the first. That you’ll start saying “well, that’s just how it is now,” which is the precise sentence every informant in every file I’ve ever read eventually said.

Don’t say it.

Here’s what calling the bet looks like, in order of how much it costs you:

Call your congressman’s office and ask one question: “What is the senator’s position on the president’s conduct toward Russia?” MAKE. THEM. SAY. IT. OUT. LOUD. Make a staffer write it down.

Give money to a candidate in a district that’s going to decide the House. Not a national committee. A name.

Show up. The town hall. The county party meeting. The school board. The places where the base thinks it’s unopposed.

And…share this. Not because I need the numbers…because the man who’s betting you’ll get tired needs you to keep it to yourself.

He stopped hiding. That means he’s watching to see what you do.

Do something he can see.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Somebody will write to tell me I’m being alarmist. I’d ask them one thing. Find me the case…any case, any country, any century…where a leader stopped hiding his loyalties, nobody pushed back, and it turned out fine. I’ve looked. The file is empty.

P.P.S. I write these because the moment to say it is before it’s settled history…and I’d rather it come from someone who doesn’t cash a check from either side. I have no sponsors…and I NEVER WILL; that’s not the freedom I demand as a writer. That’s only possible because readers keep the lights on.

Sources

Helsinki, 2018 — the original remark and the walk-back

• PolitiFact: Trump reverses Helsinki comments on Russian election interference — the “would / wouldn’t” correction, read from a prepared statement the day after

• Foreign Policy: Here’s What Trump and Putin Actually Said in Helsinki — full press-conference transcript, including the sentence the White House transcript omitted

• NPR: Trump Attempts to Soften Controversial Remarks He Made in Helsinki

Mueller findings — why “asset” is a claim nobody has proven

• PolitiFact: Summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s report — extensive Russian interference documented; investigation did not establish conspiracy or coordination

Erdoğan and the S-400s, 2019

• Military.com: Over US Warnings, Turkey Gets Russian-Made S-400 Missile System

• AIN: Turkey Removed from F-35 Program — White House statement, July 17, 2019

• Anadolu Agency: US defense chief hopes Turkey abandons S-400

Orbán, Moscow, and EU money

• Fortune: EU moving to cut off funding to Hungary, one of Putin’s last allies in Europe

• Ukrainska Pravda: EU plans to unlock €550 million for Hungary to secure sanctions against Russia — the ~€22 billion frozen in 2022 and the tranches released since

• WION: Orbán says he asked Putin how Russia would respond to EU use of frozen assets

Putin and Wagner, June 2023

• BusinessLIVE / Reuters: Putin vows harsh action against Wagner’s “armed mutiny” — “stab in the back” address

• BusinessDay: Wagner chief Prigozhin says he did not intend coup

Mussolini and Berlin — from performed independence to open alliance

• German History in Documents and Images: Hitler’s State Visit to Mussolini in Rome, 1938 — Mussolini’s early hostility to the Nazi regime and the turn after 1935

• Britannica: Pact of Steel — May 22, 1939

• Smithsonian / Brewminate: Why the Axis Powers Were Called the Axis Powers — Mussolini’s 1936 Milan speech announcing the Rome–Berlin Axis

The framework — how elected leaders erode democracies

• Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018) — the core argument that democracies now die slowly, through the gradual weakening of courts, press, and norms, with Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela as case studies