How F*cked Is America, Really?

How F*cked Is America, Really?

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #898: May 15th, 2026.

Let me save you the suspense.

Pretty fcked. Not “civilization is over” fcked. Not yet. But measurably, observably…on-the-record f*cked…in ways that should have your hair on fire if you’re paying even casual attention.

Here’s the part that drives me nuts. We are sixteen months into the second Trump term…and otherwise smart people are still doing the thing where they tilt their head like a confused dog and ask, “Is this really authoritarianism, or are we just being dramatic?”

I’ll answer that. Yes. It really is.

And…no, you are not being dramatic. Dramatic would be screaming in the streets. Most of you are reading this on your phone in line at Starbucks…or at home, relaxing. Calm down with the “are we overreacting” routine…you are, if anything, underreacting. By a wide margin.

Let’s run the receipts.

The Scoreboard Nobody Wants to Look At

Project 2025…the 900-page Heritage Foundation manifesto that Trump spent the entire 2024 campaign pretending he’d never heard of…is being installed.

Not “considered.” Not “debated.” Installed. The Center for Progressive Reform’s tracker shows the administration has initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic agenda…283 of 532 specific recommendations…in the first twelve months. On public lands alone…the Center for Western Priorities clocked it at over 80 percent.

That is not normal governance.

That is a pre-printed instruction manual being executed at industrial speed. The guy running the Office of Management and Budget…Russ Vought…is one of Project 2025’s chief architects.

The “I have nothing to do with this” candidate hired the author to run the budget. Read that sentence twice.

Now, while you were arguing on Facebook about whether Project 2025 was real, here’s what was actually happening:

The administration reinstated Schedule F, which lets the White House reclassify career civil servants as political appointees and fire them at will.

Translation: the apolitical professional bureaucracy…the people whose job it is to say “Mr. President, you can’t legally do that”…is being replaced with loyalists.

About 15,500 employees walked out of the Forest Service and Interior Department combined. Multiply that pattern across twenty agencies.

The Department of Education has been gutted. Title IX protections…gone. The CDC’s Division for Reproductive Health was stripped to the studs. Roughly 40 percent of Project 2025’s anti-abortion playbook is operational. EMTALA emergency-abortion guidance…rescinded.

Childhood vaccine recommendations…being rolled back by a Health Secretary who thinks the polio shot is up for debate.

Meanwhile, ICE is operating at a scale and aggression that would have been unthinkable in 2019.

Masked agents grabbing people off sidewalks. Deportations to a Salvadoran mega-prison without due process…including, in one famous case…a guy the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 had been illegally rendered…after which the administration shrugged.

National Guard troops deployed domestically in what Human Rights Watch flatly called “pretextual power grabs.” Renee Good was killed by ICE agents this winter. You probably didn’t hear her name much after a short time had passed. That’s by design.

The Part Where the Referees Get Bribed, Threatened, or Fired

Here is the playbook, and it is not subtle. I’ll walk you through it the way I’d walk you through a sales funnel…because that’s what it is…a funnel for stripping you of recourse.

Step one:

Capture the agencies. Done, or in progress. See above.

Step two:

Neuter the watchdogs. Inspectors general fired in batches. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor…defunded.

The Global Criminal Justice Office…abolished. Sanctions placed on the International Criminal Court itself. When the cops who watch the cops get fired…the remaining cops do whatever they want. This is not a metaphor.

Step three:

Punish enemies. Retaliatory prosecutions of former officials. Legal pressure on law firms that represented clients the President doesn’t like. Universities…Harvard, Columbia, others…squeezed via funding threats.

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel after administration pressure. Hegseth restricted Pentagon press access. You think these are unrelated stories? They are the same story. The story is: opposition costs you something now.

Step four:

Reshape the rules of the next election. In August, fresh off a friendly chat with Vladimir Putin where the Russian president helpfully fed Trump a line about mail-in ballots, Trump announced an executive order to “bring honesty” to the 2026 midterms and eliminate mail voting.

The Brennan Center…which is not a hysterical organization, said plainly that free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. Courts have so far slapped some of this down… but “so far” is doing heavy lifting.

Step five:

Cultivate the cult of personality. Martin Luther King Jr. Day stripped of its free-admission status at the national parks.

Replaced…and I am not making this up…with free admission on Flag Day, which is Donald Trump’s birthday. They put it on the list. Peter Baker of the New York Times called it “Turkmenistan-ish.” He was being generous. In Turkmenistan they at least commit to the bit.

The Friends You Keep

Tell me who your allies are and I’ll tell you what you’re building.

Trump’s foreign affinity group is…with a few exceptions…a roster of the world’s elected strongmen: Viktor Orbán in Hungary (until Hungarian voters threw him out last month…more on that in a second), Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, MBS in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador, Xi when it’s transactionally useful.

JD Vance flew to Budapest in April to personally campaign for Orbán’s reelection. Putin endorsed him. Hillary Clinton called it “an unholy alliance among autocrats and wannabe autocrats”…and for once, the line landed exactly right.

These are the people Trump praises.

These are the people he models. Orbán didn’t seize Hungary with tanks. He did it the modern way: capture the courts…capture the media…capture the universities…rewrite the election rules…hollow out the civil service…and govern. For sixteen years. Until last month. Stick a pin in that.

Meanwhile, the administration has terminated nearly all U.S. foreign aid supporting human rights defenders abroad.

The State Department has stopped calling out election fraud overseas unless the U.S. has a “clear and compelling interest.”

Translation: democracy promotion is canceled. We’re out of that business. The country that used to lecture the world about free elections…now imports its talking points about mail-in ballots from a former KGB officer.

So How F*cked, Specifically?

Here are the numbers, since I promised receipts.

V-Dem, the Swedish democracy institute that ranks 179 countries…they dropped the United States from 20th to 51st.

We now rank between Slovakia and Greece. Bright Line Watch, which surveys more than 500 American political scientists…concluded the U.S. system now sits roughly halfway between liberal democracy and dictatorship.

Halfway. That’s not “trending poorly.” That’s the midpoint of the dial, and the needle is still moving.

Human Rights Watch…an organization whose annual report normally focuses on places like Sudan and Myanmar…devoted its 2026 edition to a section titled, no kidding, “Sliding Towards Authoritarianism.” About the United States.

Now Here Is the Part the Doomers Won’t Tell You

I said “pretty f*cked.” I did not say “finished.” There’s a reason.

The courts…some of them, not all, but enough…have pushed back. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 against Trump on the wrongful-deportation case.

The Court tossed his tariff theory. State attorneys general like California’s Rob Bonta have blocked the immigration crackdowns…the funding freezes…the Education Department layoffs.

The professional civil service…even gutted…still has people inside it leaking…slow-walking…and saying no. Bright Line Watch’s John Carey said it directly: U.S. democracy would have slid further already if not for the courts holding the line.

And then…four weeks ago…Hungarian voters…sixteen years into Orbán, with a captured media and a rigged playing field and Putin himself trying to put a thumb on the scale…threw the bastard out anyway.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a parliamentary supermajority. The strongman lost. JD Vance flew over to help him win…and helped him lose instead.

That is not a small data point. That is a flare in the sky. The authoritarian model is beatable…even when it’s deeply entrenched…even when it controls the institutions… even when its allies are pouring in resources from the outside.

It is beatable. It is being beaten right now…in real time…in a country a lot of the MAGA brain trust held up as the template.

The Bottom Line, and I Do Mean Bottom

So how f*cked is America? America is at the moment in the story where the reasonable people are still saying “surely this won’t continue,” and the playbook says it will continue…right up until the moment enough people decide…loudly and at scale… that it won’t.

The midterms are six months out.

The institutions are bent…but not broken. The courts are battered…but not captured. The opposition is fractured but not finished.

And the global evidence…Budapest…of all places…is that voters can still fire authoritarians when they show up in numbers large enough to overwhelm the cheating.

We are not Hungary. Not yet. We are something messier…a 250-year-old democracy with deep institutional muscle memory being stress-tested by people who studied the autocrat’s manual and are running the plays in order.

Whether the muscle memory holds is…honest to God…an open question. It depends on judges…journalists…governors…civil servants… and…last and most…voters who decide that “well, what can you do” is not an acceptable answer anymore.

So: pretty f*cked. Not finished.

The difference between those two things is you.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Here’s the part where I level with you.

What you just read took hours of digging…through tracker databases…NGO reports… foreign policy journals…court filings…and the kind of foreign-press coverage most Americans never see.

I do this because the legacy outlets have largely decided that telling you the truth at this volume…in this tone…with the specifics named out loud…is bad for their access and bad for their advertisers.

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I don’t have advertisers. I don’t have access to lose. I have you.

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The midterms are six months out. I plan to spend every one of those days swinging. Come with me.

Sources

• Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker — Center for Progressive Reform — 53% of domestic agenda implemented; 283 of 532 recommendations.

• How much of Project 2025 has Trump enacted? — PBS NewsHour — Russ Vought, OMB, and the implementation pipeline.

• Trump has rolled out many of the Project 2025 policies he once claimed ignorance about — NPR — Rob Bonta and the legal pushback.

• From disavowal to delivery: Project 2025 on public lands — Center for Western Priorities — 80%+ implementation on public lands; Schedule F and the 15,500 departures.

• Tracking how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration achieved this year — PBS News / The 19th — CDC reproductive health cuts, EMTALA rescission.

• Project 2026: What’s next from the Trump administration — Washington Week / PBS — MLK Day / Flag Day / Trump’s birthday; “Turkmenistan-ish” line from Peter Baker.

• Trump’s first year reflected many Project 2025 goals. Here are some that remain — Axios — Reproductive Freedom for All data on anti-abortion playbook.

• Sliding Towards Authoritarianism? — Human Rights Watch — Pretextual National Guard deployments; retaliation against political enemies.

• U.S. Has Seen ‘Shift Toward Authoritarianism’ — TIME / HRW report — State Department democracy bureau cuts, ICC sanctions, foreign aid termination.

• Trump is dismantling democracy at ‘unprecedented’ speed — NPR — V-Dem dropping U.S. from 20th to 51st; Bright Line Watch findings; John Carey quote.

• A Voting Power Grab, with a Nod to Putin — Brennan Center for Justice — Trump’s mail-in ballot executive order following Putin meeting.

• The Ten Rules of Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook — Sen. Jeff Merkley — 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on wrongful El Salvador deportation; due process collapse.

• Divide and Destroy — Union of Concerned Scientists — Killing of Renee Good; January 6 historical revisionism; vaccine rollback.

• Hungarian voters oust Viktor Orbán — Fortune — Vance’s Budapest trip; Putin’s endorsement; Magyar’s victory.

• Hillary Clinton: Orbán’s loss is ‘wake-up call for Americans’ — MS NOW — “Unholy alliance among autocrats and wannabe autocrats.”

• The Trump-Orbán Strongman Era Has Peaked — Foreign Policy — The global autocrat roster Trump emulates.

• Project 2025 — Wikipedia — Heritage Foundation partnerships; SPLC-identified extremist groups among partners; nuclear posture.