Insightful read. Thank you. This “institutional capture” is terrifying.
You describe a well thought out systematic strategy. Is it a checkmate? Might is Right has never been more clear. Any voices of reason are made to suffer. Justice is a thin veneer, an illusion.
You have confused the two different indictments of Comey. The indictment in November wasn’t about the photos of seashells, but rather over the, nonsense, claim that he lied to Congress. The two, not one, who resigned over this indictment were the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern(?) District of Virginia, who otherwise fits your description of the prosecutor who resigned, and Comey’s son-in-law, who was one of the most respected prosecutors in that district.
The one who obtained the indictment of Comey was Lindsey Halligan, who was illegally appointed, not as prosecutor, but rather as the acting U.S. Attorney for that district. She was illegally appointed because, to keep the President from filling a U.S. Attorney’s office with acting Attorneys rather than someone needing to be confirmed by the Senate, the president is only allowed to appoint one such acting Attorney, and only for a period of about, if I remember correctly, four months. Any vacancy for the position of Acting U.S. Attorney, due to any of the term limit being reached, firing, death, or resignation, is to be appointed by the judges of the district, and not the President. If the acting Attorney is competent and their term limit ends due to the term limit, the judges typically retain them in office, otherwise they typically appoint the prosecutor that they consider the best in that district. Trump, at least until recently, has fired any judicial appointees as acting attorneys that weren’t renewals of his original appointments. After the loss of a few excellent prosecutors, several districts are now operating without anyone acting as U.S. Attorneys.
Superb reminder of what we are going through right now.
"Political scientists have a term for the pattern unfolding in front of us. They call it institutional capture, also known as state capture. I need you to understand what the phrase means, because the moment you have it, the last nineteen months stop reading like a pile of unrelated headlines and start reading like a plan."
In addition to the institutional capture, we're also getting accustomed to news that revolves around this guy's priorities. We hear all of this noise about the ballroom, the reflecting pool and all the other useless trivial stuff instead of what governing the nation might actually look like.
And then Americans just listen to it and tune it out and then it becomes normal. There's nothing normal about this, the nation's attention in the major media outlets are focused on his trivial bullshit.
We should be seeing outrage and civil unrest. Instead America just shrugs.
Thank you for the clarity and the to-do list. I really appreciate you laying it out in bite-sized chunks and including the history as well. My representatives will keep hearing an earful from me.
Project 2025 has been the playbook, put into action by people who have no use for democracy beyond leveraging our system of government, and a sizable enough percentage of the population to get in power with a narcisstic and power-hungry leader they can manipulate. But Project 2025 wasn't the start. It was the 1971 Powell Memorandum that really got the ball rolling, and former President Nixon picked up that ball by putting the author onto the Supreme Court. So much since has all been driving toward this moment in our history.
That doesn't mean, however, our fate is sealed. But those who genuinely support democracy and our Constitution, and who believe in the (still-to-be-realized) promise outlined in the Declaration of Independence need to be steadfast and fearless. We need to vote in November, and in every election thereafter. We need to raise our voices so that the voices of those who are attacking our country from the inside are drowned out. We need to keep watch over and defend those who are being detained and/or reviled. And we cannot rest. When Joe Biden was elected President, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief, as did our allies around the world. Our allies trusted us again. But even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, those allies won't breath that same sigh of relief; this time, they'll be cautious. Only through our voting consistently in support of democracy and the global and domestic rule of (US Constitutional) law will our allies, eventually, trust us again.
Trump an old sinner slumps in his chair, stinking of regret and liquor, waiting for death like it’s a debt collector he can’t outrun. His memories rot in his skull, every filthy choice replaying like a broken tape. He curses the world, curses himself, but mostly curses the slow crawl of time that refuses to finish him off. All that’s left is a bitter husk of a man, clinging to breath he no longer deserves.
Until the courts are willing to actually take a stand against overreach, this seems impossible to stop. The “might be illegal” from the highest court is a clue. Reading this list of experts, experienced career people forced out because they stood in the way of the administration’s agenda should be a wake up call for everyone. But I think all of us saw it. It always was about phone calls and voting. November can’t come soon enough. Something tells me that the only way to move Congress is to move a lot of these senators and representatives back home….
Hungary's rejection of Orban gives me a glimmer of hope. He had sixteen years to entrench himself, though he didn't have the support of AI, which has made trump's overthrow easier/more effective.
None of us are perfect, but most of us are good people who understand the difference between right and wrong. I see good things happening in November and thereafter.
Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk are in cahoots with Trump. Why do consumers support the businesses of people that are actively trying to destroy democracy?
We can vote with our dollars, but apathy seems to be contagious
I don’t dispute that many of the events you’ve listed actually happened. What I question is the leap from a collection of controversial personnel decisions and policy changes to the conclusion that the United States is experiencing ‘state capture.’ Several of your examples omit the administration’s stated rationale, several statistics aren’t sourced, and the Comey section collapses two separate indictments into one timeline. That’s advocacy, not an established fact.
Show me the evidence for the conclusion, not merely the evidence that the events occurred.
Different media outlets can take the same facts and use them differently to construct very different narratives. People can do the same.
So many complicated, intertwined business and political relationships and issues. I think it's hard for everyone to sort out. It's challenging to figure out what's true, what's exaggerated, what's out of context, what needs to change and what's wrong.
Many thanks, Mitch, for your accurate and heartfelt assessment of our state of political/social collapse. I'm a retired physician/psychiatrist and have been writing about who the real Donald Trump is: a grown man with hatred of the parents/family who abandoned him at 2yo, where his development was halted: the "terrible twos", so he hates America and is extremely rejection sensitive, so obsessed with loyalty. Details and analysis on "Greeley's Newsletter",substack.com.
My pleasure. There's too much noise, too much corruption, and too much misunderstanding, not to write, speak, litigate, and talk about these issues. Many more posts, audios, and videos are on the way.
So, Mr Jackson, is IQ47 acting? Are his dozings, befuddlements, strange speech phrasings, his awkwardmesses... performative? He did stage his own assassinations, bloody ear and everything. In these 2025-2026 cons, is he playing his finest rôle for the very best con!! on the biggest stage!! for the highest stakes!!... The World!!?
👏🏾 I think there is another part of this that people are not discussing enough: we have mistaken the existence of laws for proof that those laws can protect us.
The Constitution is not self-enforcing. A law only has power when there are people inside the government who are willing and able to enforce it—even when doing so means standing against the president, their political party or their own superiors.
That is why replacing career professionals with loyalists matters so much. The law does not necessarily have to be rewritten if the people responsible for enforcing it have already decided whom it will and will not apply to.
At that point, the country may still have courts, prosecutors and constitutional protections, but ordinary people no longer have any guarantee that those protections will actually reach them. Its belief in the law and its interpretation that I think is the issue.
I also think the manipulation of social media is also an important thing we need to discuss because it’s so seamless and adds fuel to the fire. The algorithm is why No one can conclusively agree on anything because the algorithm purposely divides people by using a proprietary blend of misinformation to get people emotional.
Emotional outrage creates attachment to people’s personal beliefs and all the tech oligarchs care about is engagement… because it makes them money.
I think the first people that need to be brought in for questioning and law reform are the ceos of the social media companies. Because their interpretation of what “the general population wants to see” manipulates the masses. No two algorithms are alike, that should tell you something.
It’s about how this addictive culture came to be in dating apps, and how the algorithm itself has evolved into a tool for gathering data, studying behavior, and targeting people psychologically.
Cambridge Analytica was one of the first companies to be publicly exposed for taking targeted algorithmic software and showing just how powerful that kind of technology could actually become.
Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica executive, eventually testified before the British Parliament about the company’s practices and the enormous psychological power of this kind of political targeting.
Cambridge Analytica’s technology and data operation became connected to two of the biggest political events of the decade: the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
These are companies know who you swipe on, who you pause on, what keeps you scrolling, what makes you come back..
Dems: an order of magnitude better than the Trump & Co packs of corrupt sociopaths. Trump & Co epic corruption & grifting: The Golden Age?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M-i6CsuWcM
Please, bring on a Blue Tsunami. #VoteBlue!
Speaking of Andre$$en. My husband is a FENA Whistleblower and I made a comment about it and Subastack blocked it. The SOBs.
Insightful read. Thank you. This “institutional capture” is terrifying.
You describe a well thought out systematic strategy. Is it a checkmate? Might is Right has never been more clear. Any voices of reason are made to suffer. Justice is a thin veneer, an illusion.
You have confused the two different indictments of Comey. The indictment in November wasn’t about the photos of seashells, but rather over the, nonsense, claim that he lied to Congress. The two, not one, who resigned over this indictment were the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern(?) District of Virginia, who otherwise fits your description of the prosecutor who resigned, and Comey’s son-in-law, who was one of the most respected prosecutors in that district.
The one who obtained the indictment of Comey was Lindsey Halligan, who was illegally appointed, not as prosecutor, but rather as the acting U.S. Attorney for that district. She was illegally appointed because, to keep the President from filling a U.S. Attorney’s office with acting Attorneys rather than someone needing to be confirmed by the Senate, the president is only allowed to appoint one such acting Attorney, and only for a period of about, if I remember correctly, four months. Any vacancy for the position of Acting U.S. Attorney, due to any of the term limit being reached, firing, death, or resignation, is to be appointed by the judges of the district, and not the President. If the acting Attorney is competent and their term limit ends due to the term limit, the judges typically retain them in office, otherwise they typically appoint the prosecutor that they consider the best in that district. Trump, at least until recently, has fired any judicial appointees as acting attorneys that weren’t renewals of his original appointments. After the loss of a few excellent prosecutors, several districts are now operating without anyone acting as U.S. Attorneys.
Superb reminder of what we are going through right now.
"Political scientists have a term for the pattern unfolding in front of us. They call it institutional capture, also known as state capture. I need you to understand what the phrase means, because the moment you have it, the last nineteen months stop reading like a pile of unrelated headlines and start reading like a plan."
In addition to the institutional capture, we're also getting accustomed to news that revolves around this guy's priorities. We hear all of this noise about the ballroom, the reflecting pool and all the other useless trivial stuff instead of what governing the nation might actually look like.
And then Americans just listen to it and tune it out and then it becomes normal. There's nothing normal about this, the nation's attention in the major media outlets are focused on his trivial bullshit.
We should be seeing outrage and civil unrest. Instead America just shrugs.
Thank you for the clarity and the to-do list. I really appreciate you laying it out in bite-sized chunks and including the history as well. My representatives will keep hearing an earful from me.
Project 2025 has been the playbook, put into action by people who have no use for democracy beyond leveraging our system of government, and a sizable enough percentage of the population to get in power with a narcisstic and power-hungry leader they can manipulate. But Project 2025 wasn't the start. It was the 1971 Powell Memorandum that really got the ball rolling, and former President Nixon picked up that ball by putting the author onto the Supreme Court. So much since has all been driving toward this moment in our history.
That doesn't mean, however, our fate is sealed. But those who genuinely support democracy and our Constitution, and who believe in the (still-to-be-realized) promise outlined in the Declaration of Independence need to be steadfast and fearless. We need to vote in November, and in every election thereafter. We need to raise our voices so that the voices of those who are attacking our country from the inside are drowned out. We need to keep watch over and defend those who are being detained and/or reviled. And we cannot rest. When Joe Biden was elected President, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief, as did our allies around the world. Our allies trusted us again. But even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, those allies won't breath that same sigh of relief; this time, they'll be cautious. Only through our voting consistently in support of democracy and the global and domestic rule of (US Constitutional) law will our allies, eventually, trust us again.
Also known to historians as autocratic capture
Trump an old sinner slumps in his chair, stinking of regret and liquor, waiting for death like it’s a debt collector he can’t outrun. His memories rot in his skull, every filthy choice replaying like a broken tape. He curses the world, curses himself, but mostly curses the slow crawl of time that refuses to finish him off. All that’s left is a bitter husk of a man, clinging to breath he no longer deserves.
Until the courts are willing to actually take a stand against overreach, this seems impossible to stop. The “might be illegal” from the highest court is a clue. Reading this list of experts, experienced career people forced out because they stood in the way of the administration’s agenda should be a wake up call for everyone. But I think all of us saw it. It always was about phone calls and voting. November can’t come soon enough. Something tells me that the only way to move Congress is to move a lot of these senators and representatives back home….
Accurate and chilling
Agree. We need to disrupt this pattern and can start to do so by voting and taking over majority control in the midterms.
Hungary's rejection of Orban gives me a glimmer of hope. He had sixteen years to entrench himself, though he didn't have the support of AI, which has made trump's overthrow easier/more effective.
Many similarities with Hungary, but even more differences that I think favor massive positive change in November and thereafter.
Those differences let me hope.
Flawed, not perfect Dems are at least an order of magnitude better than Trump & Co. The Golden Age for Trump & Co?
Epic corruption, extortion & rebranding campaigns are endless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzX6hpNh4WU
For Trump & Co bicycle lanes like vaccines & science base reality are hopelessly lefty... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/politics/trump-bike-lanes-funding-dei.html?smid=url-share
#VoteBlue
None of us are perfect, but most of us are good people who understand the difference between right and wrong. I see good things happening in November and thereafter.
Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk are in cahoots with Trump. Why do consumers support the businesses of people that are actively trying to destroy democracy?
We can vote with our dollars, but apathy seems to be contagious
Mitch,
I don’t dispute that many of the events you’ve listed actually happened. What I question is the leap from a collection of controversial personnel decisions and policy changes to the conclusion that the United States is experiencing ‘state capture.’ Several of your examples omit the administration’s stated rationale, several statistics aren’t sourced, and the Comey section collapses two separate indictments into one timeline. That’s advocacy, not an established fact.
Show me the evidence for the conclusion, not merely the evidence that the events occurred.
Different media outlets can take the same facts and use them differently to construct very different narratives. People can do the same.
I don’t know many MAGA people that drive Teslas. And Elon Musk sure talks like a white nationalist.
BYD makes a better car for around $10,000 US and Canada just lowered the tariffs on BYD from 100% to less than 8%.
So many complicated, intertwined business and political relationships and issues. I think it's hard for everyone to sort out. It's challenging to figure out what's true, what's exaggerated, what's out of context, what needs to change and what's wrong.
Many thanks, Mitch, for your accurate and heartfelt assessment of our state of political/social collapse. I'm a retired physician/psychiatrist and have been writing about who the real Donald Trump is: a grown man with hatred of the parents/family who abandoned him at 2yo, where his development was halted: the "terrible twos", so he hates America and is extremely rejection sensitive, so obsessed with loyalty. Details and analysis on "Greeley's Newsletter",substack.com.
My pleasure. There's too much noise, too much corruption, and too much misunderstanding, not to write, speak, litigate, and talk about these issues. Many more posts, audios, and videos are on the way.
So, Mr Jackson, is IQ47 acting? Are his dozings, befuddlements, strange speech phrasings, his awkwardmesses... performative? He did stage his own assassinations, bloody ear and everything. In these 2025-2026 cons, is he playing his finest rôle for the very best con!! on the biggest stage!! for the highest stakes!!... The World!!?
👏🏾 I think there is another part of this that people are not discussing enough: we have mistaken the existence of laws for proof that those laws can protect us.
The Constitution is not self-enforcing. A law only has power when there are people inside the government who are willing and able to enforce it—even when doing so means standing against the president, their political party or their own superiors.
That is why replacing career professionals with loyalists matters so much. The law does not necessarily have to be rewritten if the people responsible for enforcing it have already decided whom it will and will not apply to.
At that point, the country may still have courts, prosecutors and constitutional protections, but ordinary people no longer have any guarantee that those protections will actually reach them. Its belief in the law and its interpretation that I think is the issue.
I also think the manipulation of social media is also an important thing we need to discuss because it’s so seamless and adds fuel to the fire. The algorithm is why No one can conclusively agree on anything because the algorithm purposely divides people by using a proprietary blend of misinformation to get people emotional.
Emotional outrage creates attachment to people’s personal beliefs and all the tech oligarchs care about is engagement… because it makes them money.
I think the first people that need to be brought in for questioning and law reform are the ceos of the social media companies. Because their interpretation of what “the general population wants to see” manipulates the masses. No two algorithms are alike, that should tell you something.
The algorithms are a huge problem. Ever watch this (from 8 years ago) https://youtu.be/awAMTQZmvPE?si=CuY7AjyeNHBKx-oL
Yes! Brilliant 60 minutes piece .. I actually just wrote about this in my last article, “May the Dating Odds Be Ever in Your Favor.” :
https://substack.com/@mercurysheir/note/p-207225140?r=86imtk&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
It’s about how this addictive culture came to be in dating apps, and how the algorithm itself has evolved into a tool for gathering data, studying behavior, and targeting people psychologically.
Cambridge Analytica was one of the first companies to be publicly exposed for taking targeted algorithmic software and showing just how powerful that kind of technology could actually become.
Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica executive, eventually testified before the British Parliament about the company’s practices and the enormous psychological power of this kind of political targeting.
Cambridge Analytica’s technology and data operation became connected to two of the biggest political events of the decade: the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
These are companies know who you swipe on, who you pause on, what keeps you scrolling, what makes you come back..
We are so done for. Skynet is here.
100%. So sad for all of us. Thank you for sharing an avenue for “hope.”