This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/How-close-is-the-U-S-to-a-dictatorship-10“

This question assumes that a threshold is crossed, and a switch flips between a non-dictatorship and a dictatorship. The reality is that there is a transitional stage between the two states.

If you think of the process as day becoming night, twilight occurs between the two unless you live on the equator.

The U.S. is in the twilight stage of becoming a dictatorship and already exhibits key stages of the transition into darkness, such as launching a strategic assault on private law firms that would challenge his executive orders and other actions in court. His strategy has been to intimidate those entities that would restrain his efforts to achieve a complete dictatorship.

Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps are two major law firms that have capitulated to Trump’s bullying. These entities are essentially among the nation’s final layers of protection against a full manifestation into a dictatorship. If these protections fail, full-on chaos is the only option for the people. There won’t be enough time to hold out for another almost two years for a mid-term election. Americans will have no choice but to embrace a violent uprising because defeating these entities essentially guarantees he has the full cooperation of the courts to do what he pleases.

That means he will likely declare Martial Law to tamp down any resistance to furthering his stranglehold on the nation.

Americans are on the precipice of losing their democracy completely. Even though they’ve endured the pseudo-democracy of a corporatocracy for the last more than one decade, they’re entering entirely new territory if Trump succeeds in defeating enough law firms to gain his legal stranglehold over the nation.

To answer this question from the perspective of a countdown to midnight clock used to determine how close the world has been to nuclear annihilation, the U.S. is best expressed through a song by Midnight Oil, “Minutes to Midnight”:

Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(Minutes to midnight)
Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(God is a good man)
Ah, clock on the world
(Yes, he’s a good man)
Driving a dump truck up to the sun
(Is he a soul man?)
A sigh in the human heart
(Three sides to every god)

I look at the clock on the wall
It says three minutes to midnight
Faith is blind when we’re so near

But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
And you can’t see me