The Coup Ain’t Coming. It’s Already Here

I waited more than a week to write this piece because I was trying to see something. 

I wanted to see if America would flinch — if there’d be sirens, alerts, and emergency briefings. Something, after Steve Bannon said there is a plan for Donald Trump to run for a third term, with “smart workarounds” that will be revealed at the “appropriate time.”

But nothing happened.

There were no breaking news banners. No sirens. No national panic. And no front-page alarm that a man once convicted of fraud just admitted, on air, that a coup is being engineered in plain sight.

The silence was louder than the threat. And that silence tells us everything we need to know about where we are as a nation. We are numb, conditioned, and halfway to surrender. 

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When I was an undergrad student at Johns Hopkins University, I took a course called The Third Reich. That class changed how I read the news and understood the psychology of authoritarianism that conditions people to accept and perpetrate evil. 

I learned that Hitler came to power by repetition and by testing the limits of people’s disbelief. I learned that fascism begins with fatigue, with propaganda disguised as patriotism, and ordinary people ignoring the warning signs. That’s what I heard in Bannon’s voice. His is the echo of history teaching itself new tricks.

Steve Bannon didn’t speculate about Trump running for president again. He didn’t say that Trump wants to run for a third term. He announced it. He said there’s already a plan and “mechanisms” in place. To my ears, that’s a public beta test of authoritarian rule, a bold declaration of intent to defy the Constitution, and a dare for the country to stop it. That’s a man who is confident that America’s institutions are too slow, too tired, and too divided to resist.

When Bannon says there are “smart workarounds,” what he’s really saying is: we’ve already mapped out the loopholes. Trump and his people are studying the seams of democracy like pickpockets, figuring out which institutions will comply, which courts will stall, which networks will distract, and which Americans will be too exhausted or afraid to fight.

Think about the audacity of Bannon’s declaration in a so-called democracy. He’s talking about a sitting president potentially suspending the very limits of power that define the presidency itself. 

And what did America do? 

Shrugged. 

Scrolled. 

Changed the channel. 

That’s because we’ve become so desensitized by this administration’s chaos that an open threat to the Constitution barely registers as breaking news anymore.

Our nervous systems are shot because the nonstop outrage has rewired the national brain for survival and not discernment. We’ve learned to metabolize crises like background noise and hits of anxiety in a 24-hour feed. This is what the psychological warfare of authoritarianism does. It floods people with so much instability that they stop distinguishing danger from daily life. Once exhaustion replaces outrage, obedience feels like relief.

It’s not just exhaustion, though; it’s imitation. Authoritarianism feeds on our instinct to look around and take cues from each other. When no one panics, folks learn not to panic. When nobody resists, resistance starts to feel extreme. That’s how silence becomes contagious. The psychology of the bystander is social mirroring. People convince themselves that if the threat were real, surely someone else would be acting. So they wait. And wait. Until waiting becomes the new normal. And then it becomes too late.

When Bannon says there are “smart workarounds,” what he’s really describing is a psychological operation. He’s testing the threshold of disbelief. How far can he bend reality before the public mind breaks? He knows that if you repeat the impossible often enough, then people stop processing it as impossible. The human brain protects itself from cognitive overload by normalizing the absurd. That’s why coups today don’t need tanks in the streets. They need repetition. They need noise. They need a population too overstimulated to tell shock from routine.

We need to understand this coup not just as a political act but as a neurological campaign. Every shutdown, every ICE raid, every headline about food stamps or missed paychecks, every “breaking” outrage that leads nowhere chips away at people’s sense of agency. Economic stress floods the body with stress hormones like cortisol, which shrinks the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain that plans, resists, and protests. When you’re trying to survive, you don’t strategize; you comply. Bannon and his kind are counting on a nation too physiologically exhausted to fight back.

The shutdowns, missed paychecks, and disappearing food stamps are experiments in compliance. Keep people one paycheck away from ruin, and you never have to point a gun at them because hunger disciplines the body better than handcuffs. Fear of eviction keeps workers quiet. Debt keeps voters docile. Authoritarians don’t just seize power; they squeeze survival until submission feels like stability.

It’s trauma as governance.

Black folks have felt this rhythm before. We know what it looks like when power breaks you with dread. During Reconstruction and the Jim Crow eras, the violence was constant and unpredictable. That’s what made it effective. Our ancestors and elders never knew when night riders would show up, so their bodies learned to live in fear and hypervigilance. Each era used law, propaganda, and violence to make inequality feel natural and resistance feel futile. 

This administration is running the same program at scale. Consider them as digital night riders, algorithmic anxiety, and institutional terror made banal. They don’t need to silence the population. They just need to make the population tired.

That’s the coup: a government that governs by depletion. The coup isn’t coming. It’s already here.

You can see it in the kaleidoscope of crises designed to disorient you. The troops deployed under the pretext of “order.” The censorship of dissenting voices online. The government shutdown stalled food stamps and paychecks for millions. How much deprivation the people tolerate before they riot? The court cases gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Each act might seem separate, but together they form the single machinery of democratic suffocation.

Bannon’s statement was a hypnotic command and an invitation for us to accept inevitability. The media, meanwhile, treated Bannon’s confession like just another segment and moved on. Gossip. Every time they hand Bannon a microphone without interrogation, they normalize his madness. They let the theater of democracy continue while the foundation is being sawed through underneath.

The media isn’t just failing to sound the alarm; it’s part of the tranquilizer. Every chyron, every “both-sides” panel, every breathless segment that treats fascism like theater is a sedative disguised as journalism. The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t inform, it anesthetizes. It converts existential threats into consumable drama, giving the illusion of awareness while feeding the addiction to outrage. That’s the trap. The press keeps us stimulated enough to watch, but too numb to act. The coup doesn’t need to hide when the cameras themselves become part of the camouflage.

But awareness is resistance, and clarity is a weapon.

Every fascist regime depends on confusion to survive, and every empire falls the moment its people start seeing clearly. The antidote to psychological warfare isn’t hope, it’s lucidity. It’s the discipline of refusing to look away. We don’t need new heroes; we need citizens who are awake. We’ve inherited the muscle memory of survival from people who faced night riders, lynch mobs, and voter suppression far worse than this, and we still found a way to fight and live. 

The coup doesn’t need tanks or generals. It needs your disbelief. Our silence and apathy will finish what they started.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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The Coup Ain’t Coming. It’s Already Here was originally published on newsone.com