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In a stark warning, Dr. Jason Stanley says America is entering a dangerous period with President Trump’s growing rhetoric against the so-called “radical left” and “domestic terrorists.” “I think we are facing the moment in which a coup is happening,” Stanley warns. “This is the moment,” he says, and adds that what’s needed now is full-scale, nonviolent resistance.

Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with tanks in the streets– it often begins with a story. We break down a dangerous new disinformation campaign from the White House designed to turn “radical left violence” from a talking point into a political weapon. Donald Trump is using a manufactured narrative of crime to justify sweeping power grabs, including deploying the National Guard to Democratic-led cities, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, and labeling critics, including journalists and Democratic mayors, as enemies. It’s a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook, now being weaponized to dismantle civil infrastructure.

President Trump escalates his calls to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, which he calls “war ravaged” and “under siege.” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield is fighting to stop him, calling his threats “un-American” and “a very dangerous precedent.” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who grew up in Oregon and was just in Portland, says Trump’s characterization of the city is “absurd,” and protesters there are determined “to mock” the president.

America is built upon the principle of federalism, a form of government in which power is balanced and responsibilities are shared between the states and the federal government. The Trump administration, however, is increasingly undermining it by using the levers of the federal government to impose its ideology upon the states. “These efforts to try to insinuate federal control in areas where it’s not supposed to be operating is sort of breaking down this really important barrier that we have against a truly authoritarian government,” Vox Senior Correspondent Zack Beauchamp tells Ali Velshi.

“It will have a ripple effect all over the nation,” said Reverend Al Sharpton about an open Supreme Court case challenging the Voting Rights Act. The case, which hinges on a Louisiana congressional map, could upend the most important remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act. “Let's remember the context of the Voting Rights Act, and Section Two was because Blacks had been discriminated against, because there were all kinds of methods used to deny us the right to vote,” Reverend Sharpton said. “So how do you now reverse that, or drop that by saying, well, it was alright to be unfair.” The Supreme court is set to hear oral arguments for this case on Wednesday.

A brand new documentary from director Raoul Peck and producer Alex Gibney is a timely film centered around the writings and warnings of author George Orwell. It warns the “newspeak” of authoritarian rule is very much present in the current day. Gibney joins Ali Velshi to discuss the importance of Orwell’s works – especially at this point in history. “As a man of the world, he saw patterns of abuses of power, and he realized that they repeated themselves over and over and over again, across borders and through time,” Gibney says. “That's what makes Orwell's writing so compelling, is those simple patterns that repeat themselves over and over and over again…It's a very bleak vision of the future.”

As the Trump administration tries to exert power over American cities, Chicago has become a flashpoint where federal agents are performing immigration raids, detaining journalists, and clamping down on protests. President Trump has deployed the National Guard, but a federal judge has temporarily blocked the deployment. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson tells Ali Velshi that Trump has “declared war on the city” and that it’s incumbent on everyone “to push back fiercely against this tyrant.”

When OMB Director Russell Vought was working on Project 2025 - the blueprint for seizing power in a second Trump presidency - he spoke about how his think tank was building a rationale for invoking The Insurrection Act to deploy the military on American streets. Now, Project 2025 is here. National Guard troops have been deployed to five American cities - and worse could be on the horizon as Donald Trump and his inner circle have begun labeling a wide range of people and behaviors as “insurrectionist" in recent weeks. What we are witnessing is a real-time test of whether our democracy can survive a government that sees its own citizens as the enemy.

What does “minimum force” really look like? New videos surface showing ICE agents making arrests in broad daylight, near schools, in front of children, and on busy streets. The videos show federal agents intensifying their aggressive tactics in America’s big cities. Writer Radley Balko says, "The fact that we all have a camera in our pockets, and we have instant access to share these videos with the world, is an extremely powerful tool… These videos are having an effect."

In his novel “War and Peace,” the author Leo Tolstoy tells us that history does not unfold in discrete moments, but rather as a collection of small things that happen in a continuous, chaotic timeline. Ali Velshi explains the importance of taking in the chaotic timeline we are in, right now, before it passes us by. The survival of democracy relies on all of our collective stewardship and our recognizing the gravity of our current moment. 

The award-winning director and actor said the current climate has become “beyond McCarthy era-esque.”

In reality, there’s no difference between the White House’s shutdown contingency plan and the agenda they’ve already put into action.

All in one week, federal agents stormed a Chicago apartment complex, Donald Trump told 800 of the military’s top brass that America’s cities should be used as “training grounds” and that American citi...

On day four of the government shutdown, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries joined Ali Velshi to discuss the state of negotiations around the government shutdown – notably that they are not happenin...