Following the announcement of the verdict, Donald Jay Trump labeled the New York trial as a “scam” and “a rigged trial,” and proclaimed, “I'm willing to do whatever I have to do to save our country and to save our Constitution.”

Given Trump’s tenacity and determination, he will likely win this round. He may even succeed and become President again, but he cannot alter the trajectory of this nation—the course has already been set.

The reality is that America did not defeat communism; she adopted it. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn astutely observed, “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while for many people in the West, it is a living lion.” Expelled from Russia, this dead dog acquired a new life in the United States and regained vitality to become a living lion within the Democratic Party. The Party has gained almost absolute dominance over the media, electoral process, federal law enforcement, and the judicial branch, and it’s infused the educational system with Marxist ideology.

Trump is a symbol of resistance and instills an inordinate fear in Democrats who aspire to socialism. Their concern is not so much that he can reverse the trend but that he will potentially impede the process and slow it down. The Democrats have gotten very close to imposing complete control over this nation politically, economically, and ideologically. This is their moment; they want socialism now.

The ideology gives the Democrats the necessary steadfastness and determination. It also gives them the right to repress others.

Image of the morph from Biden to Stalin by Andrea Widburg

The conviction of the former President of the United States and presumptive GOP nominee for the 2024 presidential elections in New York for trivial infractions, along with the ongoing legal proceedings in Florida, Washington, D.C., and Georgia, signifies a culmination of a profound ideological shift toward authoritarianism that has slowly been taking place in the last sixty years.

It is important to highlight that the Republican Party leadership, who is also feeling threatened by Trump’s presidency, has chosen to remain silent in the face of Democrats’ vicious prosecution of their presidential nominee.

Throughout history, tyrants have utilized the legal systems to further their agendas. Imprisoning and executing political opponents have long been employed to acquire or maintain power. In that sense, Trump’s trials are not unprecedented. Indeed, the trials, the prosecution witnesses, the evidence, the press coverage, the NY verdict, and the whole process are drawing parallels to Stalin’s repression of political opponents, albeit with two notable distinctions.

First, the American system is significantly more compassionate than Stalin’s. There are no broken bones, no electric shocks, and no forced tooth extractions.

Second, Stalin’s prosecutors tried to maintain the facade of dispensing justice. As the Soviet Procurator-General Roman Rudenko, who oversaw numerous trials and executions during Stalin’s reign of terror, used to say, “The most important thing during an investigation is to avoid self-incrimination.” The American counterparts to the Stalin-era prosecutors, on the other hand, display such a high level of confidence in their impunity that they openly disregard the need to uphold even the most minimal appearance of fairness and impartiality.

Our judicial system and law enforcement have become the instruments of violence aimed at intimidating the masses and suppressing dissent. In recent years, thousands of individuals who support Trump have been prosecuted and received lengthy prison terms, with over 1,400 tied to the January 6 protest.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, colorfully described the quintessential component of this new immoral order:

But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence.

For the last twelve years, this nation has been bombarded with incessant lies, unsubstantiated allegations, manufactured evidence, and political cover-ups.

We have been told that our president was a Russian agent who colluded with Vladimir Putin to alter the outcome of the 2016 elections. Accusations were equated with prima facie evidence; denials were interpreted as cover-ups. Some elected officials who couldn’t even spell “impeachment” demanded one without any substantiation.

After the release of Robert Mueller’s report, we learned that the accusations were bogus, the evidence was a forgery, the investigators were corrupt, and the whole affair was “a phantasm.” Yet, nobody responsible for conducting politically motivated investigations and wasting millions of public funds faced legal consequences.

The current Trump trials are just the continuation of the same, though at a more elevated and cynical level.

Sixty years ago, in 1964, Ronald Reagan gave a speech on behalf of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that would become known as “A Time for Choosing.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.

Tragically, the children have diluted their liberty inheritance and become shamefully indifferent to good and evil. Indeed, Reagan’s ardent warning is coming to fruition. A blanket of tyranny and fanaticism is covering America.

Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a think tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. He can be reached at alexander.g.markovsky@gmail.com.