Trump has outflanked the Civil War as the greatest threat to the U.S.

While there's more persevering truth than some will concede in the wrenching paradox of the Lost Cause as the Civil War's victor in terms of reactionary sentiment, the conflict's self-contradiction ends there. In material terms the Confederacy went down to defeat, failing in its weaponized attempt to destroy American constitutionalism.

Forty-nine months. Such was the bloody duration of the slavocracy's bid to murder what the Founders created. And for 160 years thereafter the demagogically induced inferno lingered in our national memory as the U.S. Constitution's most powerful, yet thwarted, assassin.

In the realm of future endangerments as imagined, no constitution killer could ever be of greater strength than that born of the 19th-century's sectional crisis. Its potential was never really imagined because it was simply unthinkable.

Perhaps it was that — the unthinkability of it all, stuck tenaciously in our collective mindset — which has muddled in the national brain the extraordinary clarity of Donald Trump's bloodless victory in the selfsame war the Confederacy lost. What's more, he's done in two months what the South couldn't do in 49.

A dictatorship by any other name would smell as rancid, assuming our minds and senses were open to its squalid reality. We'd then be capable of recognizing and furthermore calling out dictatorial acts for what they are.

What they're not are instances of merely "overstepping his executive authority," which the New York Times euphemistically prefers. Another lexical evasion of fait accompli dictatorship that's deployed frequently by the press is that of denoting a "constitutional crisis" — a phrase that mistakenly implies only the gestation of bad things.

Indeed when the Times asked Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan if the U.S. has reached the "tipping point" of a constitutional crisis — i.e., a crisis in development — she set the paper straight: "We’re past the first point already."

University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq also dismissed the common usage of "constitutional crisis" as "generally unhelpful," saying "I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced."

There's a precise description of that "completely different kind" of government which until now was foreign in its application to the United States. It is this, as laid out by Jamal Greene, professor of law at Columbia University: "[Trump] is asserting dictatorial power and 'constitutional crisis' doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation."

The Fourth Estate's unwillingness to call Trump's dictatorship by its clearly applicable name is disturbing, even more so than the public's muddlement, in the sense that more is expected from the press. Also, of what value is press freedom if dictatorialism is even freer to hide behind press euphemisms?

It remains damn near unbelievable that one ignorant demagogue has managed to do in 60 days what the entire Confederate army was unable to do in four years. But I suppose killing what the Founders created was made a bit easier by the public thinking it couldn't be done because there was no press to tell them that a demagogue was doing it.