Part 2: As We Transition from Reprisal Phase to the Full Brazen Phase What Comes Next Is Escalating and Exponential Amounts of Lying
- john raymond
- 4 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The collapse of the Trump White House’s reprisal machinery marks a decisive inflection point in the trajectory of this administration’s power. For more than one hundred days, retaliation was the organizing principle of governance: investigations weaponized, enemies targeted, institutions bent toward the leader’s grievances.
But returns have diminished to the vanishing point. Letitia James’ grand jury victory and James Comey’s effective vindication through statute-of-limitations expiry—after earlier cases against both were tossed—demonstrate that the reprisal phase is no longer functional. It has stopped deterring. It has stopped intimidating. It has stopped working.
A regime that cannot punish its enemies cannot maintain the illusion of control, and it is that loss of control that defines the transition now underway.
What replaces reprisal is bunkerization. A White House once eager to project dominance is now increasingly reactive, forced backward by converging lines of legal, political, and informational pressure.
The Epstein Transparency Act tears at the administration’s last shield of secrecy. War-crimes allegations in the Caribbean introduce international scrutiny that cannot be spun away. Questions about cognition, MRIs, and presidential sleep patterns cut directly into public confidence at the level of physical capacity and legitimacy.
A government on the offensive does not worry about medical reports or transparency obligations. A government on the defensive does. These pressures are not isolated. They mark a coordinated shift in the balance of power: the White House no longer shapes events; events shape the White House.
The resulting narrative reversal is stark. Trump’s attacks on Mark Kelly and others—once framed as aggressive shows of strength—now appear as footnotes to the larger investigations that cast Kelly and his colleagues as the heroes resisting abuses of state power.
Trump, Hegseth, and their DOJ and FBI adjuncts increasingly occupy the role of central antagonists. A villain-hero axis inverted is not easily reinverted. Once narrative legitimacy is lost, reprisals lose the symbolic fuel that made them possible. That legitimacy is gone, and the political costs are rapidly being priced in.
The Republican Party has begun to feel those costs. The earliest defections come from the margins—Marjorie Taylor Greene’s distance, the quiet dissent of others who sense the shift in equilibrium. These are not ideological conversions; they are survival calculations.
Polling for Trump and the GOP is collapsing in parallel, a sign not of temporary turbulence but of structural decay. When a system begins to fracture at its edges, the center cannot remain intact for long.
Into this vacuum emerges the brazen phase. I described this phase recently: when subtle coercion fails, when reprisals stop working, the regime turns to open, shameless displays of transgression. Witkoff and Kushner traveling to Moscow—despite irrefutable evidence of Witkoff’s alignment with Putin—is the perfect exemplar. The lawless boat strikes another.
This is not strategy; it is brazenness as survival instinct. It is the authoritarian’s equivalent of shouting over the noise in a burning building.
Yet even the brazen phase now shows signs of internal failure. The lies are so grotesque—drug prices “down 500%,” for example—that they no longer generate confusion or deference. They generate ridicule.
Mark Kelly remains untouched by the barrage of White House attacks because the narrative terrain has shifted beyond Trump’s reach. When brazen lies fail to move opinion, the regime loses its second-to-last tool of manipulation. Only one remains, loyalist lying at staggering rates themselves creating an exponential number of regime protecting lies.
This is why the Epstein Transparency Act stands as the first true crack in the façade. It is not merely a legal development; it is a structural breach in the information-control regime.
Once breached, these structures cannot be rebuilt. Collapse, in such systems, proceeds slowly at first, then suddenly. We are n0w entering the “suddenly” portion.
What follows is predictable. As tools of reprisal, narrative control, and brazen intimidation fail, the regime retreats to its final instrument of survival: escalating, exponential lying.
The lies will grow larger, bolder, more foolish, more insulting to public intelligence. They will be told with straight faces by the likes of Bondi and Bessent even as the edifice behind them disintegrates. Lies become the last currency of a collapsing system. They compensate for the absence of power, the absence of legitimacy, and the absence of control.
Personnel instability will punctuate this decline. Trump may consider firing Hegseth or Patel, but loyalty supersedes competence, optics, or exposure. They are loyal; therefore they still remain. In late-stage authoritarian collapse, loyalty forms the final perimeter around the leader when all other mechanisms and machinations have failed.
The sequence is therefore unmistakable: reprisal collapses, bunkerization intensifies, the brazen phase asserts itself, and, as even that phase loses traction, lying becomes exponential.
This is not chaos. It is the predictable progression of a regime that has lost every instrument of coercion except the ability to fabricate.
And when fabrication becomes the only remaining weapon, the end is made legible counterintuitively because of the lies.