The president tonight will make an “address to the nation,” and even that’s a lie. It’s instead an address to the 36% of Americans who are likely to believe him, including what’s expected to be his relitigating “widespread voter fraud” (34 documented cases) in the 2020 election.

What makes tonight sobering is that Trump doesn’t need the other 64% of America, whose concerns, six years later, include inflation, an unwinnable war of aggression and ICE homicides.

All Mr. Trump needs are True Believers. They can guarantee a perpetual stay in power that will last beyond his lifetime.

History is instructive.

–In 1793, Robespierre’s Jacobins were a minority in the National Convention, the French revolutionary government. Military setbacks and the attempt by the royal family to flee France generated enough fear to put Robespierre in power. The Reign of Terror. symbolized by the guillotine–the “National Barber”–followed, until Robespierre himself died as his blade fell.

–Lenin’s faction of the Russian socialist movement were “Bolsheviks”–the majority. That’s a lie. Lenin’s followers were far outnumbered by more moderate socialists, led, from March 1917, by Alexander Kerensky. In October, Lenin and his then-comrade, Leon Trotsky. engineered a coup that toppled Kerensky. Opposition parties were banned. newspapers shut down a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (working class) began.

–In 1922 Italy, 50,000 Blackshirts staged the March on Rome. Their leader, Mussolini, took a train. Frustrated by a socialist parliamentary majority in the 1920 elections and an anti-Fascist general strike a year later (when the Fascists won two of 535 seats in the Italian parliament), Mussolini gambled. He was betting against a government that had signed an unpopular peace treaty and on a stagnant economy. He won. The government collapsed.

–In the midst of a Depression that hit an already weakened economy, Hitler’s National Socialists won 38%–their electoral high-water mark–to the Reichstag. They used their power to delay legislation, heckle opposition speakers and render the Reichstag impotent. That immobilization led to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Four weeks later, the Reichstag was set afire by an arsonist. A convenient suspect, a Dutch communist, was guillotined the following January. In the meantime, due to the “National Emergency” represented by the fire, Hitler became Fuhrer.

Our Reichstag Fire moment may or may not come tonight. But it’s getting closer all time—and all it takes is a minority to make a dictatorship.