It's Sunday, August the 24th, I'm Ali Velshi, and we begin this hour with a reality check, a crucial one.

The collapse of democracy is a strange, almost surreal thing. It can be abstract and hard to recognize in the moment.

At first, it just feels like

politics. It's messy. It's frustrating and sometimes a bit removed from one's day to day life.

But then the guardrails that we've taken for granted begin to topple one after another. A National

Guard unit deployed to a city that never asked for it. Key parts of the nation's electoral process attacked as illegitimate. Rules of federal judges shrugged off as optional.

Neighbors disappeared into ice vans. Critics and political opponents suddenly faced with criminal

probes. The media behaving in ways designed not to trigger the ire of the ruling party.

Each new abuse is justified as temporary,

necessary, even an emergency. Until one day, it's not temporary at all. Until one day, the

justification stop altogether because one's power is absolute, it no longer feels the need to

explain itself. At best, each assault may seem

like an outlier until the day you wake up and realize the system itself has become unrecognizable.

Well, that's where we are right now. It's not where we're headed. It's where we are. The tragedy of what's unfolding and the danger of

what's ahead will be compounded if American citizens en masse, all of us, do not recognize this

moment for what it is. Understandably, unless it touches you directly, it's easy to say

sometimes to miss what's being taken away. We've been telling ourselves the

courts will stop it. Congress will step in. Surely someone will draw the line. Yet one by one,

those lines have already been crossed. Just look around. Last night, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker

had to publicly rebuke President Trump's reported plan to send military troops into Illinois.

Pritzker made clear. Illinois has asked for no such help. Doesn't need that help. There's no

emergency on the ground. His warning was blunt. Trump is, quote, attempting to manufacture a crisis,

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