When Does the Clock Strike Four for Donald Trump?

Retribution, persecution, and the fall of a shrinking republic

At four o’clock, the world was supposed to change. That was the promise of a petty tyrant in a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode, the tale of a small man with a large grievance who believed he could purge society of its evils. His plan was simple: when the clock struck the appointed hour, every wicked soul—determined, naturally, by him—would shrink to two feet tall, exposed for what they truly were. He waited with smug certainty, convinced of his moral authority. And then, as the clock tolled four, the spell worked—just not as he expected. The person who became two feet tall was him, shrunken by his own hatred, revealed as the very thing he had denounced.

From The Twilight Zone’s “Four O’Clock,” Theodore Bikel as Oliver Crangel, now two feet tall, a stone-thrower who broke the windows of his own glass house.

Donald Trump is our four o’clock man. For years, he has cast his spell on the nation, pointing at “corruption,” “fraud,” “enemies of the people,” and “radical leftists” who would destroy America.

His genius, if it can be called that, lies in projection honed to a dark art: he rails against rigged systems he manipulates, cries witch hunt while unleashing a torrent of persecutions, and warns of authoritarianism while drafting its decrees—yet millions applaud, blind to the conjurer’s trick. The charges are mirrors, not truths. The corruption is his, the fraud is his, the contempt for law and democracy is his.

Like Serling’s petty tyrant, he sees evil everywhere but within, smugly awaiting four o’clock, never imagining that when the hour strikes, it is he who will be two feet tall, exposed as nothing more than a dealer in petulance and poison.

The United States is living inside that parable now. Our conjurer stands at the podium, claiming that his enemies are corrupt, violent, and dangerous — while wielding the very tools of corruption, violence, and danger himself. Projection isn’t just his habit; it’s his governing philosophy.

It would be comic if it weren’t so catastrophic, farcical if it weren’t so fatal to the republic that once prided itself on seeing through precisely this sort of gold-plated huckster. A man who sits on a throne of grievance, railing against “weaponization” while pointing every available weapon at his perceived enemies.

Consider the exquisite irony. The very people whose jobs he outsourced, whose wages he stiffed, whose contractors he bankrupted, whose small businesses he smothered in litigation… these are the people who now hail him as savior. It is as if the chickens elected Colonel Sanders as their shop steward. A man who has never turned a wrench or swung a hammer, whose only experience with machinery has been a telephone or TV remote, has somehow become the tribune of those who shower after work rather than before it. He tells them he feels their pain, even as he wouldn’t recognize a time card if it were stapled to the score sheet of his golf game.

And yet the economic fraud pales in contrast to the assault on democracy itself, and it is no longer theoretical.

A grand jury indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has now been unsealed—not as justice, but as vengeance. You can see the headline, now, can’t you?

It’s the headline we deserve to see but never will.

It is, however, the perfect Trump flourish: accuse opponents of “weaponizing” the Justice Department while doing exactly that, openly. Federal prosecutors long ago found no case, but what does that matter? Show trials don’t require merit, only spectacle, and Trump has always been about the show to indulge his own peevish pettiness. He insists it’s the Democrats who turned justice into politics, even as he drags the country into a parody of Stalinist theater. In Trump’s world, every accusation is a confession, every confession a weapon.

Comey, for his part, is calling Trump’s bluff, saying, “Let’s have a trial.”

Meanwhile, in Portland, projection is taking a darker turn. “Paid terrorists,” Trump declares without evidence, are laying siege to the city.

Just imagine the desperate plea from inside Portland’s city limits:

It would be funny if it weren’t followed by real orders to deploy federal troops. Local leaders, with evidence, reject the premise, but for Donald Trump, it’s about the performance, and performance doesn’t depend on reality. It depends only on keeping the faithful in servitude, convincing them that an imaginary enemy is at the gate and only he can keep them at bay.

And now comes the executive order—NSPM-7—which identifies “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-American” sentiments as precursors of violent extremism. (image here) In other words, dissent itself is suspect. Four thousand new counter-terror officers will be tasked with preventing crimes that have not yet happened. The film, “Minority Report,” as policy. To disagree is to endanger. To oppose is to be marked. Donate to the wrong candidate? Raise your hand at the wrong rally? Post the wrong words online? You may as well have “terrorist sympathizer” tattooed on your forehead, like a modern-day yellow star stitched to your clothing.

From the NSPM-7 directive

How is any of this helping the average citizen trying to put food on the table or pay the monthly rent? Masked goons in tactical gear patrolling the streets of Memphis, Portland, or the nation’s capital? How does that help Midwestern farmers facing recession and potential bankruptcy because tariffs prevent foreign nations from buying their crops? Yes! Arrest that brown person. That’ll solve everything.

Instead, the economy wheezes. Consumer enthusiasm is plummeting, home sales are down, construction has stalled, and those tariffs are driving up prices.

And while turning paranoia into policy, he tends to the real prize: his wallet. Since January, disclosures show he has purchased over $100 million in bonds—more than 600 transactions—whose value will spike if interest rates fall. And you wonder why he’s pressuring Fed Chair Jerome Powell to lower those rates? Could it be…? Forbes now pegs his fortune at over $5 billion, more than double his wealth from last year, thanks not just to bonds but to investor speculation tied to his digital ventures, and even a meme coin bearing his name.

Add to that his endless side hustle of sneakers, Bibles, and trading cards hawked to his flock, and you begin to see the con in full flower.

Funny how the economy may collapse for you, but not for him. The question isn’t whether he’s working for the working stiff but whether he even knows what one is, or cares.

Yet, his legion of followers, so many of them struggling to make ends meet, buy the tchotchkes regardless, because the spell flatters them, tells them their resentments are noble and their hatreds justified.

Witness, for instance, in a recent Daily Caller column, editor Geoffrey Ingersoll flatly declared, “Today, I choose violence… Is this a call for violence? Yes. Explicitly, it is.”

The message was not metaphor but marching orders: “Force corrupt police to intervene. I want blood in the streets.”

Further adding, “Democracy will survive if James Comey spends time in jail… Let’s do Fauci next, how about that? … Then let’s investigate Ilhan Omar, AOC, Barack Obama, and everyone in Clinton world. Let’s put Biden world through the wringer… As long as the arrest and adjudication process absolutely ruins them.”

The only faint relief in the piece came from readers who recoiled at the venom in the comments section, mocking, rejecting, and condemning the call to bloodshed. It was a reminder that even within the fever swamps, not everyone is prepared to drink poison. But the fact that such rhetoric can appear in a mainstream conservative outlet at all should give us pause. When editors toy with open violence, the line between propaganda and provocation blurs, and history tells us what comes next.

But spells are fragile things. Eventually, projection collapses. Eventually, the curtain pulls back and the truth appears in miniature: a mean little man, raging at a world that never loved him as much as he loved himself.

The German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller warned us what silence buys under tyranny: first they come for others, and we do not speak; finally they come for us, and there is no one left. Rod Serling, dealing with a subject he felt strongly about, sharpened the warning in that Twilight Zone episode: the tyrant shrinks under the weight of his own malice.

Four o’clock can’t come soon enough.