Oh no, YOU are not "clueless" - you stated the situation as it stands quick and to the point. Most people don't comprehend even that little of the overall perspective. I wasn't even thinking about Trump or Sessions - just stating the obvious historical progression of events. We are approaching a crossroads, if we aren't there already, that all nations face at some time or another, sometimes repeatedly - institutional totalitarianism is either confronted and exterminated, or it eventually expands, dominates and envelopes all. That's it, in black & white. We're not observing someone else's history & events from afar, reading about it in a book, watching it in some movie. We are in it, living it, right now.
No question that this country is on the brink of something. We definitely haven’t been a Constitutional republic for a very long time, and, as you say, states seem to follow very similar paths historically, eventually reaching a point where something has to break.