What do you get when you arm an astoundingly malicious and narcissistic personality with nearly limitless power? Many bad outcomes, including a Donald Trump as U.S. president using the power of the federal government to pursue a white-supremacist agenda. But that is not all. Trump has populated his administration with battalions of bootlicking enablers, many of them shockingly unsuited for the offices they hold, but all of them dangerous as facilitators of his ultimate plan.
Then there is the Republican-controlled legislature. Congress should be a check on the power of the presidency, or so it is suggested in a quaint document called the U.S. Constitution, but today’s controlling factions in the U.S. House and Senate are a world-class collection of invertebrates, not just useless to the country but dangerous to it in their uselessness.
The courts and the citizens who are loyal to constitutional order appear to be the final bulwarks against tyranny.
Yes, my fellow Americans. This is where we are.
Some Americans, I know, are delighted by what is unfolding. Obviously, those are the people of Trump’s camp. Some support the white-supremacist vision and eagerly await what they think it has in store for the country and for them personally. But some who voted for Trump did not think past the price of eggs in deciding to whom they would give their votes. More’s the pity.
What do we see unfolding in the country under Trump 2.0?
Science is being attacked, disparaged and dismantled. After liberal democracy itself, the science conducted in the United States is arguably the largest contributor to this country’s global status as “great,” and the endurance of American science, made possible in large part by the work of numberless immigrants, has sustained that greatness.
But Trump cannot perceive that. For reasons beyond normal comprehension, he sees science as a threat: in climatology; in disease prevention; in energy-efficiency. Science even took care of him when he came down with the coronavirus, and science makes Truth Social function so that he can use it to disseminate his lies about the 2020 election, attack anyone who disagrees with him on any issue and trumpet his supposed greatness.
American Democracy itself is under assault, but expressly in service of a white-supremacist design. Trump won the presidency in 2016 and found the outcome satisfactory. He lost in 2020 and launched a campaign of dangerous lies about having been robbed of a supposed victory. The result was that an army of his supporters attacked the Congress at his instigation and provocation on Jan. 6, 2021, as that body was certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the election held in November 2020. This man who was and is again president has proved himself to be an enemy of American democracy.
The rule of law is being twisted and perverted by a felon — 34 times guilty, lest we forget — to advance his dishonest purposes. Is there anything more ridiculous than Donald Trump’s braying night and day about the odious criminals blemishing the image and safety of the country’s great cities. Has he lately looked into a mirror with any discernment? If he has, he will have seen the felon who pardoned well over 1,000 people accused or convicted in connection with that disgraceful attack on the Congress and on our democracy. He will have seen a shameless hypocrite who always works to put himself and his allies above the law while insisting that people he dislikes abide by it, even be victimized by it.
This country’s commitment to international law and ideals — a fidelity that historically has not been all that much to celebrate — now sits squarely atop “that great dust heap called history.” For reasons that may be known only to God, to Trump and to Vladimir Putin, Trump cannot see the war between Russia and Ukraine in plain terms: Russia under Putin invaded its smaller neighbor without provocation. Yet Trump seems determined to find a way to stab Ukraine in the back to gratify some bizarre libido that Putin obviously excites in him.
Religion, too, is being perverted. U.S. Christian nationalism is marching side by side with white supremacy and cheering it on so that together they can effect a takeover of the country’s command posts: federal, state and municipal; civic and martial. And Trump’s pose as a Christian is just farcical. Consider his oft-repeated declaration that the Bible is his favorite book. He can tell that story to those two Corinthians of his. In fact, I am quite certain that his favorite book is the particular ghostwritten fiction about his life that has taken money out of the pockets of the largest number of suckers. Trump is no more Christian than Satan is.
But immigration policy, including the mass-deportation campaign and the motives behind it, may be where Trump’s most flagrant violations of decency are to be seen. To be clear, no properly run country can allow people to stream into its territory virtually unchecked and by the millions, and the United States absolutely has a duty to straighten out this mess. It cannot countenance a shadow society comprising millions. The Democrats should have sorted this out long ago, but they have been sadly timid on that subject, as on crime (but let us save that for a separate broadside).
Trump’s behavior toward the undocumented immigrants he wants out of the country is deeply immoral. He is terrorizing brown and black immigrants, particularly, with jackboot tactics and with lies that they are “the worst of the worst.” I know many who are far finer people than Trump could ever hope to be. And his transfers of immigrants to summary imprisonment in El Salvador and to third countries to which they have absolutely no connection reveal his extraordinary depravity.
What is the real purpose of this policy? I believe that it is to reduce as far as possible the nonwhite population of this country — in service of his white-supremacist design. The infamous Fourteen Words, the Nicene Creed of white supremacy, are embedded in this policy. Don’t know what those words are? “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
In keeping with that perverse plan, he has imported white South Africans of the Boer stripe who he claims need to be rescued from “genocide” at the hands of black South Africans. That genocide is his own invention, of course. If he really wants to rescue a people from what seems much closer to genocide, should he not be bringing Palestinian civilians out of Gaza and into the United States to save them from the starvation and the slaughter being inflicted on them by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas? Of course not. Palestinians are not Trump’s kind of humanity. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu want to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, bundling the Palestinians out of there to foreign places and steal their little piece of land to use it to turn a profit. This is pure evil.
The independence of the United States’ great liberal universities is under attack, as is standard in the fascist playbook. And why should that be? It is because the universities are largely populated by critical thinkers who tend to be high-minded about questions of justice and are disinclined to fall for the crypto-eugenics philosophy and the other nonsense coming out of this aspiring dictator. I think it really bothers him that such people see him as little more than a clown, even if one who does possess the means to do great harm.
The Trump administration says it is going after the universities because of violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, to wit, antisemitism being tolerated on campuses. Antisemitism is an ancient, dangerous and disgraceful stain, and it exists, we can safely say, in every society where Jews live. But because it is an insidious pathology, it is to be found in societies and communities in which people have never even met a Jew. People with a proper knowledge of history know that antisemitism needs to be fought at every turn to be contained, but I do not believe that Donald Trump is sincere when he says he is confronting the universities over antisemitism.
This man does few things better than lying, and while he is not burdened with intelligence, in my view, he is deceitful and exceedingly crafty. He will play any card that helps him to “win,” and I believe he is playing the antisemitism-warrior card with gusto simply to humble the universities.
I end this list of Trump’s targets with the nation’s courts. In every country where a properly functioning civic system has fallen to dictatorship, the courts have been defied and intimidated, then dismantled and remade as tools of the dictator. I need not give a list of instances, but the ever-handy example of Weimar Germany’s transformation into Nazi Germany springs to mind. Accordingly, Trump and his acolytes here in Washington and across the country are assailing federal judges for even just daring to pause administration actions. Even the U.S. Supreme Court seems susceptible to defiance. After all, might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.
Here is the bottom line: Our country is facing a dreadful menace in the schemes of the Trump administration. And I believe that at the bottom of it all lies the objective of keeping control of the country in the hands of a radical white-right faction. For this group, demographic change has deprived it of the certainty that white will always be in control because of its numerical weight in the population. For this group, things have gotten out of hand: Not only has the country’s nonwhite citizen (read voting) population grown vastly, but large numbers of white citizen voters cannot be relied on to back the far right’s agenda. So drastic measures are called for. The whole electoral system must be rigged, by irregular electoral districting and whatever other measures will serve the overarching goal.
Electoral rigging is not guaranteed to yield the desired result, but there’s always the option of brute force. If one can bend the military to serve this particular corrupt purpose, nothing else matters.
Trump and his henchmen are quick-marching our society to a future that most of us will find deeply offensive if not personally dangerous. Stay woke, people! History is replete with horrors that befell societies whose majorities thought: Such things can never happen here; we are, after all, a civilized country.
But it can happen in the United States of America, and it is happening.
What am I going to do about all of this? I will not go quietly into some horrid future being manufactured by Trump and his extremist allies. Now freed from professional constraints on my speech, I am adding my voice to those already raising a clamor about the gathering danger. Most of us just want a quiet and peaceful life, but sometimes, to secure that pacific existence, we must be prepared to raise hell. I will be raising hell.
Democracy Warrior 