The Trump train keeps on rolling. The so-called resistance is still in shock if not prematurely surrendering. Some among the mainstream news media are already engaging in what historian Timothy Snyder describes as “anticipatory obedience.”
As I desperately tried to warn the American people, the Democratic Party had no answer for such power; the elites have not and will not save we “the Americans” or our democracy and future. Now we are here, less than two months before Trump becomes president for a second time.
Part of Trump’s power and appeal as an authoritarian populist leader is that he is the main character and hero in a real-life movie that he is writing. The American people and the world are stuck in this real-life MAGAverse movie with no hope of escaping any time soon.
During an interview with Fox News last Friday, Newt Gingrich described Trump’s symbolic power in the following way, “I think the only way you can begin to understand this is to take Trump totally outside of normal American politics and recognize that he’s a mythic figure…. like some of the people who come out of the Viking sagas.”
Of course, Trump is not a Viking hero of legend. But the facts do not really matter here. It is the power of the grand narrative and a compulsion to power as a great man of history that drives Trump and the MAGA political project and why his followers are so devoted to him — even when his proposed policies will cause them great harm. What matters more to Trump’s MAGA people and other followers is how he functions as a type of permission structure, encouraging and role-modeling their worst behavior.
In his excellent recent essay “The Second Coming”, Fintan O’Toole warns that:
“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably, at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges. And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate.
Ultimately, as I and others have explained, Trump and the MAGA movement’s victory in the 2024 election (and beyond) is a function of branding and messaging. By comparison, Kamala Harris and the Democrats could not explain to the American people, in simple terms, what they represent. After their defeat in the 2024 election, the Democrats have even less clarity about their branding and messaging than they did before. When he takes power in January, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Trump will have control (again) of the world’s largest bully pulpit and megaphone: the Office of the President of the United States of America.
As promised and threatened, Trump has already announced a large increase in tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China. These tariffs are a de facto tax on the American people. Trump’s own “working class” followers, a group who supposedly voted for him because of “the economy,” will see their pocketbooks suffer greatly because of how food, fuel, housing, and other goods and services will go up in price. Trump has filled out his Cabinet and other senior positions with loyalists who will enthusiastically implement his commands, even if they are unconscionable and/or illegal.
As part of his plans for autocratic rule, Trump has chosen Kash Patel to be his Director of the FBI. Patel’s primary role will be to protect and advance Trump’s personal and political interests and agenda. And as in other autocracies and authoritarian regimes, Trump is the state.
Predictably, the institutionalists and the defenders of American democracy and norms are responding with outrage, terror and disgust at the possibility of Patel being given such power and authority. In a new essay at The Atlantic, Tom Nichols describes Trump’s selection of Patel in the following terms:
The Russians speak of the “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.
If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.
The early-20th-century Peruvian strongman Óscar R. Benavides once stated a simple principle that Trump now appears to be pursuing when he said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” It falls now to the Republican members of the Senate to decide whether Trump can impose this formula on the United States.
Writing in her newsletter, Notes From an American, Heather Cox Richardson observes:
His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.
Congress — which represents the American people — designed governmental institutions like the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Defense to support the mission of the Constitution, which is the fundamental law of the United States of America. The Constitution is not partisan, and in 1883, after a mentally ill disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress passed a law requiring that the people who staff government offices be hired on the basis of their skills, not their partisanship.
The people who work in governmental institutions — and therefore the institutions themselves—are rather like the ballast that keeps a ship upright and balanced in different weathers. Nonpartisan government officials who clock in to do their job keep the government running smoothly and according to the law no matter whom voters elect to the presidency.
It is precisely that stability of the American state that MAGA leaders want to destroy. In their view, the modern American state has weakened the nation by trying to enforce equality for all Americans, making women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities equal to white, Christian men. But they have been unable to persuade voters to vote away the institutions that support the modern state.
Patel’s nomination is one more attempt by Trump to test the limits of the country’s political norms and traditions — and to test the Republicans in the Senate and their loyalty to him and the MAGA movement. Will the Republicans in Congress demand that it be treated as a co-equal branch of government, or will they surrender that constitutionally mandated responsibility and oversight to Trump? Based on their larger pattern of behavior, it appears much more likely than not that the Republicans in the Senate (and Congress as a whole) will acquiesce and prostrate themselves before Trump when he likely puts his Cabinet in place through recess appointments.
Trump’s “bloody” plans to deport more than ten million refugees and undocumented persons are ramping up very quickly: the private prison industry and the other predatory gangster capitalists who will profit from this exercise in state-sponsored trauma and violence are enthusiastic; profits always matter more than people. By comparison, the targeted communities and their allies are in a state of terror and panic. During a visit to the U.S.- Mexico border last Tuesday, Homan plainly stated, “Let me be clear: There is going to be a mass deportation because we just finished a mass illegal immigration crisis on the border.” Honan is prepared to put mayors and other public officials in prison if they unlawfully interfere with the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans.
Vanity Fair’s Caitlin Dewey adds this additional context:
Trump will prioritize deportations for people who may have criminal associations, who have been denied asylum, or who come from “countries of foreign concern,” such as China and Nicaragua, Homan said, adding that America’s intelligence agencies will help identify and locate those targets and immigration agents will arrest them. But “no one’s off the table,” Homan told The Center Square, raising the possibility that Trump will target families or other undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked for many years in the US.
Such a policy is mainly popular among partisan lines, according to a new Scripps News/Ipsos poll, which found 52% of Americans saying they somewhat or strongly support the mass deportation of those in the country illegally. But that support drops when respondents are asked about different types of deportation programs: Only 38% of Americans say they’d support an operation that separated families, for instance. (Homan is, famously or infamously, a primary architect of the family separation policy that Trump embraced during his first administration.)
Trump’s mass deportation plans will also include declaring a state of national emergency and ordering the use of the United States military — potentially against American citizens. As expected, civil rights advocates are deeply concerned. It has been reported that senior United States military officials have been conducting informal talks about how to resist or otherwise circumvent illegal and/or unconstitutional orders from soon-to-be President Trump and his agents.
Meanwhile, the numerous criminal felony investigations into Trump have been terminated. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith have been metaphorically defenestrated. Trump now stands supreme and basically above the law. Contrary to its national mythology, America, especially for rich white men who are billionaires and former presidents, is a country of men and not laws.
In his newsletter Enough Already, journalist D. Earl Stephens explains his rage, disgust and disappointment at these developments:
Our worst nightmare had come to life.
On Monday we learned that our so-called “Justice” Department was abandoning the two criminal cases it took them forever to file against the most dangerous person in the world.
Less than three weeks after the most consequential election in American history, they waved the white flag of surrender. They were cutting and running. How appropriate for these weaklings.
It didn’t stop them from all their double-talking, however, which frankly I could have done without. I have heard enough from these appeasers forever. I just wish they’d get the hell out of our lives and stay there.
They have done enough damage to the United States of America.
Because no matter what kind of bulls—- they are lobbing at us now to explain their way out of the terrible mess they left us in, only one thing is true at this terrible moment in American history:
Justice delayed is justice denied.
In a new essay at The New York Times, Miriam Elder meditates on the temptation to “turn inward” in a defensive response to Trump and the MAGA movement and why that will offer little if any protection:
The United States is not Russia, and Mr. Trump is not Mr. Putin. This country has checks and balances that Russia can only dream of (if we can keep them), and a tradition of free speech and freedom of association that, though often tested, are central to how America works. But something binds these men who seek power with no controls — the creation of internal enemies, the constant shock moves to keep people on their toes, their viselike grip on the information environment, as well as the anger and exhaustion they provoke in their critics. Here we go again.
In the months that followed Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin, a term that had been popular in the Soviet era seeped back into the culture: internal emigration, or as it’s better known in the West, internal exile. The fight against Mr. Putin had been lost, the thinking went, and you had but one life to live. Why not spend it making a cozy home, tending a little garden, shutting out the leaden horrors outside? You didn’t have to move anywhere to internally emigrate. There was no financial cost or material upheaval. You simply had — to bastardize a phrase popularized by Timothy Leary — to turn in, tune out and drop out.
There are hints this is happening in the United States. Democrats are not nearly as united as they were in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first win. Donations to nonprofits, which soared in 2016, are down, and tactics such as another Women’s March have been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm. This may be a result of exhaustion or a frustration with the old methods.
The desire to turn inward is understandable, and human. It’s a form of self-protection. It’s also a delusion. I keep coming back to an aphorism that bounced around Russia as the number of internal émigrés grew: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. A new approach is necessary if America is to avoid the fate that befell so many Russians.
Following the election, President Biden met with Trump in the White House. Biden treated Trump as though this was any other presidential election and transition of power instead of the national emergency and existential danger to the future of the republic that he, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s other leaders proclaimed it to be. Thus, the following questions: Were these alarms serious? Did they believe them to be true? Were the Democrats just selling wolf tickets in an attempt to win the 2024 election?
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As reported by Rolling Stone, Trump and his inner circle are mocking President Biden and the Democrats for their collegiality:
“Some of us have been laughing about it,” an incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “[Democrats] spend all this time calling Donald Trump a Nazi and Hitler, and now it’s just: ‘Smile for the camera!’”
These sentiments of gleefully rejoicing and sneering at, as one close Trump ally puts it, the Democrats’ almost performative “capitulation” to Trump — who campaigned on a grossly authoritarian platform that includes wielding the federal apparatus to exact revenge operations on prominent political enemies — are widely shared in Trumpland, according to four sources close to the president-elect or working on the Trump transition.
In recent weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter, Trump himself has privately mocked Biden for being so “nice” after Harris lost the election, with the president-elect sarcastically joking that he would have done the same thing for his Democratic opponents.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other progressive Democrats in Congress are developing a plan to somehow find areas of common concern with Trump to advance the cause of working people — yet simultaneously somehow manage to blunt his authoritarian agenda. Politico offers these details:
Progressive Democrats wrestling with how to navigate a second Donald Trump presidency are settling on a new approach: Take his populist, working-class proposals at his word — or at least pretend to.
If he succeeds, they can take some credit for bringing him to the table. If he doesn’t, they can bash him for it.
It’s a change in strategy, emerging in private conversations among some liberal elected officials and operatives, that comes after years of resisting Trump ended with him returning to the White House….
Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the resistance icon who popularized the motto “nevertheless, she persisted” while skewering a Trump cabinet pick in 2017, is finding common cause with the president-elect.
“President Trump announced during his campaign that he intended to put a 10 percent interest rate cap on consumer credit,” Warren told POLITICO. “Bring it on.”
But, she added, “if he refuses to follow through on the campaign promises that would help working people, then he should be held accountable.”…
Progressives are not suddenly buying MAGA hats, and with Trump not yet in office, the range of ways they may engage him — or oppose him — remains a work in progress. They are still appalled by Trump’s behavior and policies, including his plans to create the largest deportation program in history, cut taxes for the wealthy and roll back transgender rights. And many of them fear that Trump is an aspiring dictator who threatens democracy itself (which Trump allies have said is unfounded).
But some of Trump’s populist campaign promises fall in line with progressives’ own aspirations. Those include making in vitro fertilization treatments free, ending taxes on tips and capping credit card interest rates. He has also promised for years to protect the popular programs of Social Security and Medicare. At times, he has promoted directing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
I am less than inspired; such plans are but another form of accommodation and normalization that border on the tragicomic. Politico continues: “Not all progressives agree with that strategy. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., a member of the so-called Squad, said of Trump, “I’ve never gotten the impression that he’s been accountable to anything in his life.” But, she said, “I don’t fault anybody for trying.””
In a new essay, Thom Hartmann shares my worries and concerns about the weak “Resistance” and the near full-on surrender of the Democratic Party, “the institutions,” and the rule of law to Donald Trump and what that portends about the next four years and beyond. Hartmann writes:
As Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice “obey in advance,” America is in crisis and Democratic leadership seems completely absent.
Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies on social media and in the checkbooks of billionaires. And, as we saw vividly in this month’s election, it dies when democracy’s sworn advocates fail to show up to fight for it.
And right now democracy’s advocates among America’s political class are shockingly quiet. Or they’re going on TV to pathetically claim that ending prosecutions against Trump means “the system has worked.”
That has to stop….
And what has happened to our champion, Kamala Harris? She seems to have vanished during her family vacation in Hawaii. That’s not leadership during a time of crisis, and if Trump’s plans for his presidency aren’t a crisis then the word has lost its meaning.
Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong, visible leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation’s?
If Trump is successful in going after “the enemy within,” the window for Democratic activism may close soon, much as it once did in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and every other democracy once taken over by strongman authoritarians.
Where is our clear leader? Our Donald Trump? The Democratic Party needs to get its media act together right away.
Define its message. Identify unambiguously the “enemies” of American democracy and call them out daily. Fully embrace the American working class. Declare class warfare. Express outrage, offer opposing policies, and point out GOP hypocrisy. Stop “obeying in advance.”
And they must do it now, before it’s too late. There’s still time…but it won’t last long…
Democrats, the so-called Resistance and other pro-democracy forces should be moved by “the fierce urgency of now” as Donald Trump and his allies are preparing their shock and awe blitzkrieg campaign against America’s democratic institutions, the rule of law, civil society, the social safety net and humane society. Instead, they are mostly standing still and wondering why the American people en masse are not rallying to their cause. As the truism advises, where Leaders lead the People will follow. The Democrats and the other supposed defenders of American democracy and civil society are instead largely behaving like the battle to defeat Trumpism is now lost even before he has even taken office. As Molly Jong-Fast writes in her new essay at Vanity Fair magazine, “Do I think democracy makes it through another Trump administration? Only if democracy supporters stand up for norms and institutions, and resist falling down the path of cynicism and hopelessness. It only takes one person to do the right thing.”
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