"Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States"

 

I’m not certain it’s possible to understand what happened in the 2024 election this close to it, beyond the undeniable outcome: Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. For two weeks now, people have been trying to assemble the pieces of how we got here, but it’s like the old proverb about blind men feeling different parts of an elephant. Depending on where you’re situated, you might feel a trunk, or a leg, or a patch of hide, but you don’t really get a sense of the whole thing.

Still, it’s hard not to want to try and understand. For one thing, that’s critical for the midterm election, which is painful to think about right now, but could become a very real way of setting limits on the damage Trump can do to democracy by installing a functioning legislative branch to check him—as the Founding Fathers intended.

One good reason for trying to diagnose what went wrong is to see if it’s possible to reassemble and strengthen what so many people were convinced was a pro-democracy coalition assembled to defeat Trump. Putting it back together, more successfully, in time to save the country at the midterms, resulting in a Democratic-led House and Senate, would be a significant check and balance on a bloated executive branch.

There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump.

It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.”

Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn't like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration; a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity.

They didn’t want a new generation of leadership. They wanted the “old stability,” the patriarchy that has run the country for generations. In many ways, that's what’s at the heart of the conservative coalition. It's not a rejection of the established order; it's an embrace of it.

If that’s what Trump voters thought they were getting, they may be sorely disappointed. As I wrote, in a piece about Trump’s coming plans for mass deportation to be published later this week on Cafe.com, the Trump presidency isn’t a pick-your-adventure experience, where you can get some parts of Trump’s plan, but not all of it.

Steve Bannon, hosting his War Room podcast on November 15 said: “Donald Trump and his revolution is in charge now. And that revolution is going to make its way from Mar-a-Lago and from every part of the country, like Andrew Jackson, it's going to converge on the imperial capitol in late January.

And yes, we're going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground. Because you know why? They need to be burned down to the ground. Metaphorically. As the process of creative destruction. The process of the structure of revolutions, the paradigm shift has impact.”

Trump delegate and New Jersey Republican Mike Crispi tweeted: “Will RFK get confirmed? Will Gaetz get confirmed? The answer is YES… as long as Johnson and Thune hold true to their word to support the President’s agenda. Recess appointments solve all. It’s time to WIN!”

Recess appointments, to the extent they “solve[s] all,” do so at the expense of the Constitution, as we’ve been discussing this week. Appointing people to run cabinet level agencies who are opposed to the work or the people who do the work won’t help.

Trump doesn’t want to do the hard work of governing, and he has expressed little interest in helping the American people—certainly not all of them, and especially not the ones who didn’t vote for him. He has no interest in remaking government, because he doesn’t understand it. Trump wants to protect himself, not the people.

Thinking a vote for Trump was a rejection of “elites” is part of the weak tea biography Trump sold to far too many Americans—the idea that he, the guy who started out on third base, hit and would continue hitting homes runs for them. Trump appeals to people who want to slide into home without having to run all the bases; that’s his ultimate appeal, the cheat who somehow manages to succeed, surrounded by his billionaire friends.

In her concession speech, Kamala Harris reminded us that “Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. Don't ever give up, don't ever stop trying to make the world a better place.” It was a battle cry disguised as a concession speech. Although it’s taken a while, I’m ready to get started.

Kamala Harris: The fight for our country is always worth it. Joe Biden: Giving up is unforgivable

Is there a chance Trump has now consolidated all the power he needs to become an autocrat, a dictator? Absolutely. When people tell you who they are, believe them. But might we still find ways to limit the damage, to make a midterm election and a democratic future possible? I’m counting on it.

I don’t know what that looks like yet. But what I want to say to you tonight is, don’t give up. Trump is not inevitable. Good people have found a way to defend democracy in other countries, and we will do it here too. Many of the people who thought they were voting for return-to-stability-Trump or I-will-fix-it-Trump are going to be in for a shock.

People who voted their pocketbook without concern for their children, or at least their ability to find someone to clean their house, are going to be in for a rude awakening. We’ll get back on our game and be ready by the time Trump is sworn into office.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

 

…In the brief chapter that follows the suggestion to “think up your own way of speaking”, Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, dwells on the insights of Victor Klemperer, the great Jewish philologist who studied the ways that the Nazis commandeered language before they commandeered everything else. Klemperer noted how Hitler’s language explicitly undermined all and any opposition. “‘The people’ always meant some people and not others… encounters were always ‘struggles’ and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was ‘defamation’ of the leader.”

Snyder does not name America’s 45th president in the course of this book, but the nascent administration is never far from his thoughts. Throughout his march to power, Trump used a narrowing of language in an identical way to that which Klemperer described, and has emphasized his populist project by the subordination of word to image.

This is a presidency being shaped by the techniques and tone of television and Twitter and YouTube, rather than the progression of rational argument through sentence and paragraph. Trump’s admission that he never reads a book all the way through is symptomatic of his rhetorical style. He offers a “highly constrained [language] to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the past, present and future”,

Snyder argues. In the president’s frame of reference events are only ever bad or sad or mad. With his Dr Seuss vocabulary, he can present the world as a place of simplistic oppositions, stripped of nuance.

Snyder’s beautifully weighted book is the perfect clear-eyed antidote to that deliberate philistinism (“I love the poorly educated”, as Trump chillingly observed). Always measured in their observation, these 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten.

Snyder is ideally placed to distil those urgent lessons. His landmark 2010 book, Bloodlands, examined the lasting effects of the totalitarian regimes of the Third Reich and of Stalin’s Russia on the places in which they clashed most devastatingly: Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states. When he suggests “do not obey in advance” or “be calm when the unthinkable arrives” or “be wary of paramilitaries” or “make eye contact and small talk”, he deftly brings to bear all that he knows about the trajectory of tyranny and the mechanisms of resistance.

Bloodlands won Snyder the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, and this book makes Arendt’s analysis of fascism a touchstone. Snyder reminds you, for example, that the definition of totalitarianism that Arendt offered was not the creation of an all-powerful state, but “the erasure of the difference between public and private life”. We are free, Snyder notes, “only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us and how they come to know it”.

The manner in which western populations have broadly accepted the fact of surveillance, and willingly surrendered their identities to social media, has already gone a long way to removing that dividing line between public and private. Snyder counsels extreme caution in rubbing out that distinction further. He calls for a “corporeal politics”, voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; face-to-face interaction rather than email, marching not online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”

In a time when authority seeks to destroy the legitimacy of facts he invokes at various points Václav Havel’s philosophy of “living in truth”, of keeping a sacred space for what you can prove to be true and for truth-tellers. Self-deception becomes first a seductive habit and then a state of mind. That progression is how tyrannies spread.

To prove this point, Snyder offers reminders, if reminders are needed, of just how quickly wave after wave of unacceptable behavior became normalized on the Trump campaign trail. How, for example, we got used to the fact that “a protester would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of ‘USA’ and then be forced to leave the rally” not by federal police but by the candidate’s private security detail. “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally?” Trump asked, pushing the idea of political violence. “To me, it’s fun.”

It is salutary to be reminded that the eastern European media, and journalists from Ukraine, called the election much more accurately than the Washington press corps. They had seen this behavior up close before, and they knew where it led.

There will no doubt be those who dismiss as hysterical the parallels that Snyder draws between the path to power of the Trump administration and that of the Third Reich. He himself expresses sincere hope that the lessons in resistance he offers will either not all be needed, or that they will collectively have the desired effect of check and balance.

He gives his fellow Americans the following warning, however: “We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the last century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience…” You will read no more relevant field guide to that wisdom than this book.

Book Review by Tim Adams

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder is published by Bodley Head (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

 

 

How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world

 

1 When someone tells you who he is, believe him. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defense, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. 

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan.  Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless, but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organizations will crumble fast.  The chilling will be real and immediate.

5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not powerless. If you’re a US institution or organization, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.

6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.

7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this, and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK.  Most of us did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of color. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralyzed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone or use email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication forever.

13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those with which you disagree. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.

15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to demoralize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”

16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.

17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognize what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”

18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

19 Take the piss. Humor is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

20 They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly.

 Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer

-The Guardian

 

McDonald's Ad or Broligarchy?

“Some of it is so silly that you almost want to laugh. But it’s serious times. We are entering a moment where it’s either the Constitution or Donald Trump. You can’t have both. It’s not just fun and games and fast food. It’s time to start paying attention.”  -Joyce Vance

Trump’s campaign pledge to eliminate the Department of Education

 

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy.

When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools.

Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization.

He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans.

That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. 

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students.

But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people.

Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

-Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/12/trump-close-education-department-proposal-explained/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/15/trump-abolishing-education-department-may-hurt-students-with-disabilities/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/evangelical-homeschooling-and-the-development-of-family-values

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos

https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf

https://glaad.org/moms-for-liberty-book-bans-anti-lgbtq/

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162

https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/130020/a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools

X:

SteveRattner/status/1856816905379532870

DGComedy/status/1848389872165306824

 

Incompetent Sycophants and There Will Be Plenty More of Them

 

President-elect Donald Trump has already named several people for top positions in his administration. His latest picks include: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) for secretary of state; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic representative from Hawaii, for director of national intelligence; and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) for attorney general.

It’s early in the transition-planning process, but Donald Trump and his team are rapidly announcing key Cabinet and White House roles. Loyalty to the president is a top consideration for Trump and his team, and in some instances, they are also taking an unorthodox approach to filling positions, creating “czar” positions to oversee broad policy portfolios and picking people with little relevant policy experience.

Secretary of State

Marco Rubio

Requires Senate confirmation

The secretary of state is America’s lead diplomat and will be the face of Trump’s foreign policy abroad. They are charged with being the principal interlocutor as the president reshapes alliances such as NATO, presses on Iran and seeks to encircle China. This secretary of state will inherit a far more dangerous world stage than existed in Trump’s first term, with raging conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Trump has vowed to resolve both in his first days in office.

The Florida senator is a hawk on China and Venezuela and has previously supported robust aid for Ukraine and advocates a robust U.S. presence in the world. Rubio ran for president in 2016 and clashed bitterly with Trump in the Republican primary, though they repaired their relationship and Trump considered Rubio as a potential running mate earlier this year.

The Attorney General

Matt Gaetz

The attorney general heads the nation’s massive federal law enforcement agency, with more than 100,000 employees. The FBI is its principal investigative arm; other agencies that fall under the Justice Department include the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The department leads federal investigations and prosecutions, including criminal, civil and civil rights cases. Trump and his allies have vowed to reduce the agency’s independence from the White House and use its investigative powers to go after his political enemies.

Matt Gaetz, a Florida representative, has been named to one of the most consequential positions in the Trump administration. Gaetz, who has served in Congress since 2017, has been a loyal and outspoken supporter of Trump, defending the former president after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election results on Jan. 6, 2021. Gaetz is a divisive figure even within his party and could face a tough confirmation battle... 

-The Washington Post

Furthermore,

“…It would be childish in any other context, but here, we have the next president, squarely telling senators that they must abandon the Constitution and give him their loyalty if they want to hold on to power.

“How bad is it going to be? Perhaps there will be a few brave senators who will take a stand on a nomination or two. But no one stays opposed to Trump and sticks around for long. The new Republican Senate leader, South Dakotan John Thune, voted to acquit Trump following the second impeachment trial, but said "My vote to acquit should not be viewed as exoneration ... What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”

“Unless something changes, Senate Republicans are unlikely to stand up to Donald Trump as the Constitution obligates them to do. They will have to choose whether to do the right thing or be complicit in Trump’s malfeasance. No serious president would suggest that a TV pundit with no experience running a major executive branch agency could run the Department of Defense. But Donald Trump has. This is exactly why the Founding Fathers gave the Senate the responsibility for advice and consent. If they abdicate, the can never again claim to be constitutionalists.”

-Joyce Vance

A Second Reign of Terror: Trump's Blueprint for ICE Home Raids

 

When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he’d merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term’s personally profitable crony capitalism.

While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he’s just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours) within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.

Taking down the free press in Germany and imprisoning dissidents and journalists only took Hitler three months, about the same as Mussolini and Pinochet.

America’s rightwing oligarchs are apparently ready for the fun to begin: Elon Musk tweeted last week that it’ll soon be time to use the force of law and the Department of Justice to prosecute the people at The Center for Countering Digital Hate who’ve been relentless in outing Nazis on Xitter. (Musk just lost a lawsuit to them.)

But even though they moved quickly, Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and Duterte didn’t start with journalists; they started with the most marginalized and least powerful people in their nations. For Hitler it was trans people he went after within his first two weeks; for Duterte it was drug addicts.

Pinochet and Mussolini arrested vulnerable working class supporters of their opposition political parties who dared show up in the streets to demonstrate against them.

So, who’s the weakest here in America? While Trump campaigned against trans people (just like Hitler had in 1933), it looks like he has another group in mind for his first geneticize. Trump has his sights on undocumented Black and Hispanic migrants to begin the state-sponsored violence and inure the American public to what will eventually come for many more of us.

Get ready for midnight door-knocks by men with guns starting in January. Particularly if you or anybody in your extended family has a last name that ends with a vowel or a z, or even if you simply have black hair and brown eyes. Trump and Thomas Holman are on the case.

Holman notoriously ran ICE during the last Trump administration and is often considered, along with Stephen Miller, as the father of Trump’s brutal child separation policy that traumatized so many thousands of young families and has left about 1,000 youngsters trafficked into pop-up “Christian” adoption services missing to this day.

Alone. Frightened. Not knowing where their parents are or if they’ll ever see them again.

Holman also helped write part of the immigration policies for Project 2025. And famously bragged to CBS that if he found families with “illegal” members in this country, he’d simply deport the entire family, US citizens or not.

When asked by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Holman barely took a breath before asserting, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

America has done this before, and the results were ugly.

In the 1920s, Republican President Herbert Hoover initiated a nationwide roundup and deportation of people of mostly Mexican ancestry. Police and border agents simply went house-to-house in Hispanic neighborhoods from Arizona to Alaska, often kicking in doors and dragging out people who couldn’t immediately prove their citizenship. As many as 2 million people with Hispanic last names were arrested.

As a result, an estimated 40% to 60% of the people arrested, detained, and deported were actually US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. Because they were deported without proof of citizenship (often because of home births without hospital records), however, they were never able to return to the US.  

During WWII, American employers encouraged Mexicans to come to the US to fill jobs vacated by US citizens who’d been drafted and sent off to war.

After the war, President Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback and essentially replicated Hoover’s program; an estimated 300,000 to 1.1 million people were similarly dragged from their homes. Nobody is certain how many were US citizens, but estimates range from 30% to as many as 60%.

Again, because they weren’t able to instantly prove citizenship when the police arrived at their homes, they had no way to get back into the US once they were dumped in Mexico.

If Trump’s leading candidate for Attorney General, Mike Davis, assumes that role he’ll almost certainly back up Holman’s efforts, even if millions of US citizens are seized, imprisoned, and deported. He’s the guy, after all, who just tweeted:

“Fuck unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump.” And “Here’s my current mood: I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)”

The fact that Trump and the people around him are giddy about going after Hispanics and other Black and Brown immigrants from “shithole countries” answers the question everybody is asking about how brutal his second administration could become. It’s going to be rough. Get ready.

And if you have a Hispanic last name or live anywhere near Hispanics and have black hair and brown eyes, be sure to get your proof of citizenship ready and carry it with you at all times, even when you sleep.

And the rest of us? No dictator in history has ever started a violent inquisition attacking the weakest in society — and they all begin there — without soon extending his terror against every person he thought opposed him or who represented a challenge to his power. The smug media idiots who’ve been sane washing Trump for years will either roll over (as has already begun) or end up in jail themselves. Along with many of us on Substack and in the progressive press.

As JD Vance recently said, implying the thought and speech police will soon be coming for Trump’s critics: “You cannot lie, take your position of public trust, and lie to the American people for political purposes. It’s disgraceful. And people have to suffer consequences for it.”

Welcome to Trump’s version of hell. And welcome to the resistance.

 

-Thom Hartmann

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my daily work to fight Trump’s fascism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

"All is not lost. Yet." There is hope.

 

— Blue state governors and other officials are working to “Trump proof” their states and agencies. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are seeing record sign-ups, donations are flowing into groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and progressive newsletters like this one are seeing unprecedented levels of new subscribers and supporters. The resistance is energized.

— Trump doesn’t have as big a mandate as the media is promoting: If a mere 155,000 people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (out of a total 12,943,827 votes cast in those three states) had shifted their votes from R to D, Kamala Harris would be our incoming president. It’s true that voters shifted to the right in virtually every race in America, but that should be seen not as a defeat but as an opportunity — much like the one Republicans faced in 1976 and 2008

— for Democrats to reboot the party and reengage in the battle, the subject of this article.

— America was birthed in resistance; we have a long tradition of fighting oppression and, to the extent Trump and his billionaire allies plan to crush “the left,” they will face fierce opposition (which has already begun).

— We know what largely drove Trump’s win. As political scientist Rachel Bitecofer writes over at her brilliant Substack newsletter The Cycle, Republicans “successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you.” We can do something about that, particularly since the suggestion that Democrats don’t care for average working people is a vicious lie.

That said, the Democratic Party must come to the realization that is now dawning across Europe that the old Blair/Macron/Clinton neoliberal consensus (low taxes, free trade, open borders, weak unions) is dead. That if its reverse, progressive populism, isn’t embraced by center-left parties, rightwing populism and oligarchy will fill that void with a vengeance (like they’re seeing across Europe — and we just saw here in last week’s election).

What Americans said in last week’s election was, “We want real change, and want to know that it’s happening.” Clearly, that’s not what they saw or believed.

Democrats must, in other words, go where the people are and promote new policies loudly. It’s time to espouse progressive populist positions across the Party with a fervor bordering on the passion with which Christian nationalists have lifted up the GOP and handed them victory this year.

Those should include three major policy bites:

Bring our jobs home. I laid out the strategy to do this using measured and intelligent tariffs and other trade barriers on September 17th here in an article titled Why Trump Is Wrong & Alexander Hamilton Was Right About Tariffs.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing — kept on this continent by the force of tariffs and other trade barriers — were at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: if a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with US labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs. 

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus). 

Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart in 1962 with the slogan, “100% Made In The USA” (that was also the title of his autobiography). That all changed in the 1990s when Bill Clinton embraced the neoliberal trade deals Reagan and Bush Sr. had written; today it’s nearly impossible to find anything made in the US in a Wal-Mart. That has to change, and every American knows it.

If Democrats fight Trump on tariffs like they did during this campaign, they’re cutting their own throats. Has Rana Foroohar wrote in today’s Financial Times:

“Unprovoked by her opponent, she raised the issue of tariffs as a “Trump tax”. …

“Let’s focus instead on how voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have heard that comment. They would not have focused on the word inflation. They would have focused on the word tariff. And by decrying tariffs in that way, Harris would have immediately been interpreted as coming from the usual neoliberal economic camp that sold working people in manufacturing (and indeed, many services) down the river over the past two decades.”

Tariffs can work for Democrats; they just have to do (and promote) them more intelligently than Trump has so far.

Fix immigration. I laid out a strategy to do this back on March 17, 2021 here on Hartmann Report in an article titled The Main Driver Of Immigrants & Refugees is the Republican Party Itself.

Prior to the Reagan era, getting a job in manufacturing, construction, or meat-packing was a surefire ticket to the middle class. Today those industries (along with multiple others) are dominated by low-wage often-undocumented immigrant labor.

The main thing that prevented American workers from competing with undocumented immigrant labor was the power unions once had over hiring decisions. When Reagan came into office, roughly one-in-three workers belonged to a union, and another third worked for employers who mimicked union standards as they’d set the wage, benefit, and standards-of-employment floor.

When Reagan gutted America’s unions, that first line of defense collapsed; today only one-in-twenty private sector workers are in a union. Business cheered, and Republicans were just fine with a flood of immigrants starting in the 1980s as it provided them with a steady stream of employees willing to work for low wages.

Anticipating this, Congress built into Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) provisions for employer sanctions and fines for hiring undocumented workers; businesses quickly figured out how to game the system, though, and the penalties have only rarely been enforced by any of the last six business-friendly neoliberal administrations.

This is why, as I wrote on April 25 in an article titled Southern Autoworkers aren’t Listening to the GOP’s BS Any More, Democrats should have embraced Card Check (as promised) during the Clinton and Obama administrations — and still can.

We also need to enforce the sanctions in the IRCA, although first those sanctions and penalties need to be given teeth and enforced rigorously. Mitt Romney was right on this when he said:

“If people are not able to have a card and have through an E-Verify system determine that they are here illegally, then they’re going to find they can’t get work here. And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.”

Instead of ridiculing him, Democrats and the then-Obama administration should have seized the opportunity to embrace this reform that’s already in place in every other developed country in the world.

End homelessness and the crime associated with it. This hits the lived experience of almost every American family, as I wrote on November 9, 2023, here on Hartmann Report in an article titled Democrats Can Win by Confronting Crime.

Cherelle Parker became the first woman elected mayor of Philadelphia in 2023, in part because of her tough-on-crime positions. She’s a progressive Democrat and beat five other Democrats in the primary (including one endorsed by both Bernie and AOC) before cruising to victory.

Her platform was straightforward and almost sounds like Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s: hire 300 more police officers, fix broken streetlights, remove graffiti, fix up dilapidated buildings, and empower the new police on the street to stop pedestrians they believe may be committing a crime.

“At the time” she first made those proposals, her website notes, “many in the city, including some of those running for mayor now, were convinced that a plan that calls for more police would be political suicide. But she did not take cues from the loudest voices calling to defund the police, instead talking to and listening to people in communities across the city and taking action.”

Unlike with Giuliani, her hiring more police didn’t mean hiring more racist cops and tolerating racially motivated search-and-frisk. This can be done intelligently, and numerous other countries provide us with examples of that. Excessive sentencing like we saw brought forward by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s doesn’t reduce crime and actually makes social problems worse.

Confronting crime at the street level does, however, cause people to become more supportive of enforcing laws — even minor laws — that then reduces crime overall.

I know four people (two in my family) who’ve had five cars and two bicycles stolen in the past two years: in each case, the police said they lacked the resources to try to find either the vehicles or the thieves.

I saw a man stealing a car near my office a few months ago and called 911 (here in Portland they’re referred to as “Homeless Ubers”: people steal cars and then abandon them when they get to their destination). The phone was still ringing five minutes later as he drove off and I hung up, disgusted.

The Portland police wouldn’t have had the resources to do anything about it anyway: they’re stretched so thin they can barely enforce traffic laws. When somebody tried to break into our house and we had a picture of that person, the Portland Police Department ignored our report.

Much of this crime is rooted in homelessness: In addition to intelligently cracking down on crime, Democrats must take a stand against the giant Wall Street hedge funds and banks — and foreign investors — who’ve purchased millions of American single-family homes and either flipped them into high-priced rentals or left them vacant as investments.

We have 15 million vacant homes but only a million or so homeless people, and — as I detailed here on April 22 in an article titled Why Homelessness Stalks America Like the Grim Reaper — Democrats should take a cue from parts of Canada and other nations that have outlawed or tightly regulated corporate and foreign ownership of single-family homes.

Other areas where Democrats can make significant gains among working class people of all races are:

— Paid sick leave and low-cost child care (I wrote about this on September 18, 2023 in an article titled The American Dream Demands Paid Sick Leave & Low-Cost Child Care). It won on ballot initiatives in three Red states this year.

— Free and affordable college (Forgiving Student Debt Isn’t Giving a Gift — It’s Righting a Wrong on June 17, 2022).

— Affordable healthcare as a right of citizenship (Why Is America the Only Developed Nation With No Right To Healthcare? June 17, 2021).

— Taking on the billionaires with reasonable taxation (What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent? June 2, 2023).

— Build and support a Democratic-leaning openly progressive media infrastructure (Radio Silence: How Progressives Lost the Airwaves September 30).

But, as Bernie Sanders has been repeating like a mantra for three decades, the sweet spot for progressive populism will always be what FDR won four terms as president on: good American jobs for American workers, affordable housing, and low crime.

G-d willing, there will be another election in two years and every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — are up for reelection. While gearing up to oppose Trump’s most obscene policies, Democrats also need to begin fine-tuning their pitch now.   

-Thom Hartmann

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my daily work to restore democracy to America, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

A Letter on Veterans Day, November 11, 2024

When are we going to rebel against this man who denigrates both living and dead U.S. soldiers; a man who called soldiers “losers and suckers”; a man who said this about John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured”?

When are we going to rebel against this man who once said about visiting the cemetery near Paris, Aisne-Marne America: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers!” This is a draft dodger with so-called “bone spurs” and parental connections and money that kept him out of Vietnam; a draft evader who also referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers for getting killed”?

When are we going to rebel against a man who has not and will never “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”; a man who is contemptuous and ignorant of the Constitution of the United States of America, specifically the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments; a man who also violates Article II, Section 1 and Section 3 of the Constitution of the United States; a man who ignores the legislative and judicial branches of government and their Balance of Power; a man who constantly attacks the U.S. Intelligence Agencies and the Rule of Law by using techniques of deceit and deflection? 

When are we going to rebel against a man who “creates and capitalizes on chaos”; a man who “has ostentatiously refused to fulfill one of his most important duties as president: protecting the nation and its political system from damaging cyber-attacks by a hostile foreign power”; a man who has heightened polarization and partisanship; a man who makes his underlings lie for him; a man who “has told subordinates and criminals that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing” they commit for him; a man who has no integrity and perpetuates lies through distraction, threat conflation, normalization and repetition to confuse and mislead his gullible followers? 

When are we going to rebel against a man who exults in bullshit; a narcissist who does not believe in morality and justice and will do everything in his power to remain in office the next time he is elected; a man who is, and who will continue to be, a serial abuser of discretionary powers; a man who, like Richard Nixon, “prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice [by engaging] personally and through his subordinates and agents in a course of conduct or plan to delay, impede, and obstruct investigations”; a man who said, “I have the right to do whatever I want”?; a man who extols Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other despots but attacks American allies and their leaders; a dangerous traitor who wants to subvert congressional power and destroy U.S. defense and intelligence agencies when he becomes president of the United States of America?   

In short, when are we going to rebel against a callous, manipulative, mendacious, and impulsive charlatan who threatens our national security, betrays our national interest, and perverts the powers of the presidency, a bully who is going to seek revenge on his so-called “enemies”: a scoundrel who has divided our nation and will create an irreparable travesty of justice and defilement of the rights of many Americans? 

-Glen Brown