Bob Sheak, Dec 6, 2024

Trump won despite his poor record

The final vote count gave Trump 77,232,887 votes, or 49.9% of the total votes. Kamala Harris received 74,935,796, or 48.4%. Trump’s 1.5% advantage was lower than recent presidential winners received. Nonetheless, it gave the presidency to Trump, a convicted felon with a long record of indictments. His dismal record in dealing with the Covid pandemic is a not-too-distant example of his ineptness. Helio Fred Garcia writes in his book, The Trump Contagion:

“In December 2021 NPR broadcast a report that Trump supporters were far more likely to die of Covid-10: Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from Covid-19 as those who live in areas that went or now President Biden” (pp. 224-225).

Overall, Trump has accumulated 91 criminal indictments, according to a detailed account in Ali Velshi’s book, The Trump Indictments. Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman have also compiled this outrageous record in their book, The Trump Indictments. These charges will most likely be vacated or postponed, which would ultimately mean that he may not ever be held accountable for his lawless behavior.

He lies. Washington Post journalist Glenn Kessler and his colleagues identified 30,753 false and misleading statements from Trump during his first presidential term (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years).

He pushed and got lower tax rates for the rich and corporations, while increasing the national debt by over 8 trillion dollars. According to US Budget Watch 2024, the national debt increased by $8.4 trillion during Trumps first presidential term (https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt).

Inequality rose during the Trump presidential years. Jeffrey Kucik reports on this (https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/535239-how-trump-fueled-economic-inequality-in-america). The article was published on Jan. 1, 2021. Kucik writes:

“It is difficult to select just one issue that defines President Trump’s legacy. There is his tragic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is his alienation of America’s allies. There are even his wars on science and the rule of law. Any of these disasters would provide a suitable byline for the history books.
But we need to add something equally important to this list: Four years after Trump took office, income inequality continues to grow. And it is growing at a faster rate than during any of the last five administrations.”

Now Trump wants complete power

Trump Is Using “Unitary Executive” Theory in His Bid to Amass Supreme Power

Marjorie Cohn considers this issue in an article published on Dec 3, 2024
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-using-unitary-executive-theory-in-his-bid-to-amass-supreme-power). Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense, and is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Here’s some of what she writes.

“Trump is claiming total executive power that would eclipse the legislative “co-equal” branch of government.

“In the weeks since the presidential election, president-elect Donald Trump and his allies have made a series of moves that indicate their intent to dangerously consolidate executive power under the controversial ‘unitary executive’ theory of the Constitution.

“During the presidential campaign, Trump posted a video on Truth Social that referred to his second administration as a ‘unified Reich,’ invoking Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany. As president-elect, Trump’s cabinet selections have corroborated his campaign pledge to be a dictator on day one.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided to grant Trump absolute immunity while in office. On this, Cohn writes: “With the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his core ‘official’ functions, and the 920-page ‘Project 2025’ right-wing blueprint for an autocratic government, Trump is positioning himself to change the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over all aspects of the executive branch — and thereby becoming a ‘unitary executive.’”

Cohn continues. “Proponents of the unitary executive say that Article II establishes a ‘hierarchical, unified executive department under the direct control of the President’ who ‘alone possesses all of the executive power and … therefore can direct, control, and supervise inferior officers or agencies who seek to exercise discretionary executive power.’”

Cohn points out that “Project 2025, the right wing’s roadmap to an imperial presidency, is anchored in the unitary executive scheme. ‘This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI….’”

Furthermore, as revealed in Project 2025, “Trump would circumvent Congress by taking complete control of all administrative agencies that protect our health, safety, food, water, climate and labor rights. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a federal agency doesn’t have the last word on protecting these rights. When a statute is ambiguous, an agency must now defer to courts (many of which are staffed by judges appointed by Trump) instead of following interpretations of agency experts.” For example, Project 2025 will reinstitute Schedule F that
“would reclassify 50,000 of the 2 million merit-based civil service employees as political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president with no civil service protections.”

Cohn offers a summary of how Project 2025 could undermine the constitutional checks and balances.
– Curtailing the independence of independent agencies;
– Weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve Trump’s political agenda;
– Replacing civil servants with political supporters;
– Impounding funds Congress has appropriated and using them for other purposes;
– Neutralizing the press and independent media;
– Misapplying the Insurrection Act to suppress protests and deport undocumented immigrants;
– Misusing the recess appointment process to confirm executive branch nominees without Senate approval; and
– Deconstructing the administrative state to help corporations maximize profits.

The creation of a “king” in the White House

Cohn writes: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” and quotes Sonia Sotomayor who wrote in dissent. ‘The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.’ The immunity the court established now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president to use for his own political gain or financial interests, with the knowledge that he is inoculated from criminal liability.”

“As a result of Trump v. U.S., Trump’s election victory, and the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, Trump’s criminal cases — comprising 91 charges — are evaporating.”

Trump’s appointments to his administration: examples

His appointments emphasize loyalty over competence. Trump wants people in advisory or cabinet positions who will implement his right-wing agenda, basically, in various ways, to support a fossil-fuel energy system, to allow liquified natural gas exports to continue, to open up public lands to private investors, to ignore or deny the climate crisis, to drastically cut spending by the federal government on programs that benefit wide swaths of the population, to cut taxes on the rich and corporations, to begin the deportation of millions of undocumented residents, to impose ill-considered tariffs, especially on China, Canada, and Mexico, and to use the FBI and other executive branch agencies to punish Trump’s critics, viewed as “enemies.”

Consider three

Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense

One of his least defensible picks is Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Jane Mayer has written at length about Hegseth, and how he was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job (https://newyorker.com/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history). Here’s just two paragraphs from Mayor’s article.

“But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

Kash Patel to head the FBI.

Chris Lehmann argues in a Dec. 3, 2024, article that “Kash Patel is Trump’s Scariest Cabinet Appointment Yet (https://thenation.com/article/politics/kash-patel-trump-cabinet). Lehmann identifies Patel as “a deep state conspiracy theorist” who Trump has appointed to head the FBI.

“Patel has…duly minted his battles over control of the deep state into a book, Government Gangsters, which derides the agency he’s now charged with administering as ‘one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State,’ where rampant corruption has become ‘an existential threat to our republican form of government.’ He has also vowed, should he be entrusted with overseeing the agency’s operations, to shut down its Hoover Building headquarters in Washington on day one, and convert it into ‘a museum of the deep state.’”

Patel complains that the FBI is “overrun with self-protecting raging liberals—another plaint cribbed entirely from the persecution fantasies of Trump. Patel’s own history with the agency dates from his tour at the House Select Committee on Intelligence, where he reportedly penned the ‘Nunes memo,’ which castigated FBI officials for approving a baseless FISA surveillance order on former Trump campaign official Carter Page. That caught the eye of Trump, who appointed Patel to the National Security Council after the GOP lost its House majority in the 2018 midterms, and then promoted him to serve as the NSC’s senior director of the agency’s counterterrorism directorate.”

“…as with Trump himself, the conspiratorial logic behind Patel’s advancement has curdled into additional shocking and dangerous breaches with reality. Patel is a champion of the Trump-aligned QAnon cult and conspiracy theory, announcing in a 2022 podcast appearance that the mythical figure at the center of Q ‘should get credit for all the things he has accomplished.’ He’s also joined Mike Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, for the Q-promoting ReAwaken America tour. In his role as all-purpose MAGA hustler, Patel has hawked a dietary supplement that supposedly reverses bodily damage wrought by the Covid vaccine, dubbing it ‘a homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax.’”

“Patel’s conspiracy-mongering finds a frequent outlet in his broadsides against the press—an especially troubling penchant for the leader of an agency like the FBI, which has stood stoutly athwart basic civil liberties. ‘We’re going to put in all-American patriots from top to bottom,’ Patel announced in a 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. ‘We will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly—we’ll figure that out.’

What Kash Patel Could Do to the F.B.I.

Garrett M. Graff, a journalist, a historian and the author of “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War” and “Watergate: A New History,” among other books,
also considers the implications of Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel to head the FBI (https://nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/kash-patel-trump-fbi.html).

“It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel, whom Donald Trump picked over the weekend to lead the F.B.I., is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

“That’s what even those who know Mr. Patel well are saying. ‘He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,’ his supervisor in the first Trump administration, Charles Kupperman, told The Wall Street Journal. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.’ Mr. Kupperman’s view is hardly an outlier. In Mr. Trump’s first term, Bill Barr, then the attorney general, and Gina Haspel, then the C.I.A. director, went to great lengths to prevent Mr. Patel from being installed in senior intelligence and law enforcement roles.”

“Unlike Mr. Patel, who has never been nominated for a Senate-confirmed position, every F.B.I. director in modern times has been vetted and confirmed (often repeatedly) by the Senate to another position first. Three F.B.I. directors were federal judges before being selected. Robert Mueller had been nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents and confirmed by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the Senate; James Comey, Barack Obama’s nominee, had been in front of the Senate twice for confirmation. Mr. Wray had been the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, a role that earned him the department’s highest award for leadership and public service.

“Moreover, the idea of appointing a Trump loyalist like Mr. Patel goes against the fundamental approach all recent presidents have taken, which is that they’ve appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them. Bill Clinton’s relationship with his choice, Louis Freeh, was so tested during the Clinton scandals that the two men weren’t even on speaking terms, and Mr. Freeh turned in his White House pass to avoid even the appearance of familiarity with the president. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.

“What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton did in their presidencies.

“Mr. Trump has been clear in what he is trying to do with a nominee like Mr. Patel: He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against those he sees as his political enemies and domestic critics. Mr. Patel said last year that he hopes to prosecute journalists.”

“…a Patel directorship of even a few years could cause grave, lasting harm to the institution. One of the key ways a director shapes the bureau is through the promotion of top agents, from section chiefs to unit chiefs to special agents in charge to assistant directors and executive assistant directors. His choices of those leaders would shape the bureau for decades.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head HHS

Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun and David Ovalle, Washington Post journalists, assess 10 of RFK Jr.’s “conspiracy theories and false claims” (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2024/11/15/rfk-jr-views-conspiracies-false-claims).

“The ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the nation’s top health post has alarmed medical experts, who point to his history of trafficking in conspiracy theories as disqualifying to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Kennedy, whom President-elect Donald Trump selected as health secretary on Thursday, will be charged with a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food if the Senate confirms him.”

“This is troubling. ‘He is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the United States and globally, and he has been at this for 20 years,’ said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Here are 10 false health claims Kennedy has publicly made over the years:
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV

“Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.

Weber and her colleagues continue. “‘I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,’ he [Kennedy] said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.”

“A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

“Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines.

“Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022.

“‘So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,’ Hotez said. ‘I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.’”

“Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments.”

Consider the reasons why milk is pasteurized.

“Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and has sickened at least 46 people in the United States. Unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain high levels of infectious H5N1 virus.”

“Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public.

“‘The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,’ Kennedy told Fox News in August.

“Kennedy has repeatedly spoken about wanting to eliminate industry interests from the government, but public health experts say it is slander to imply that government employees are purposefully harming Americans.

“That’s just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality,” Hotez said. “I’ve worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.”

Kennedy has also falsely linked mass shootings to antidepressants and video games and asserted that AIDS is not caused by HIV. His views on covid-19 follow his dangerous and untrue claims.

“Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media.”

Initial responses from the Left to Trump’s election

Calls to action

1 – John Nichols emphasizes Trump’s narrow victory over Harris and that he does not have a mandate (https://thenation.com/article/politics/donald-trump-vote-margin-narrowed). He points out:

“Why make note of all the presidents who ran better than Trump? Why discuss the narrowness of his advantage over Harris? Why consider, in addition, that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be among the narrowest in modern American history? Because it puts the 2024 election results in perspective—and, in doing so, gives members of both parties an understanding of how to respond when Trump claims that an unappealing nominee or policy should be accepted out of deference to his “powerful” mandate.

“Trump’s victory was not of ‘epic’ or ‘historic’ proportions. There was no ‘landslide’ for the once and future president, as Fox News suggested repeatedly in postelection headlines. The election did not produce the ‘decisive victory’ for Trump that the Associated Press referred to in the immediate aftermath of the voting. Nor did it yield the “resounding defeat” for Harris that AP reported at the same time.”

Nichols continues.

“We now confront a second Trump presidency.

“There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country.

“We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

“Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance.”

2 – Kamala Harris say we must continue the fight for democracy

In her concession speech, Harris urged her supporters to “continue ‘the fight that fueled this campaign” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-election-loss-speech-howard-university). The following quote from her speech captures her commitment to continue the fight for America.

“Let me say my heart is full today. My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve,” Harris said. “The outcome of this election was not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

3 – New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is concerned about what Trump will do with the power of the presidency, but hopes there will be resistance

(https://nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-future-mourn.html).

“Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also [the popular vote]. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.”

“But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”

“There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.”

“Ultimately,” Goldberg writes, “Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure ‘some temporary hardship.’ We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it.”

“The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve.”

Others see a grim future for the country

1 – Elie Mystal argues that “Trump is Not a Fluke – He’s America” (https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-is-america-not-a-fluke). The article was published on Nov. 7.

“America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance….”

“Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn’t really deserve to be ‘saved.’ It deserves to fail.
Trump is not our ‘retribution.’ He is our reckoning.”

2 – Peter Baker, New York Times journalist, analyzes how Trump’s threats and language sometimes are linked to a fascist past (https://nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/trump-fascism.html).

“While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad. Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him….

“Mr. Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves. He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if re-elected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.

“He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold onto power despite the will of the voters, something no other sitting president ever tried to do. When that did not work, he spread demonstrable lies about the 2020 vote so pervasively that he convinced most of his supporters that Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate, according to polls, eroding faith in the democratic system that is key to its enduring viability. He then called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution so that President Biden could be instantly removed from power and himself reinstalled without a new election.”

“Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘War,’ calling Mr. Trump ‘fascist to the core.’ In recent days, 13 other former Trump aides released a letter backing Mr. Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former president’s ‘desire for absolute, unchecked power.’

“Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has fueled concerns about fascism since the day he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015. As he kicked off his campaign that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists and within months he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

“He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an ‘America First’ approach, he happily appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

“Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini. When Mr. Trump retweeted a quote that ‘it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,’ NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini. “I know who said it,” Mr. Trump replied. ‘But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?’ He also came to use language familiar to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be ‘enemies of the people,’ a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.
“While he was president, Mr. Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another point, he complained to Mr. Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler. In interviews with The Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Mr. Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the last few years. Mr. Trump denied this past week that he ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

“The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (‘genius’), President Xi Jinping of China (‘a brilliant man’), Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (‘very honorable’), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (‘my favorite dictator’), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (‘a great guy’), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (‘what a great job you are doing’), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (‘a hell of a leader’) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (‘one of the most respected men’).”

Mr. Trump during his four years in office regularly asserted the most expansive view of presidential power. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring to the article in the Constitution that deals with executive power, ignoring the limits built into the document.”

“An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when Mr. Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of wartime victory. General Paul Selva of the Air Force, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected, explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s what dictators do,” General Selva told him. Mr. Trump was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times again, officers later said.

“The rift grew over time and culminated in Mr. Trump’s final year in office. When some of the protests over Mr. Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s first instinct was to use the armed forces. He repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted 10,000 troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.

“Mr. Trump demanded that General Milley personally take charge, but the Joint Chiefs chairman resisted, saying the National Guard would be sufficient. Mr. Trump shouted at him in a meeting. “You are all losers!” he yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive. Turning to General Milley, he said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

“Over the past four years, Mr. Trump has escalated his threats to use the power of the presidency to punish his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Mr. Biden and other Democrats if he wins the election and threatened prison time for election workers who he deems to have cheated in some way.

“He promoted a social media post saying that former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, should face a military tribunal for investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He calls Democrats ‘the enemy from within’ and suggested that he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up American citizens who oppose his candidacy.

“He has signaled that he would go after the news media as well. After ‘60 Minutes’ edited an interview with Ms. Harris in a way that Mr. Trump did not like, he said that “CBS should lose its license.” He said similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN. While in office, aides have said he pressed them to use government power to punish corporations affiliated with CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”

“He has called for the summary execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing the police to inflict ‘one really violent day’ on criminals or even ‘one rough hour — and I mean real rough’ to bring down the property crime rate.
In a 2021 podcast, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, now Mr. Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president won again he should ‘fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,’ in effect turning the nonpartisan government work force into a partisan cadre of loyalists.

Concluding thoughts

Nearly half of all voters registered support for Trump and gave the Republicans slim leads in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. They voted for a man and a political party that will try to destroy American democracy, ignore the US Constitution, create a king-like president, and find justifications for their extremist agenda. Trump and his administration are committed to capturing, detaining, and deporting millions of undocumented residents, and, in the process, separating many children from their parents. He will look for ways to compel local officials to go along. He will, as emphatically promised, impose inflation-driving tariffs, and thus increase the costs of goods to American consumers and many businesses. He and his administration will go after their domestic “enemies.” These efforts will likely be supported by a right-wing Supreme Court and many federal courts across the country.

Alternatively:

In his new book, On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder describes what a real democracy entails.

“A large representative democracy works only when people are in fact represented. Democracy is rule by the people, so nonhuman entities (algorithms, corporations, and foundations) should neither vote nor pay for political campaigns. No American should count for more than any other American. Campaigns should be transparently and publicly financed. Candidates should be publicly financed; voter registration should be automatic; voting stations should be plentiful; ballots should be paper; gerrymandering should be outlawed” (p. 241).