Voting for Republicans Is Voting Against Democracy

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Voting for a Republican – any Republican, from the lowliest city council or special-district seat to the Presidency – in 2024 means voting against democracy; I’ll say that again: voting for a Republican means voting against democracy. The modern-day Republican Party has not only given up on democracy, it has repudiated it at all levels. It intends to govern, once it retakes control of the Presidency, the Senate and state governments it does not already control, as an authoritarian force, jamming its ideas and ideologies down the throats of Americans even when most of the country disagrees with them.

Republicans in power gave two vivid demonstrations of their hostility towards democracy on April 6 and 7, 2023. On Thursday, April 6, the two-thirds majority in the Tennessee General Assembly voted along party lines to expel two young African-American members, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for the “crime” of having stood up on the floor of the Assembly and joined protesters in calling for safe, rational gun laws in the wake of the March 27 mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, the state’s capital.

One day later, on Friday, April 7, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district judge in Amarillo,Texas, issued a ruling in a case brought by a private anti-abortion group invalidating the U.S.Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2000 approval of mifepristone, a drug used in non-surgical abortions and also to treat women who’ve miscarried. Kacsmaryk said his ruling would apply nationwide, in states that have explicitly protected a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy as well as in states that haven’t.

Neither of these decisions went into full effect immediately. The local governments in Nashville and Memphis, which under Tennessee’s constitution have the power to fill legislative vacancies, both voted unanimously to reappoint Jones and Pearson as their own interim replacements pending a special election, and they re-won their seats when those elections occurred. And the mifeprestone decision was put on hold, first by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito – author of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years, who set Wednesday, April 19 as the date for a Supreme Court hearing on the case. On April 22 the Supreme Court issued an indefinite “stay” (delay) of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, so mifeprestone remained available until the Court has a chance to rule on the “merits” of the case.

Overall the modern-day Republican Party has shown not only a rejection of democracy but a visceral contempt for it. Time and time again, today’s Republicans are embracing positions overwhelmingly rejected by large majorities of Americans. Though abortion is an issue notoriously difficult to poll on – a lot depends on how the questions are worded – 62 percent of American poll respondents say they want abortion legal in “all or most cases.” A majority of Americans want to see assault weapons like the AR-15, used in virtually all mass shootings these days, banned (as they were in the U.S. from 1994 to 2004), and up to 90 percent want universal background checks for gun buyers.

Violating the Constitution to “Save” It

Ordinarily, a political party in a representative democracy that goes so far out of line with the majority opinion of its country’s people would be dooming itself to political oblivion. But that doesn’t worry today’s Republicans. Driven by a fanatical belief that they know what the country really needs, whether the people who live here want it or not, the Republicans have cleverly used the anti-democratic features of the U.S. political system – some of them written into the Constitution itself, some developed through centuries of custom – that serve to keep Republicans in power regardless of what the people want or how they vote.

At least some of these compromises were made at the 1787 Constitutional Convention so there could be a United States at all. To guarantee small states that their interests wouldn't be swallowed up by larger, more populous states, the Framers of the Constitution created a two-house legislature and guaranteed each state the same number of Senators regardless of its population. This has become more undemocratic over time as the population gap between the largest and the smallest states has steadily grown. In 1787 the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.

The Framers also created the Electoral College, which over time has also taken on the role of boosting the political power of smaller, more ethnically homogeneous states. Since 1992 there have been eight Presidential elections, of which the Democratic nominee has won five and the Republican has won three – but only once, in 2004, did the Republican actually win the popular vote for President. George W. Bush became President in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016, through carrying enough smaller, more homogeneous states to win majorities in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.

In 2020 several political commentators noted that Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republicans in general had given up on winning the popular vote and concentrated on gaining the all-important electoral majority. It’s an historical oddity that in all four Presidential elections since the modern two-party system emerged during and after the Civil War in which the popular and electoral vote diverged – Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland in 1888, George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, and Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in 2016 – it’s always been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the Republican who won the Electoral College and hence the Presidency, never the other way around.

One other thing the Framers did that has been ruinous for American democracy in recent years was to give state legislatures virtually absolute control over national, state and local elections. State legislatures determine what districts would-be Congressmembers and state legislators will run in, and also regulate the time, place and manner of conducting elections. If you read the great Constitutional amendments which expanded the franchise – the 15th, which (at least theoretically) guaranteed the voting rights of people of color; the 19th, which guaranteed them to women; the 24th, which abolished poll taxes; and the 27th, which lowered the voting age to 18 – all of them are framed as specific limitations on the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures to regulate who may vote, where and when.

One of the most starkly repressive and anti-democratic features of American politics is legislative gerrymandering. The term comes from Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention, who as governor of Massachusetts in the first decade of the 19th century produced a legislative map designed to keep his party, the Democratic-Republicans, in power permanently. Opponents joked that one of the districts looked like a salamander, and they called it the “Gerrymander.” The term stuck, and since the development of computers and their use in drawing legislative district lines, gerrymandering has become more and more precise.

Current political scientists have estimated that only about 10 percent of the 435 House of Representatives districts are truly competitive between the two major parties. In all the others, voter registration margins are so lopsided that most House members are more likely to lose their seats by being “primaried” – usually by someone more extreme in their politics – than losing a general election to the other major party’s candidate. Republicans have generally pushed more extreme gerrymanders than Democrats, so when Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) says she’s taking extreme-Right positions because they reflect “the will of my voters,” she’s absolutely right – only the “voters” she’s representing are a cadre of extreme Republicans with the same views as hers.

To see how effective modern-day gerrymandering is, one need only look at two states that sit side-by-side, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Michigan, a citizens’ initiative took the power to draw legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to an independent commission; in Wisconsin, the state legislature still draws the lines. Besides being right next to each other on the map, Michigan and Wisconsin are both more or less evenly divided between the two major parties and they’re both on the list of six so-called “swing” or “battleground” states that determine Presidential elections.

Yet in Michigan, Democrats in 2022 not only re-elected their Democratic governor but gained control of both houses of the state legislature – while in Wisconsin, Democrats only narrowly (by one seat in one house) avoided having two-thirds Republican supermajorities in both houses that would have effectively nullified the power of their re-elected Democratic Governor, Tony Evers. In 2018 65 percent of Wisconsin’s voters chose a Democrat to represent them in the state legislature – but the Republicans had done such a good job of gerrymandering that Democrats got just 45 percent of the legislative seats.

In April 2023, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal Democrat, Janet Protasiewicz, to their state’s Supreme Court in May, largely in the hope she’d reverse Wisconsin’s gerrymandered districts and protect women’s choice against a 1931 “zombie law” banning nearly all abortions that became effective once the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade (https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-abortion-0d188b5c6f841546f98436c1ab8180fa). Legislative Republicans responded by blocking her from taking office for four months by threatening to impeach her.

Legislative gerrymandering is only one tool by which Republicans, once they seize control of a state through an election, make sure they never have to give it up. Another tool is voter suppression; instead of trying to convince or persuade voters, modern-day Republicans seek to shrink the electorate so people unlikely to vote for them aren’t able to vote at all. John Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, has led the Court in a series of decisions that have effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and made it harder for people of color either to vote or to have effective representation in Congress and state legislatures.

The latest of these is a November 20, 2023 ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals – just one rung below the Supreme Court – that would take away the ability of private citizens and advocacy groups to bring lawsuits challenging state laws as discriminatory against voters of color (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/20/federal-court-deals-devastating-blow-to-voting-rights-act-00128069). Under this opinion, only the federal government, through the Department of Justice, could bring such suits – which, if the Republicans regain the Presidency in 2024 or thereafter, would mean the effective elimination of any enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court vs. the People and the Constitution

The transformation of the United States Supreme Court over the last several decades of Republican Presidents has in itself been a major attack on democracy. What many people don’t realize is that the U.S. Constitution does not specifically grant the Supreme Court the power to invalidate laws by declaring them unconstitutional. That is a power the Court proclaimed itself in 1803, in a case called Marbury v. Madison, in which then-Chief Justice John Marshall said, “It is the duty of the judicial department to decide what the law is.”

Since then, the Supreme Court has usually been a Right-wing force in American politics. It reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when in a series of utterly dreadful rulings it declared minimum-wage laws unconstitutional, effectively banned labor unions, exalted corporations as “people” with the same political and legal rights as actual humans, and ruled that racial segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities for whites and Blacks were “equal” – which, not surprisingly, they never were. In the 1930’s there was a bitter clash between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the hard-line Right-wing court majority who were throwing out New Deal legislation as fast as Congress could pass it – and when Roosevelt tried to respond by expanding the number of justices on the Court, his critics called it “court-packing” and successfully mobilized to stop him.

Things gradually changed because Roosevelt was able to reshape the court through sheer attrition. Because Roosevelt’s presidency lasted over 12 years – longer than any before or since, especially after the 22nd Amendment (passed in 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death) limited the Presidency to two terms – he and his successors (including Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed two of the most liberal justices in U.S. history, Earl Warren and William Brennan) reshaped the court in a more liberal direction.

Even after Warren’s retirement in 1969, the Court for a few more years kept trending liberal, and the justices didn’t always fall on major cases the way you’d expect them to based on the partisan affiliations of the Presidents who appointed them. It’s hard to believe given how the whole concept of women’s bodily autonomy in general and her right to abortion in particular has become one more issue dividing the two major parties, but the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973), which for the next 49 years guaranteed a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, was written by Harry Blackmun, appointed by Republican Richard Nixon – and the dissent was written by Byron White, appointed by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

Republican leaders saw this as a major problem. A young Right-wing activist named Leonard Leo formed a group called the Federalist Society that would identify law students with solidly Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession. Leo regarded such relatively liberal or moderate Republican Supreme Court appointees as Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter as mistakes, and one major mission of his organization was to make sure future Republican Presidents appointed only hard-core Right-wingers not only to the Supreme Court but the federal judiciary as a whole. Today it’s virtually impossible to get a federal judicial appointment from a Republican President unless you’re either a Federalist Society member or have their imprimatur.

In previous posts I’ve referred to Leonard Leo as “the most important American you’ve never heard of,” and his role in hand-picking much of America’s judiciary is only part of his matchmaking skill. He’s also become the point of contact between judges, including Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and super-rich people who want to offer them bribes, including sweetheart loans and expensive trips, to build goodwill at the Court. Even before some of the major scandals involving favors wealthy individuals have done for sitting Supreme Court justices – including lavish vacations and flights on private planes, private-school tuitions and free housing for their relatives, and the like – on May 3, 2023 Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote an article called “America’s Anything-Goes Supreme Court” (https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae) in which he discussed three reasons why the Supreme Court has fallen to its lowest level of approval in the history of public polling on the subject.

“The first was the manner in which this court has been filled,” Luce wrote. “After the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016, the Republican Senate kept a vacancy open for the final ten months of Barack Obama’s term on the unheard-of grounds that the next president should decide. Donald Trump then filled the slot with a ‘conservative’ justice, Neil Gorsuch. When the liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died six weeks before the 2020 election, Republicans wrapped up the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s highly ‘conservative’ nominee, in near-record time. The new umpires were only too willing to profit from a politics that rewrote the rules as it went along. As a result, the court now has an unassailable 6-3 ‘conservative’ majority which seems likely to last at least the next two decades.” (I’m putting quotes around the word “conservative” because the current court majority is a group of Right-wing revolutionaries and there’s nothing truly “conservative” about them.)

“The second,” Luce added, “is the unpopularity of this court’s decisions — most notably last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that enshrined the right to abortion. In addition to flying in the face of public opinion, their move overturned the principle of ‘settled law’ to which each of the justices had attested in their hearings. Last year the court also gave the green light to partisan gerrymandering, which feeds heavily into America’s disaffection with politics. Ditto for another ruling that allows gun owners to carry concealed weapons in public.

“The third cause of the court’s plummeting standing,” Luce continued, “is the fact that the justices are not bound by even the flimsiest of ethical codes. Last month, ProPublica, a non-profit investigative group, revealed that Clarence Thomas, the most ‘conservative’ justice, had taken millions of dollars in hospitality from Harlan Crow, a Texan billionaire. This included numerous private flights, superyacht holidays in Indonesia and New Zealand and annual stays at his palatial New York estate. Crow also purchased Thomas’s mother’s house and paid to renovate it. None of this was disclosed.” Recently Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed a so-called “code of ethics” for himself and his fellow justices – but without any enforcement mechanism, it will make no difference.

At the end of his article, Luce compared the current 6-3 Right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to the Iranian Council of Guardians, the board of Muslim clerics that essentially rules Iran and has veto power over who gets to run for office in Iran’s nominal democracy as well as everything the electeds try to do. “Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion,” Luce wrote. “They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.” And just as Iran’s Governing Council sees its mission as imposing a theocratic agenda on Iran’s people and stamping out anything that goes contrary to the “will of Allah” as they define it, U.S. Republican judges in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular see their mission as advancing the cause of so-called “Christian nationalism” and gradually whittling away at the separation of church and state.

Republicans’ Determination to Control Women’s Bodies

One of the most revealing comments in Edward Luce’s commentary on the current U.S. Supreme Court is his point that the Court, like Iran’s Council of Guardians, “regulates women’s bodies.” Regulating women’s bodies, and in particular re-enslaving them to their wombs so they can’t have sex without the risk of becoming pregnant, is one of the main priorities of both the Republican Party and America’s radical Right in general.

And they’re pursuing this goal despite overwhelming evidence that almost 60 percent of Americans are pro-choice. This is borne out not only by opinion polls but actual election results. In 2022 abortion rights were directly on the ballot in six states – California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana and Kansas – and in all six the pro-choice position won. California, Michigan and Vermont voters amended their states’ constitutions to guarantee abortion rights. Kentucky and Kansas voters rejected attempts by anti-abortion activists to write language in their states’ constitutions to ban abortion. Montana voters rejected a measure that would have called for prosecuting doctors and nurses who failed to provide care for a fetus that survived a late-term abortion.

With current polls showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six so-called “battleground states” – Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia – that will effectively determine the next Presidential election, Democrats are panicking and working to put abortion rights on the ballot in those states in hopes of driving voter turnout for their party. But a recent attempt to do that in Nevada was just thrown out by judge James T. Russell before they could even collect signatures to get it on the ballot (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4325295-judge-rejects-nevada-attempt-enshrine-abortion-ballot/).

The lengths to which Republicans will go to pursue their anti-choice agenda in spite of the clear will of the American people were amply displayed this year in Ohio. In order to keep pro-choice activists from writing reproductive choice protections into the Ohio constitution, the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature first put on the ballot in August a measure to change the threshold for amending the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent – not coincidentally, just above the 55 to 57 percent of Ohio voters that were supporting it in polls. The legislature put this on the ballot despite their previous vote to get rid of midsummer special elections in odd-numbered years because so few people vote in them. Ohio’s pro-choice activists mobilized voters in that state to reject that amendment, which they did by a 14-percent margin (https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/08/08/ohios-issue-1-goes-down-to-defeat/).

In November 2023 Ohio voters went on to pass the measure protecting abortion rights in the state constitution by a similarly lopsided margin, with 56.62 percent voting yes and 43.38 percent voting no (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2023_Ohio_Issue_1_). This vote came despite lots of misleading campaigning against it, including ballot language from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that described what the measure would do in highly partisan and propagandistic terms – Secretary Frank LaRose said it “would always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy regardless of viability,” which it wouldn’t – and campaign arguments from the anti-choice side saying it would allow for “abortions after birth,” which don’t exist.

But losing twice at the ballot box didn’t stop the Ohio legislature from looking for ways to ban abortion in the state despite the public vote (https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/11/13/some-ohio-gop-lawmakers-attempting-to-undermine-democratic-process-after-voters-protect-abortion/). A quartet of Right-wing extremists in the Ohio legislature – Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), Bill Dean (R-Xenia), Melanie Miller (R-Ashland) and Beth Lear (R-Galena) – are pushing a bill to strip Ohio’s state courts of the ability to enforce the pro-choice constitutional amendment. “The Ohio General Assembly shall have the exclusive authority over implementing Ohio Issue 1 [the pro-choice amendment],” the draft legislation says. “All jurisdiction is hereby withdrawn from and denied to the Courts of Common Pleas and all other courts of the State of Ohio.” The bill also threatens impeachment against any judge who tries to enforce Issue 1. The four authors explained in a press release on the official Ohio Republican legislators’ Web site that the bill was needed to block “mischief by pro-abortion courts.”

Legal experts in Ohio argue that what Gross, Dean, Miller and Lear are trying to do is itself unconstitutional. “Whatever authority the legislature might have to tinker with the jurisdiction of the state courts, it cannot eviscerate a rights-granting provision of the state constitution,” said Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Entin. Constitutional law expert Steven Steinglas called the bill “ridiculous,” and added, “I know we’re talking respectfully about the Ohio General Assembly, but saner minds will, I am sure, prevail.” But even if the bill never gets to be law, it’s still a vivid illustration of the visceral contempt modern-day Republicans have for the rule of law and the democratic principle.

Donald Trump and His Fascist Re-Election Agenda

The campaign for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination has been totally dominated by former President Donald Trump. The latest polls show him with over 60 percent support from Republican voters, and ironically his various legal troubles – including four indictments in three jurisdictions charging him with a total of 91 felonies – have only boosted his support in his own party. What’s more, legislative fatigue, distrust and a general sense that the 81-year-old Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency (even though Trump is just three years younger!) have kept the general-election polling between Biden and Trump dead even, with Trump (as mentioned above) leading in five of the six “battleground states” that will probably determine who the next President is.

During the 2016 campaign I compared Donald Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in battle because every time an attacker knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again stronger than before. Antaeus was finally defeated and killed by Herakles – or, to use his more famous Roman name, Hercules – who, on the advice of the goddess Athena, lifted Antaeus in the air with one hand while knifing him with the other to make sure Antaeus couldn’t touch the earth and thereby regain the strength to fight off and kill Herakles.

Throughout his career as a businessperson and a politician, Trump has similarly withstood all sorts of scandals that would have been career-ending for any other public figure. He survived in 1991, when the people who’d lent him money to build his failing Atlantic City casinos were about to force him into bankruptcy when they realized the casinos would do better with Trump’s name on them than without it. They cut a deal with him whereby the casinos would still bear the Trump brand but he wouldn’t be allowed to have any role in running them – and this revolutionized Trump’s business model because he realized he could make developers pay through the nose to license Trump’s name and he could make money off their projects without the bothersome necessity of actually building or running anything.

During his 2016 campaign he called the media “enemies of the people,” mocked a disabled reporter who covered him on the campaign trail, called on his rally audiences to beat up hecklers (and said he’d pay for their legal defense if they were arrested), said Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” when she asked him a tough question about his abusive comments about women, mocked U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and said, “He wasn’t a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” All these incidents led to Trump rising in the polls, and even the October 2016 revelation that in a taped conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he could sexually assault women and “they let you do it, because when you’re a star, you can do anything” didn’t stop Trump’s seemingly unstoppable win in November.

Trump’s next Antaeus-like comeback from seeming defeat happened when he lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden – or at least that’s what the reality-based world said happened. Trump immediately responded with a series of press conferences claiming that he had really won the election and it had been “stollen” from him (that spelling, with two “l”’s, is the one he routinely uses on his own “Truth Social” media site) – and in the classic manner of Naxi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his philosophy of the “Big Lie,” repeated it over and over until nearly all U.S. Republican voters believed it.

Trump not only urged his followers to come to Washington on January 6, 2021 – the date on which the U.S. Congress was supposed to meet and perform the “ministerial” (government-speak for actions with a predetermined outcome) function of certifying Biden’s victory – he called them to a rally on the Ellipse in D.C. and urged them to march on the Capitol to stop the certification of Biden’s win. Trump said he would join the march personally – I’ve long suspected he had Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome as his model – and though he didn’t because the U.S. Secret Service said it would be too risky and wouldn’t let him, the riot he arguably provoked with his incendiary speech lasted three hours (during which Trump refused the requests of his own staff, including his adult children, to do something to stop it) and led to the deaths of five people.

Later evidence developed by the House of Representatives select committee appointed to investigate the riot, and the special prosecutor U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked to handle an official Justice Department probe, made it clear that Trump intended to foment a coup d’état to stay in office illegally despite his election defeat. And most of his party sided with him: 151 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives – three-fourths of the party’s delegation – voted with Trump and refused to certify the election. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, respectively, initially attacked Trump for sparking the riot but quickly changed their tunes once they learned that Republican base voters were with Trump no matter what. Three weeks after the riot, McCarthy went to Trump’s golf resort at Mar-a-Lago, Florida and went through a self-abasing ceremony many people compared to the “taking the knee” ritual in the TV miniseries Game of Thrones.

Since then, Trump has not only declared his candidacy to retake the Presidency in 2024 but has staked out a frankly authoritarian and anti-democratic platform. Variously called “Agenda47” (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47) and “Project 2025” (https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981), the essence of the plan is to replace all career civil servants who won’t toe Trump’s line with so-called “loyalists” loyal only to Donald Trump. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had the same idea; they called it the “Führerprinzip” (“leader principle”). The idea both Hitler and Trump had was that their will would be the ultimate legal authority. As I noted when Trump fired FBI director James Comey in 2017 after Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” to Trump, the American soldiers who fought in World War II had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution. The Germans they were fighting against had sworn a personal oath to Hitler.

Trump already started this process during his first term when in October 2020 he issued an executive order with the seemingly innocuous title “Schedule F.” As Jonathan Swan reported on Axios.com July 22, 2022 (https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term?fbclid=IwAR0H-mDvYLnxMAb5N2zIQkU2zg87EsaGSE1nnMxiSs06Uj_4fWLSwiTwuL8), “Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as ‘Schedule F’ employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections. … An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life. Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his ‘America First’ agenda.”

“Schedule F” fell through the media cracks when the election and Trump’s increasingly bizarre contesting of the results dominated news coverage during late 2022. Joe Biden rescinded the “Schedule F” executive order just two days after taking office, but Trump has made it clear that if he becomes President again in 2025 he will immediately reinstitute it and start clearing out the civil-service bureaucrats whom he believes obstructed his agenda the first time around.

Trump has also made no secret of his plan to weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice and use it as a tool to prosecute his political “enemies” whether they’ve done anything criminal or not. He’s claimed this is revenge against Biden for having allegedly weaponized the Justice Department against him, but there’s plenty of evidence that Trump has always believed U.S. Presidents should have the power to order the prosecution of political opponents and anyone else they don’t like. He said so himself in a remarkable interview with Right-wing talk radio host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2, 2017:

“[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

Indeed, Trump and his last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, William Barr, had a falling-out over precisely this question. In October 2020 Trump called Barr into his office and demanded that Barr get indictments against Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and his 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump seemed to think that just indicting these people on the eve of the 2020 election would be such a blow to the Democratic Party that he would be guaranteed to win re-election. Barr tried to explain to Trump that the Justice Department can’t just go ahead and indict people without probable cause that they’ve committed actual crimes. Trump was unpersuaded, and within a month he’d ordered Barr to “resign.”

Robert Kagan just published an op-ed in the Washington Post stating flat-out that Trump has already pledged to pursue a dictatorial agenda if he’s returned to the Presidency in 2024. Trump has promised, Kagan wrote, “to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.” The battlefield of American politics is already littered with the scalps of Republican elected officials who dared to take on Trump and try to hold him to account, including Justin Amash, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and, most recently, Mitt Romney. With the aid of a fanatically devoted base, Trump has essentially taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality.

And a recent YouTube video from the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY68idKVKx0) shows just how fanatical the Trump base is. It was filmed in South Carolina and showed that, with just a handful of exceptions, the Republican Party in that state is unshakably devoted to Trump. The low point of that YouTube video comes when a Black woman compares Trump to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as a political martyr. That video also features Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene demanding that all other Republican candidates for the Presidency drop out at once and endorse Trump.

Trump’s example has inspired Republicans up and down the ballot to copy his methods and swear fealty to his goals (whatever they are). Just as the Nazis who gained seats in the German legislature before Hitler’s total takeover in January 1933 worked industriously to sabotage any efforts to solve Germany’s economic problems because Hitler and the Nazis knew they did best when the German economy was at its worst, Trump and his colleagues in the Republican clown car currently running the House of Representatives are, I’m sure, consciously aware that the more they can do to make the U.S. government and democracy as a whole look unworkable, the better Trump will do in 2024.

U.S. Congressmember Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the so-called “House Freedom Caucus,” recently took the floor to complain that the House Republicans have not done anything to convince American voters that they deserve to retain their majority. But the overall context of his remarks made clear that the biggest thing he wants House Republicans to do is shut down the government to force President Biden and the still Democratic-controlled Senate to agree to massive cuts in government spending. These cuts will fulfill the Republicans’ long-term ideological mission to eliminate what’s left of the “social safety net” and take money away from most Americans to give it to the super-rich.

The Republicans, under Donald Trump’s leadership, are pursuing an agenda that would never win majority support from the American people in a free and fair election. So they’re rewriting election laws in state after state to make sure we never have one again. Among the major policy goals of the current Republican Party is a nationwide ban on abortion, allowing just about anybody to buy almost any sort of gun they want and carry it with them everywhere they go, ending all programs to fight human-caused climate change, and simultaneously exalt corporate power while targeting corporations that oppose the anti-women, anti-Queer Republican “faith-based” policy agenda.

As Trump continues his campaign to win back the Presidency in 2024, his rhetoric and the reality of his proposals are both sounding ever more like Hitler, Mussolini and the other original fascists. At a Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire (https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary), Trump said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” A few brave news commentators noted that the reference to perceived political enemies as “vermin” was also rhetoric Hitler used to attack the Jews and justify his program to exterminate them all.

More ominous is Trump’s repeated promises to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the President to order the U.S. military to maintain “order” under certain circumstances. The Act reads, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” Trump wanted to invoke this as part of his illegal plot to stay in power even after he lost the 2020 election, and if returned to the Presidency he would almost certainly use the Insurrection Act to send U.S. soldiers into American cities and towns to suppress demonstrations against him.

American democracy is pretty well doomed if Donald Trump regains the Presidency in 2024 and the Republicans take back the Senate and keep the House. Their leadership models are authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Javier Milei in Argentina. All of them won power by proclaiming themselves as friends of “the people” against unspecified sinister “elites” who were keeping them down – the recipe Trump followed to perfection in his rise to power and the Presidency in the U.S. As Robert Kagan wrote in his Washington Post article, “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.”