November 5, 2024: The Day American Democracy Committed Suicide

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

”In a democracy you must have seen how men condemned to death or exile stay on and go about in public, and no one takes any more notice than he would of a spirit that walked invisible. There is so much tolerance and superiority to petty considerations; such a contempt for all those fine principles we laid down in founding our commonwealth, as when we said that only a very exceptional nature could turn out a good man, if he had not played as a child among things of beauty and given himself only to creditable pursuits.

“A democracy tramples all such notions under foot; with a magnificent indifference to the sort of life a man has led before he enters politics, it will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.”

– Plato, The Republic

I first encountered that quote in 1971 in a junior-college introduction to political science class. On November 3, 1972, as Richard Nixon was winning his landslide election victory against George McGovern for re-election as President of the United States, I was editor of my junior-college paper, the College of Marin Times. I had that quote typeset and ran it as the front cover, with a thick black mourning border and the headline, “Now More Than Ever” – the slogan of Nixon’s victorious campaign.

Now it’s happened again. Through a combination of guile, gall, indomitable spirit and commitment, Donald Trump has regained the White House after four blessed years during which we were more or less rid of him. I say “more or less” because Trump never really left. He didn’t sink into well-deserved obscurity as most defeated one-term Presidents have. Nor did he look for other ways he could serve his country, as John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter did. Instead he bided his time, vowed revenge (literally; in one 2023 speech he promised his supporters, “I will be your retribution”) and mounted – to use Trump’s own over-the-top language, which for once is entirely accurate – perhaps the greatest political comeback the world has ever seen.

Don’t be fooled by the narrow margin by which Trump won his return to the White House in 2024. Though Right-wing propagandists exaggerate when they call it a “mandate” or even a “landslide,” this year’s election was an overall catastrophe for the Democratic Party and Left-of-center America in general. The narrow inroads Trump and the Republicans have established in traditionally Democratic communities – voters of color (Latinos and African-Americans in particular), especially working-class men; young voters; and non-college-educated women – are beachheads from which the Republicans can build a seemingly impregnable political majority in years to come.

The triumph of the Republican Party in 2024, and particularly its authoritarian, democracy-hating “MAGA” wing, was a long time coming. It didn’t start with Trump. It started with Richard Nixon and the late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) in 1968. With the Democrats abandoning their centuries of support for slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan and embracing the racial equality movement by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the white racist constituency was up for grabs and the Republicans grabbed for and won it.

Though the Nixon-Thurmond “Southern Strategy” was originally intended just as a defense against the independent Presidential candidacy of George Wallace as an avowed racist in 1968, it soon became the core appeal of the Republican Party not only in the South, but among Northern working-class white voters as well. Through veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) appeals to racism and cultural anxieties – manifesting themselves first as an anti-hippie movement and then as an anti-Queer movement – the Republicans finally broke the New Deal coalition and set forth the possibility of broad-spectrum dominance of American politics, which – despite his failure (yet) to win control of Congress – Nixon seemed to have achieved in his landslide re-election in 1972 and Ronald Reagan also seemed to have achieved in his similarly sweeping landslide in 1984.

The next step in the Republicans’ long-term plan for total domination came in 1987, when President Reagan’s appointees to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the Fairness Doctrine that had previously required broadcasters to cover political issues relatively impartially. As a result, virtually the entire AM radio band became a 24/7 transmission belt for Right-wing political propaganda. The biggest star of Right-wing propaganda radio, Rush Limbaugh, became the most effective media spokesperson for the American Right in the nation’s history. In 1996, the launch of Fox News gave the Right a permanent propaganda outlet on TV as well. Millions of Americans now got (and still get) all their information on what was happening to them and the world around them filtered through the open and ardent propaganda outlets of the Right.

The final step came in 2016, when Donald Trump emerged as a radical-Right Presidential candidate. Trump spoke in the same us-versus-them rhetoric as the talk radio hosts, with the same sneering contempt and mockery of anyone who disagreed with him. Despite his background as a child of wealth, power and privilege, he managed – as Limbaugh and the other talk-radio and Fox TV stars had before him – to convey himself as the true, authentic voice of the American working class. It occurred to me during the 2016 campaign that liberal aesthetes looked at the tacky gaudiness of Trump Tower and thought, “How disgusting” – while millions of working-class Americans saw it and thought, “That’s what I would do if I had money.”

And though in 2016 Trump’s working-class appeal was mostly limited to whites, by 2024 he’d figured out how to extend it to people of color as well. Already in 2016 a good friend of mine who’s Mexican-American had warned me he knew a lot of fellow Latinos who were going to vote for Trump because they worried that undocumented immigrants were going to take jobs away from them. By 2024 the American Right was targeting working-class citizens of color, Latinos in particular but also African-Americans, and using the same tactics that had successfully won them the white working-class vote since the 1970’s – mostly by appealing to traditional racial and cultural prejudices – to pull them away from the Democrats and towards their side. This year, Trump was able to win 45 percent of the Latino vote nationwide despite his open, out-front anti-Latino racism.

It’s STILL “The Economy, Stupid”

In 1992 James Carville, a consultant for Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign, coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to explain why Clinton – who just before the Democratic convention that year was third in the polls behind Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and independent candidate H. Ross Perot – still had a chance and could win. With the economy mired in a recession and Bush’s policies arguably to blame, Carville told Clinton to focus relentlessly on people’s economic woes. Bush tried to say that the American economy was basically sound and if people would only keep him in office, things would get better. But stubbornly high inflation made Bush look totally out of touch with what the American people were feeling, and he lost.

That is exactly what happened in 2024, only with the roles of the two major parties reversed. The more President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders touted good-sounding economic statistics – historically low unemployment, rising wages and a record-setting stock market – the more people found them out of touch with what they were going through. Every time people went to a grocery store or filled up their cars at a gas station and saw they were paying far more than they’d paid a week or a month before, they grew angrier and angrier, and more inclined to vote for Trump because when he was President, inflation was still relatively low.

Indeed, it’s arguable that the only reason Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020 was the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s what Brad Parscale, digital campaign strategist and one of the many campaign managers who came and went, thought. He told PBS for their documentary The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump, “By February of 2020 you see Trump’s popularity skyrocket,” Parscale said. “We come into a poll, I show him in the Oval, and he was winning in a landslide. He had a battle map that no one had seen since Reagan. That is February of 2020. And I remember going home that night and seeing the pictures coming out of China, and Italy, and other places, of COVID.”

Faced with a real crisis he was utterly unable to deal with, Trump’s popularity plummeted in 2020 as the COVID crisis wound on. Though Trump did do one big thing right – he authorized a crash program, “Operation Warp Speed,” to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19 – for the most part it was rambling press conferences in which, in one infamous incident, he wondered aloud if bleach and Lysol could be used inside the body to kill the virus. But if Trump was driven from the White House largely because of his mishandling of COVID, he was returned to it partly because of the lingering damage COVID had done to the economy.

COVID-19 also appears to have been the factor that sank Joe Biden’s candidacy for re-election. When Biden appeared at the now-infamous June 27 debate with Trump and flamed out so spectacularly various Democrats rallied to get him off the ticket and nominate someone younger and stronger in his place, he actually had COVID-19. But he hadn’t been diagnosed yet, and just when he needed to be at his strongest and defend his place on the ticket, the disease weakened him and cost him the ability to protect himself.

As a result, the Democrats were stuck with Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, who suffered from innumerable handicaps she was unable to overcome in the brief 3 ½-month campaign available to her. She was a woman, part-Black, part-Asian, who came from one of the most unpopular parts of the country: the San Francisco Bay Area, considered a hotbed of the counter-culture too many Americans have been indoctrinated to despise. As Vice-President, her favorability/unfavorability ratings were even worse than Biden’s. The only reason the party was stuck with her was, under federal campaign law, she could use the money that had been raised for the Biden-Harris campaign. Any other candidate the Democrats nominated would have literally had to start their fundraising from zero.

Harris was also Biden’s Vice-President, and sitting Vice-Presidents who run for President almost never win. No sitting Vice-President ever won the Presidency between Martin Van Buren in 1836 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. (Both Van Buren and Bush were essentially running as surrogates for fantastically popular Presidents – Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan, respectively – and both lost their own re-election bids due to economic collapses caused by the failures of policies they’d inherited from their predecessors.) The reason why so many sitting Vice-Presidents – including Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Al Gore in 2000 – have lost their bids for the top job is Vice-Presidents get all the blame for what people don’t like about their Presidents, and none of the credit for what people do like.

Trump, Defender of Masculinity

Another key factor in Trump’s 2024 win was his emergence as an aggressive defender of masculinity and male privilege. As Associated Press reporters Zeke Miller, Michelle L. Price, Will Weissert and Jill Colvin wrote in a November 6 dispatch (https://apnews.com/article/election-day-trump-harris-white-house-83c8e246ab97f5b97be45cdc156af4e2), “The victory validates his bare-knuckles approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.”

The fact that he was running against a woman, both in 2016 and 2024, was a major boost for Trump. It’s significant that out of Trump’s three Presidential candidacies, the only time the Democrats were able to beat him was with a safe old white man whose campaign slogan could have been, “Make America Boring Again.” It seems virtually certain that the bigwigs who run the Democratic Party won’t risk nominating a woman or a person of color when the next Presidential election rolls around in 2028 – assuming there is a Presidential election in 2028, which for the first time since America’s Constitution was ratified in 1789 can’t be taken for granted (more on that later).

One key outreach Trump and his campaign made that ensured his victory was to the largely (but not exclusively) white on-line community of young “bro” men. As Katherine Fung wrote in Newsweek on November 8 (https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-young-men-bro-vote-1982213), “Trump pulled off one the greatest political comebacks in modern history in the early hours of Wednesday, winning enough electoral votes to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris and return to the White House for a second term. He is also projected to win the popular vote [which he did]. Key to Trump's victory? The young men he courted with appearances on podcasts and livestreams hosted by influencers like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys. The same young men that Democrats thought were all talk and no bite.”

In fact, Trump and his people have been far, far more adept at using social media than their Democratic counterparts. Democrats still behave as if, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) put it, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but no one’s entitled to their own set of facts.” In fact, everyone’s entitled to their own set of facts, too. The days when a father-figure anchor like Walter Cronkite of CBS could solemnly intone at the end of his broadcasts, “And that’s the way it is,” are long gone.

America’s increasingly fragmented media landscape made it possible for every American to consume just the sorts of news that will reinforce their already existing prejudices and avoid any information that would challenge them. It’s true that some perspectives – particularly those Left of center – are deliberately missing from this media smorgasbord. Like the American political system, the American media system is so capital-intensive that no perspectives that truly challenge the prerogatives of the rich and powerful will get heard. That in itself permanently biases American politics towards the Right, because it means that disaffected Americans who want sweeping social change will hear Right-wing solutions and not Left-wing ones.

Trump made inroads into the youth vote partly by his mastery of social media and partly because he presented an in-your-face challenge to the whole way people’s dating landscapes have changed with the rise of feminism. I don’t envy the young straight men of today, having to navigate today’s dating world with a plethora of new rules straight women have insisted on, many of which condemn most of the old ways young men used to have to persuade young women to have sex with them. When Trump’s Access Hollywood tape from 2006 came out during the 2016 campaign, his blatant sexism and disrespect for women – his boast that he could “grab ‘em by the pussy” because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything” – made him a hero to millions of horny young straight guys who envied him for what he could get away with.

In fact, it’s occurred to me that Donald Trump is the world’s oldest punk rocker. As incoherent as Trump’s rally speeches became during the later stages of the 2024 campaign, they served the purpose of letting American voters know that he would not be constrained by any rules, whether the law, decorum or simple common sense. Even the bizarre rally in which he stopped speaking for 40 minutes and played musical selections, ranging from Luciano Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria” to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” had an anarchic sense of rule-breaking about it that no doubt earned him the votes of many disaffected young men. And Trump’s classic defense of his off-the-wall D.J. set was to say it was “fun” – a word he often uses to defuse criticism.

Trump was also effective at reaching out to people through media forums his target audience had heard of but virtually no one else had. It was how he was able during the last two months of the campaign, after the September 10 debate with Harris in which she won the debate but he won the election, to duck any media interviews in which he might seriously be challenged on his ideas. (One partial exception was the October 15 Chicago Economic Forum with John Micklethwait of Bloomberg News, the latest pigeon who futilely attempted to correct Trump’s complete misunderstanding of how tariffs work.) MS-NBC host Stephanie Ruehl said that Trump’s three-hour love-fest with Joe Rogan had far more of an effect on the outcome than the September 10 debate.

The extent to which Trump’s campaign was associated with toxic hypermasculinity became apparent when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson gave a speech to a Trump rally in Duluth, Georgia October 23 (https://newrepublic.com/post/187485/tucker-carlson-daddy-trump-spanking-speech). “There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s pissed. Dad is pissed,” said Carlson. “He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know. When dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.’”

Immigrants Are to Trump What Jews Were to Hitler

It’s also impossible to explain Donald Trump’s amazing political successes without reference to his single most important issue: immigration. He began his political career in July 2015 by coming down the gold escalator at Trump Tower and immediately denouncing Mexican immigrants as “murderers” and “rapists.” It’s why he made the centerpiece of his campaign a promise promptly to deport up to 15 million “illegal” immigrants, as well as the bizarre claim he made on September 10 that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing people’s cats and dogs to eat them: the same sorts of things Nazi propagandists used to say about Jews to justify their extermination.

All would-be authoritarians, Left or Right, need scapegoats to reinforce their power. For the Left through most of the 20th century the scapegoats of choice were international capitalists and the so-called “bourgeoisie.” For the Right it’s been a heady mix of targets including Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, Queers, Trans people and anyone who seems “different,” who doesn’t fit into the white-bread image of “America for Americans.” (Trump’s long-time advisor Stephen Miller has repeatedly said, “America should be for Americans,” which strikes me as odd because taken literally it’s a call for all us white people to go back to Europe and give America back to the Natives.)

One of the centerpieces of Trump’s return-to-office campaign was his call for the mass deportation of up to 15 million “illegal” immigrants. He made clear that he and only he would be the arbiter of who counted as “legal” and who was “illegal.” He denounced the Haitian immigrants of Springfield and said he would deport them as “illegal” even though they were admitted through legal channels: a so-called “temporary protected status” program signed into law in 1990 by a Republican President, George H. W. Bush. The most ominous thing Trump said about his mass deportation program was that it would be modeled on “Operation Wetback,” a similar but less extensive program ordered by the incoming administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953-1954.

“Operation Wetback” became notorious because the people at the Border Patrol and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (which is now Immigration and Customs Enforcement) didn’t bother to check people’s actual immigration status. They just did random sweeps of everybody with brown skin and a Spanish surname. As a result, they deported not only undocumented immigrants but people with legal status and even U.S. citizens, both naturalized and U.S.-born. It would be karmic justice indeed if some of the 45 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump were deported (or had to fight in the courts to stay in the U.S.) under Trump’s mass “Operation Wetback II” program.

Trump also may try to repeal by executive order the part of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This provision has generally been read to mean that if you’re born on American soil, whatever the immigration status of your parents, you’re an American. But there’s been a long-standing demand on the part of Right-wing lawyers that the clause, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” should be read to exclude the U.S.-born children of “illegal” immigrants because they’re not legally “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.

On its face, that’s preposterous. Just ask any undocumented immigrant who commits a crime and gets arrested if they’re “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. (Indeed, undocumented immigrants commit far fewer crimes than either documented immigrants or U.S. citizens precisely for that reason: if you’re undocumented and commit a crime, you’ll serve a prison sentence and then be deported.) But it’s been a long-standing demand of the Right-wing anti-immigrant community and Trump could well issue an executive order instituting that interpretation of the Constitution. And the six-member radical-Right majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court (three of whose members were appointed by Trump in his first term) just might let him get away with it.

Trump Finesses Potential Democratic Issues

One of the great hopes the Democrats had for this election was that it was going to be the first Presidential race since Trump and his radical-Right Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and its finding that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed most (not all) women the right to abortion. Opposition to this ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (2022), had helped save the U.S. Senate majority for the Democrats in 2022 and held the Republicans to a five-seat House of Representatives majority instead of the “red tsunami” a lot of political commentators (including me) had expected. Accordingly, in both 2022 and 2024 Democrats put a number of initiatives on the ballot in several states that would allow voters to guarantee women in those states the right to abortion, and maternal care in general, under their state constitutions.

But Trump made sure this strategy fizzled completely. By pledging he would veto any attempt by Congress to impose a nationwide ban on abortion and saying he would leave it up to individual states whether or not to allow the procedure and under what circumstances, he gave pro-choice women permission to vote for a pro-choice ballot measure and still vote for Trump. Ironically, if Trump and the Republicans really want to ban abortion nationwide, they may not need a new act of Congress to do it. They could simply start enforcing the 151-year-old Comstock Act, which makes it a crime to send through the mails any drug, device or substance that could be used to bring about an abortion.

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report, which Trump disavowed and said he hadn’t read even though almost 200 members of his first-term administration were involved in creating it and the book by its director includes a foreword by Trump’s Vice-President-elect, J. D. Vance, called for just that strategy: using the Comstock Act for an effective nationwide abortion ban. Trump could also order the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw its approval of the abortion pill Mifepristone, used in nearly two-thirds of modern-day U.S. abortions, even though it was first approved in 2000 and has an exemplary safety record.

In fact, one of the most maddening things about the 2024 election is the bizarre disconnect between what state voters decided in actual ballot measures and how they voted for President. In Missouri, for instance, voters approved a measure to raise the state’s minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave in addition to passing an abortion-rights measure. They also turned down a measure supported by the Right for school vouchers. At the same time, they chose Trump over Kamala Harris by 15 points. Voters in Kentucky also turned down a school voucher program and re-elected their popular Democratic governor, Andy Beshear – but they went for Trump over Harris by 30 points.

CNN analyst Eric Bradner summed up the Democrats’ dilemma in a November 10 article (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/10/politics/trump-voter-shifts-nationwide/index.html): “What Democrats will have to grapple with as the party enters a period of soul-searching is why the national party’s brand is so toxic with voters who have sided with the party on policy, and at times handed the party local victories.”

The Modern Antaeus Wins Again!

In previous posts over the last decade I’ve often compared Trump to Antaeus. Antaeus was the son of the Greek sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in normal combat because every time he was knocked down, Gaia would refresh his strength and he’d come back up mightier than before and kill his enemy. Antaeus finally got his comeuppance when the Greek hero Herakles – whom you know better by his Roman name, Hercules – acting on the advice of the goddess Athena, grabbed Antaeus and held him off the ground. Then he stabbed Antaeus to death with one hand while holding him up with the other so Gaia couldn’t refresh his strength.

Alas, the Democrats have yet to figure out how to vanquish Trump the way Herakles finished off Antaeus. As Newsweek’s Right-wing opinion columnist Josh Hammer put it in a November 8 dispatch (https://www.newsweek.com/death-obamaism-historic-maga-opportunity-opinion-1982555), “Trump's electoral landslide [sic] this week is one for the history books. His myriad foes illegitimately spied on his 2016 campaign. They fabricated a ‘Russia collusion’ narrative out of whole cloth, then spent years ‘investigating’ it. They impeached him twice. They prosecuted him across four separate jurisdictions, 91 criminal counts in total. They have tried to humiliate him, bankrupt him, and incarcerate him. Assassins have tried to kill him – twice. They have failed – repeatedly and catastrophically.

“Trump has solidified his status as the most consequential American political figure since Ronald Reagan,” Hammer continued. “He has become the first Republican presidential candidate to win the national popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. He has scrambled America's political coalitions for a generation or more, expanding beyond his white working-class base to reach the full tapestry of modern American life.” While there’s a certain degree of overwrought triumphalism here – America’s radical Right are sore losers and even sorer winners – Hammer’s overall point is well taken.

Even before he entered politics, in his career as a businessperson, Donald Trump had survived and even thrived after taking blows that would have eliminated less resourceful men. And when the first assassination attempt against him happened on June 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, both Trump himself and his strongest supporters claimed that his survival had literally been due to divine intervention. As I put it in a blog post on July 19, “The message came through loud and clear that GOD ALMIGHTY WANTS DONALD TRUMP TO BE PRESIDENT AGAIN, and if God Himself wants him to be in the White House once more, who are we mere voters to stand in his way?”

Indeed, it’s occurred to me that Trump’s public campaign, filled with shambolic rallies and endless digressions that made no sense, from celebrating “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” to using a rally at golf legend Arnold Palmer’s home town to rhapsodize about his dick size, may just have been a stage magician’s sleight-of-hand so we didn’t notice the real campaign, the one he was waging across man-space podcasts and his other quiet calls to the faithful to turn out en masse and return him to the Presidency. That may be the biggest reason why he appointed his campaign chair, Susie Wiles, to be the first White House chief of staff of the second Trump term (though since he had four chiefs of staff in his first term, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for her long-term job prospects in his second).

Just How Far Will Trump Go?

The as-yet unanswered (and unanswerable, until he actually takes office, though we have some clues in whom he’s picking for his Cabinet) question about Donald Trump’s second term is how far will he actually go. Certainly when he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025 he will be the most powerful President in American history, thanks in part to the U.S. Supreme Court decision guaranteeing him and all future Presidents near-total immunity from prosecution for anything they do in office. Trump totally dominates the Republican Party, and with Mitch McConnell on his way out as Republican Senate leader and his three potential replacements (John Thune of South Dakota, John Cornyn of Texas, and Rick Scott of Florida) all hard-core MAGA faithful, it’s almost certain that the Senate will at last eliminate the filibuster and allow bills of all sorts to pass with a simple majority vote.

That will leave the shrunken number of Democratic Senators in the same position as the current Democratic appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court: helpless in the face of a mobilized Republican juggernaut that will simply outvote them at every turn. Since I wrote the above, John Thune has won the secret majority-leader election and he’s pledged, at least so far, not to modify the filibuster rule. But it’s hard for me to believe that Trump, with his notorious impatience and history of demanding that whatever he wants be done immediately, or else, would stand for that for very long.

Indeed, one demand that Trump has already made seeks to nullify one of the Senate’s last remaining checks on U.S. executive power. He made the extraordinary demand of the three candidates for Senate majority leader that they agree not to convene the Senate at all for days or even weeks after the Constitutionally prescribed start of the legislative calendar on January 3. Trump wants to do this so he can get his Cabinet members in office immediately under the so-called “recess appointment” provision of the Constitution, meaning they can start work right away without the bothersome necessity of obtaining Senate confirmation.

Just why this “recess appointment” power is so important to Trump started becoming clear as soon as some of the actual names were released. For Secretary of Defense Trump has nominated Pete Hegseth, a National Guard veteran whose main qualifications appear to be he’s one of the hosts of the Fox and Friends Weekend show and earlier this year published a book called The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. He’s never actually administered an organization, especially one of the size and scope of the Defense Department. In his book Hegseth said women should once again be barred from serving in combat roles in the U.S. military – a ban lifted in 2013 under former President Obama and his Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta.

Hegseth also called in his book for mass firings of Pentagon personnel he considers too “woke” – Right-speak for being too concerned with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies,” Hegseth wrote. “Lots of people need to be fired.” Hegseth has criticized both former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley, whom he called “a partisan to the end” for Democrats, and his replacement, General Charles Q. Brown, who is African-American. In his book, Hegseth questioned Brown’s qualifications in ways that seem openly racist: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We'll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn't really much matter.”

Trump’s choice for Attorney General is even more scabrous: Congressmember Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). In 2020, during Trump’s first term as President, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation of Gaetz on allegations of drug use and sex with underage prostitutes. Though the Justice Department decided not to prosecute him, Gaetz still faced an ethics investigation that could have led to his being expelled from the House of Representatives – only he’s already resigned his seat, so he’s escaped responsibility for his alleged actions. Once he is Attorney General, he’ll be able to quash all investigations against himself. Gaetz was behind the removal of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 and has publicly endorsed the racist “Great Replacement Theory,” the idea that by immigrating to white-majority countries and out-reproducing the white populations, people of color are “reverse-colonizing” and taking over the world.

The handful of moderate House and Senate Republicans still remaining were mostly aghast at the prospect of Attorney General Gaetz. According to a report by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. Congressmember Mike Simpson reportedly told the Huffington Post, “Are you shitting me?” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Punchbowl News, “I was shocked at the nomination. … This is why the Senate’s advise-and-consent process is so important. I’m sure that there will be many, many questions raised at Mr. Gaetz’s hearing.” And Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters that the selection of Gaetz was “not on my bingo card. … We need a serious attorney general. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to consider somebody that is serious.”

Trump has also appointed Robert Wilkie, his controversial appointee to run the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA), as his liaison to staff the entire military, even though Wilkie was driven out from his job of running the VA by the opposition of 20 veterans’ organizations after he was accused of inappropriate sexual conduct with a woman VA staffer. And his choice as unofficial “border czar” to run his promised mass deportation of up to 15 million people was Tom Homan, one of the people in charge of the notorious “family separation” policy in Trump’s first term in which undocumented immigrants were forcibly separated from their U.S. citizen children. Asked if there was a way to carry out the deportations without separating the families, Homan said, “Sure. We could deport the whole families.”

The One Thing That Could Sink the Trump Juggernaut

The last two times it looked like the Republican Party had achieved its long-time goal for “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics – an unassailable majority that would continue indefinitely for decades or even centuries – what did it in was economic collapse. In the early 1990’s President George H. W. Bush faced a recession as a result of the economic policies he’d inherited from Ronald Reagan, and voters replaced him with Democrat Bill Clinton. Likewise, in 2008 decades of Republican (and Democratic) deregulation of the home finance market brought upon a horrific economic crisis it took newly elected Democratic President Barack Obama and a bipartisan Congress four years to get us out of.

Trump just could be setting himself up for a similar eventuality through two potentially devastating promises he made as a candidate: dramatic increases on tariffs and mass deportations of undocumented workers. Since most undocumented laborers do either farm or construction work, if Trump succeeds in deporting up to 15 million of them, there would be immediate and stunning shortages of food and rampant inflation at grocery stores. And Trump’s abject misunderstanding of how tariffs work could also lead to skyrocketing inflation by raising the price of everything Americans buy that contains components or ingredients from other countries.

Trump appears genuinely to believe that tariffs are taxes paid by foreign countries that don’t cost American consumers anything. Trump’s own first-term economic advisor, Gary Cohn, tried and failed to educate Trump on what tariffs really are. Tariffs are taxes imposed by the American government on American consumers, just like all other sorts of taxes. The only difference between tariffs and other taxes is that tariffs are paid by people who buy goods made in other countries. Given how interconnected the world’s economies are and how even items nominally “Made in U.S.A.” are dependent on parts made elsewhere, the massive tariffs Trump has proposed could jack up inflation far beyond the levels under Biden and make whole categories of goods unaffordable for most Americans.

There’s also an odd wrinkle in American tariff law that will allow Trump to reward particular companies and punish others. That’s because the tariff law of 1934, which replaced the onerous 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that most economists believe extended the Great Depression and helped make it worldwide, gave the President wide-ranging personal control over tariff rates. Trump could, if he wanted to, impose massive tariffs on silicon, rare-earth elements and other key imports, mostly from China, that are crucial to the production of electric cars. Then he could “waive” these tariffs for Tesla, the company owned by his good buddy Elon Musk. So if Americans wanted to buy an electric car, they’d have to buy a Tesla because Trump’s discriminatory tariffs would make all other brands unaffordable.

But Trump and his Republican Party have done such a good job building support from some of the most unlikely constituencies that a mere economic downturn like those in the early 1990’s or the late 2000’s probably wouldn’t be enough to turn the trick. It would have to be a sustained and total 1929-style collapse. So Democrats are in the unenviable position of having to root for another Great Depression because it’s the only thing that could conceivably break Trump’s and the Republicans’ “hold” on working-class voters, not only whites but people of color as well – and also having to hope for the death and deprivation that would come about as a result of such a large-scale crisis.

In the meantime, Trump will always be with us. I’m convinced that Donald Trump – assuming he survives to the end of his second term (though if he doesn’t he’ll just be replaced by his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, who’s even crazier) – has no intention of giving up power in 2029, or ever. Though he’s pledged to abide by the 22nd Amendment restricting the President to two terms, he could conceivably declare some sort of “national emergency” that would justify him either running for a third term or suspending the 2028 election altogether. And it’s also likely that a U.S. Supreme Court packed with his acolytes would let him get away with it. (The fact that America had Presidential elections in 1864 and 1944 during real national emergencies – the Civil War and World War II, respectively – wouldn’t enter into it.)

More likely, though, he’ll seek to retain power despite the 22nd Amendment through what Latin Americans call imposición. That means finding a totally reliable stooge to run in his place while Trump himself continues to wield absolute power. And the most likely imposición stooges for Trump would be his three adult male children. This possibility was already hinted at by someone who brought a sign to a 2024 Trump rally that read, “DONALD TRUMP 2O28,” and in tinier print it said, “Jr.” It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump, Sr. will run Donald Trump, Jr. for President in 2028 and 2032, then Eric Trump in 2036 and 2040 and Barron Trump in 2044 and 2048, followed by Trump’s grandchildren. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that America could never again have a President who isn’t named Trump!