The Gloves Come Off in Donald Trump’s Combative March 4 and 14 Addresses

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

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”Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions is really their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

– Gustave Le Bon, √The Crowd (1895)

”If a majority of our people turned their backs on you and the future, they did it out of simple childishness and fear.”

– Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), letter to defeated Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, November 6, 1952

On Tuesday, March 4 – just two weeks after newly re-installed President Donald Trump literally proclaimed himself king of America via a mock Time magazine cover showing him wearing a crown with the slogan, “Long Live the King” – he gave a so-called “Address to a Joint Session of Congress.” It was really a State of the Union speech (though given that rather awkward designation because pettifogging historians don’t believe that a newly installed – or, as in Trump’s case, newly re-installed – President can be fulfilling the Constitutional duty to “from time to time give Congress Information on the State of the Union”). It lasted 99 minutes – the longest on record (indeed, of the six longest State of the Union speeches ever, four have been given by Trump) – and it was remarkable for its combative tone and its refusal even to feint at “bipartisanship.”

Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, had mostly avoided direct criticism of Trump. When he felt the need to do so, he diplomatically referred to “my predecessor.” Trump, not surprisingly, showed no such reticence. He regularly denounced Biden, calling him “the worst President in American history” and addressed the rival political party as at best an inconvenience and at worst a bunch of hopeless ingrates. “I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud, nothing I can do,” Trump said in his most bizarrely self-pitying tones. “I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations, or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded and these people sitting right here, will not clap, will not stand and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.”

So instead of trying to govern in a spirit of bipartisanship, Trump said, he would govern on his own. “Over the past six weeks, I have signed nearly 100 executive orders and taken more than 400 executive actions, a record to restore common sense, safety, optimism and wealth all across our wonderful land.” Trump said. “The people elected me to do the job, and I'm doing it. In fact, it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency, it's our presidency, is the most successful in the history of our nation by many. And what makes it even more impressive is that, do you know who number two is, George Washington.”

Trump’s claim of a “mandate” drew a shocked and anguished reaction from one African-American Congressmember, Representative Al Green (D-TX). Waving his cane, he yelled back at Trump, “No mandate to cut Medicaid” – America’s health-care program for low-income people. Though Republican Congressmembers regularly heckled Barack Obama and Joe Biden during their State of the Union speeches, Green’s outburst got House Speaker Mike Johnson to order him removed from the chamber.

If the Democrats really wanted to be an effective opposition, they would all have walked out en masse in solidarity with Congressmember Green and had their own impromptu rally on the steps of the Capitol to denounce Trump’s lies. But they didn’t. A few gradually trickled out of the hall as Trump’s speech droned on, and on, and on. Later some Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress made themselves look ridiculous by pretending to be working out for a boxing match, throwing punches in mid-air and dancing in a gesture that got rightfully laughed at by virtually everyone who saw it.

A Libertarian Agenda

Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 4 came at the end of a whirlwind six-week period during which he and his allies, including independent multibillionaire Elon Musk and newly appointed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought, are seeking nothing less than the utter destruction of the federal bureaucracy. They are imposing by executive fiat a radical-Right revolutionary agenda that aims drastically to shrink the size and scope of the federal government over the lives of individual Americans – and simultaneously to hand control of the country to the richest and most powerful.

In a bizarre March 4 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Pete Buttigieg, former Secretary of Transportation under Biden, gave a presentation that fundamentally misunderstood what is going on in the U.S. today. He asked why there aren’t principled conservatives and libertarians standing up against Trump and his authoritarian agenda. Trump has successfully driven out just about all the principled conservatives who used to sit in the U.S. Congress – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger – and as for the libertarians, Trump is basically enacting their agenda.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy first articulated by Russian-born American novelist and political commentator Ayn Rand (1905-1982) in the 1940’s and 1950’s (though she disliked the term “Libertarianism” and called her philosophy “Objectivism”). It’s actually based on the earlier Protestant theology of the Swiss-born John Calvin (1509-1564). Unlike previous Christian leaders, Calvin believed that only a certain handful of people, whom he called “The Elect,” were saved by God and destined for Heaven. What’s more, he believed the way God would show who “The Elect” were was by their material success in this world. Calvinism essentially flipped Christianity on its head; instead of a religion exalting the poor and weak, Calvin’s version became one that supported the rich and strong.

Though Rand herself was a lifelong atheist, her vision of the human race was essentially a secular version of Calvin’s. Her philosophy held that rich people were by definition superior to the common run of humanity. Therefore, society should be run in a way which did as little as possible to interfere with the prerogatives and prejudices of the rich. Instead, it should seek as much as possible to help them stay rich and become even richer, and should block the efforts of non-rich people to use governmental power to compel the rich to offer any financial or social benefits to the non-rich.

Rand reversed Karl Marx’s “labor theory of value,” which held that all value in the economy was created by workers. Instead, Rand argued, all value was created by visionary capitalists who created the industries in which the workers worked. In the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), her main expressions of her political philosophy, Rand constructed plots in which her ultra-rich capitalist heroes would lose all their money through no fault of their own, and then earn it all back again and more, thus illustrating their vast superiority over the common run of mere mortals. Rand even argued that the spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism was so powerful it could transcend the laws of physics; the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, is a genius who builds a motor that literally runs on air.

Rand and her followers, including future Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, argued for a severely limited government that would have only three functions: a military, to defend the nation against foreign threats; a criminal justice system, to enforce domestic laws and punish people who killed or stole; and a civil justice system, to arbitrate differences between people with property and protect them against the efforts of people without property to take it from them. Rand and her followers vehemently rejected social programs designed to help the non-rich, especially if they were funded by taxes aimed primarily at the rich. When asked what society should do to help disabled people, she said, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor.” Her argument was that taxing rich people to pay for social programs to help non-rich people was essentially enslaving the rich.

She also said that asking the question, “What should we do … ,” was building the collectivist assumption into the way the question was framed. In her view, if rich people voluntarily wanted to set up private charities to help non-rich people, that was their right (though in the plots of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the rich people she most admired were the ones who refused to donate to charities). But it was not only bad policy but downright immoral to tax rich people to pay for services for non-rich people. That’s why people who have noted that Trump’s and Musk’s policies are targeting agencies that help other people are missing the point completely. Trump and Musk are following a Libertarian agenda that holds that running programs to combat Ebola, bird flu or AIDS in the Third World is not only wrong but evil.

During Trump’s first Presidency, in March and November 2017, I posted items to this blog pointing out that while Trump campaigned in 2016 as a European-style nationalist conservative, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare against fellow Republicans who were promising to cut them, he was governing as a Libertarian. The reason, I argued, is that Libertarianism appealed to the two things most important to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only did Libertarianism generate policy proposals that would make rich people like Donald Trump even richer, it assuaged his notoriously vulnerable sense of self by telling him that his wealth automatically established his superiority over ordinary humans.

That’s one reason for the bizarre section in Trump’s address on March 4 on which he claimed that the U.S. Social Security Administration had people on its rolls who were up to 300 years old, and were presumably receiving benefits. Trump didn’t offer an explanation for who was actually collecting this money, though he said, “[W]e're going to find out where that money's going, and it's not going to be pretty.” This had already been exposed as not only wrong but a lie – it had to deal with a computer program used in the 1970’s that, if they didn’t have a birthday for someone, filled in a date from the 19th century – but Trump went ahead and told it anyway.

The day after Trump’s big speech to Congress, Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Though Trump pledged in both 2016 and 2024 not to cut Social Security or Medicare, he, Musk, Vought and the other Libertarian ideologues in his government know that the only way they can possibly finance huge tax cuts for the rich and balance the federal budget is by ending, or at least drastically cutting, Social Security and Medicare.

The New-Boys Network

One major feature of the first six weeks of Trump 2.0 has been the overwhelming assault on the federal workforce led by Trump and his “hand,” to use the Game of Thrones term, Elon Musk. This is a direct implementation of one of the nuttier ideas of Curtis Yarvin, a young blogger and podcaster whom Trump’s vice-president, J. D. Vance, has cited as his ideological guru. Yarvin’s bonkers ideas got a nationwide airing on Rachel Maddow’s MS-NBC show on September 30, 2024 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She showed clips from an interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy and then presented a clip from Yarvin himself, via a speech he gave to a wildly adoring Right-wing crowd at a public meeting.

Yarvin’s speech offered an uncannily accurate prediction of what Trump and Musk would do to the federal workforce when Trump won back the White House. Speaking in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which Yarvin explained was an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees” – Yarvin said, “You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”

Yarvin went on to explain that his vision of “the system” that needs to be “deleted” goes far beyond the government and its workforce. “[I]t includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Though Trump still claims to be a “populist,” he made clear his real class interest when he had four of the richest men in the world – Elon Musk, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai – given seats of honor at his January 20 inaugural. During the later stages of the 2024 campaign there was a lot of nonsense written about how the high-tech industry had supposedly been relatively liberal before and now was moving Right to support Trump. That was a bunch of B.S. The truth is that a lot of the founders of big Internet companies had read Ayn Rand’s novels and saw themselves as heroic capitalists in the mold of her characters. Indeed, in the early stages of the Internet I read articles by people complaining that they wanted to engage in serious political discussions online and couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a Libertarian.

That eventually changed as Internet access spread beyond the original Silicon Valley “tech bros” and moved into the general population. There is now a wide variety of political views expressed online, from progressive Left to radical Right. But the people running the big tech companies remain in the thrall of a Libertarian ideology that tells them they are the “makers,” everyone else is a “moocher” or a “taker,” and they should be allowed to do whatever they like to society as a whole. Every time a Trump opponent goes public with the criticism that Elon Musk’s wholesale firings of government employees are “disruptive,” what they don’t realize is that in the high-tech world “disruptive” is actually a compliment. The whole high-tech computer/Internet industry is based on the idea that all change is “progress,” and all “progress” necessarily good.

I’m sure most people who’ve used the Internet have had the experience of receiving a so-called “upgrade” to a Web site and finding the new version far clunkier and harder to use than the previous one. But that doesn’t matter to the people running the industry, who seem to insist that their customers exist to serve them instead of the other way around. In his March 4 speech, Trump said, “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” What he really meant by that was he’s persuaded, either by pressure or outright buy-outs (like Musk taking over Twitter and ending the lifetime ban imposed on Trump by its previous owner), social media outlets to end their bans on hate speech, health-related disinformation, and other radical-Right propaganda.

Trump certainly isn’t a fan of the First Amendment generally, especially as it applies to criticism of him personally. As Scott Nover wrote on March 5 on the Time magazine Web site (https://time.com/7264811/trump-free-speech-joint-address-essay/), since retaking the Presidency on January 20, “Trump has operationalized his long-held animosity for the tenets of the First Amendment, attacking the independent press, free speech, and peaceful protest.” When the Associated Press (AP) refused to go along with Trump’s unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Nover reported, “The White House retaliated against the AP, kicking its reporters out of presidential briefings in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One. On Feb. 21, the news organization sued three White House officials over the blocked access, saying the decision would infringe on its First Amendment right to freedom of the press as well as its Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Trump has also taken away the power of the White House Correspondents’ Association to determine which White House reporters get to be on “the pool” that regularly covers the President. Instead, he’s said he’ll make those calls himself, just as he took over administration of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., leading a number of top artists to cancel their bookings there. He’s banned mainstream outlets like the AP and Reuters from White House briefings, and instead invited reporters from obscure Right-wing Web sites like Newsmax, One America News and Real America’s Voice. The fiasco surrounding Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky’s February 28 White House meeting with Trump and Vance was touched off by Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn, boyfriend of Right-wing Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), asking Zelensky why he hadn’t worn a suit to a meeting with the U.S. President – a criticism later seized on and amplified by Trump and Vance.

Even when Trump seems to be on the point of doing something positive, he turns it into a personal issue and an ill-disguised threat. In the March 4 speech, he called on Congress to pass laws like the U.S. Senate’s Take It Down Act to regulate so-called “deep fake” images created through artificial intelligence (AI) and then posted online. “And I'm going to use that bill for myself too, if you don't mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody,” he said. That suggested that if Congress indeed passes such a law, Trump will use it to order the removal of caricatures like the one flown in a parade in London a few years ago showing him as a giant baby, wearing a diaper and nothing else. And in his 2016 campaign he told his rally audiences to beat up anyone who crashed the event and caused a disturbance, and promised to pay their legal bills if they were arrested by police for doing so.

On March 4, the same day Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, he sent this post on his own social-media site, Truth Social, outright threatening any colleges and universities that allowed so-called “illegal protests” on their campuses. “"All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests," Trump wrote. "Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!" And three days later he acted on his threat, announcing the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University in New York over what four federal agencies called their “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” This, mind you, is coming from a President who’s hosted Holocaust deniers to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s call for the deportation of legal immigrants who protest on behalf of Palestinian rights in Gaza was put into effect on March 11, when Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was abruptly removed from Columbia’s New York campus and moved to a detention camp in Louisiana pending deportation. At first the government said it was revoking Khalil’s student visa – but later it turned out he was here on a so-called “green card” that gave him legal permanent resident status. He had settled in the U.S. so extensively that he had married an American woman and was about to have a child with her. She was eight months pregnant when her husband was taken and summarily declared “illegal.” Earlier, on March 5, Indian Columbia student Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked. The Department of Homeland Security announced that she considered her to have “self-deported” because she’d made vacation plans to return temporarily to her home country.

Trump’s statement made it clear that he regarded Khalil as an enemy of the U.S. and he would be just the first of many deported for similar reasons. “I think we ought to get them all out of the country,” Trump said. “They’re troublemakers. They’re agitators. They don’t love our country. We ought to get them the hell out. I think that guy, we ought to get him — I heard his statements too. They were plenty bad, and I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country. I watched him. I watched tapes, specifically, I watched tapes, and you can have him, okay? You can have him — and you can have the rest of them. … Columbia used to be a good school. Now it’s been overrun because of bad leadership.”

The overwhelming evidence from both Trump’s first term as President and the first six weeks of his new one is that Trump has, and has never had, any desire to be a powerful, influential but Constitutionally limited President. Instead he wants, and has always wanted, to be a Führer, to govern by executive decree and be the ultimate source of all legal authority. (The constitution of Nazi Germany said that “the will of the Führer” was the ultimate law.) He’s been aided by a powerful Right-wing legal theory called the “unitary executive,” which basically argued that since the executive branch was the only one for which the framers of the Constitution vested ultimate authority in just one person (the President), the President should be all-powerful and have the right to do just about anything. Trump himself said this during his first term when he referred to the Constitution and claimed, “There’s this little thing called Article II, which says I get to do whatever I want.”

Tariffs: Now You See Them, Now You …

One of Trump’s most peculiar and bewildering obsessions is with tariffs. Trump seems to think that tariffs are taxes paid by foreign countries and if the U.S. imposes them, that’s “free money.” In fact, tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers on just about everything they buy. The only difference between tariffs and other sales taxes is that tariffs are charged on goods imported from other countries. A number of people have tried to explain this to Trump, ranging from his first-term economic advisor Gary Cohn (who came away from a meeting with Trump on tariffs reportedly saying, “What a fucking moron”) to Bloomberg News editor John Micklethwait in the only even semi-critical interview Trump faced during the last two months of the 2024 campaign. They have all dismally failed.

Trump’s weird obsession with tariffs has led to his willful destruction of the American economy. His on-again, off-again approach to imposing them has rendered the executives of American manufacture unable to make investments because they don’t know from month to month, week to week, or even day to day just how much their raw materials will cost. One car dealer posted an online video pointing out that the price of a Dodge Ram on his lot would automatically rise from $80,000 to $100,000 on the basis of the 25 percent tariff Trump was imposing on Canadian steel. Trump says that manufacturing companies can avoid the tariffs if they use only American raw materials and components. But even if everything they needed to make cars existed in the U.S., it would take years for them to build new supply chains and retool their factories to use only American components.

The proof of Trump’s deliberate wreckage of the U.S. economy lies in what the stock indexes are doing in response to his tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked 700 points on Monday, March 11 and was lower by at least 1,700 by the time the week ended. Standard & Poor’s and the NASDAQ, the index for high-technology stocks, posted similarly dramatic declines. Trump’s response – and this, mind you, is coming from a President who during his first term regularly cited stock market gains as proof his economic policies were working – was to declare that the stock market was irrelevant and the U.S. is in a “period of transition” that will ultimately lead us to a better future,

If there’s one thing my 71 years of life on this planet has taught me, it’s to beware of any politician who defends policies that make you miserable and worse-off immediately because they’ll create a better future. They never do; all they do is make the people imposing them richer and more powerful permanently. At best, Trump’s tariffs seem like a schoolyard bullying game, aimed at punishing countries for having allegedly taken advantage of the U.S. in previous trade relationships. At worst, Trump seems to be creating what economists call “autarchy” – a state of affairs in which a country tries to cut itself off from all foreign trade and insists that it can go it alone in the world economy. Just ask a North Korean – if you can get him or her in a position where they can talk freely – how well that’s worked for them.

A March 4 article by Eric Levitz on the Vox.com Web site (https://www.vox.com/politics/402530/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-explanation) exposed how self-contradictory Trump’s explanations for his tariff policy really are. “In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense,” Levitz wrote. They are: 1) to get Canada and Mexico to act to stop undocumented immigrants and drug smuggling across their borders with the U.S.; 2) to force companies to move production to the U.S. and thereby narrow the trade deficits; 3) to force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate their trade agreements (the last one of which Trump himself signed to great fanfare in 2018); 4) to coerce Canada into becoming the 51st U.S. state; and 5) to raise revenue for the U.S. government.

Some of these justifications suggest that Trump will unilaterally lift the tariffs he’s imposed if he gets policy concessions from the countries he’s imposed them on, especially Canada and Mexico. Others suggest they’re intended to remain in place indefinitely because the U.S. government will be making revenue from them. Trump gave that game away in a little-noticed TV clip in which he finally answered the question Hillary Clinton tried to ask him in the 2016 campaign: just when does Trump think America was “great” and to which he wants us to return to “make America great again”?

Trump’s answer was revealing: between 1870 and 1913. It was an era in which corporations controlled more of the American economy and had more political power than either before or since. It was an era without environmental restrictions on the ability of corporations to pollute; indeed, city residents were told that the smoke that had taken the place of fresh air in their communities was a sign of “progress.” It was an era in which political offices were openly bought and sold – especially seats in the U.S. Senate, which at that time was still elected by state legislatures instead of directly by voters. It was an era in which labor unions were illegal – an era Trump and Musk would love to return to. In a 2024 podcast interview they both joked about being able to fire striking workers, which is at least technically illegal under U.S. labor law (though companies in fact do it all the time).

It was the era in which Congress passed the first legal restrictions on immigration to the U.S.: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which as its name suggests was intended to ban all future immigration to the U.S. from China. It was the era in which the U.S. Supreme Court made its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896, which held that racial segregation was constitutional and allowed white Southern governments to return African-Americans to a virtual condition of permanent servitude.

And it’s significant that Trump’s definition of the period when America was “great” and to which he wants to return us ends in 1913, when the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect. It allowed the federal government “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Until then, the primary way the federal government funded itself was through tariffs.

Already in the 2010’s members of the radical-Right “Tea Party” movement, which anticipated Trumpism in many ways, had declared that the original U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were “divinely inspired.” But they claimed that three subsequent amendments – the 14th, which among other things established “birthright citizenship,” which Trump has attempted to abolish unilaterally by executive order; the 16th, which made the income tax constitutional; and the 17th, which moved electing Senators from state legislatures to the voters – were literally the work of Satan.

“[I]f you think back a million years ago to Trump's inaugural speech – it does seem a long while ago – who was the president who was most venerated in that speech?” New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger said on the March 14 episode of the PBS series Washington Week. “It wasn't Washington. It wasn't Lincoln. It was [William] McKinley. McKinley, the man who loved tariffs and expanded the United States, ended up being the winner of the Spanish-American War, ended up with the Philippines, which he really didn't know what to do with once he got it. [It’s] pretty fascinating that he is the one who Trump has chosen to go follow.”

The Libertarian Dream and the Fascist Reality

In his second Presidential term, even more than he did in his first, Trump is enacting an authoritarian playbook by dictatorial means. In his first term (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/07/trumps-gleichschaltung-kills-people.html) I compared Trump’s demand for “loyalty” from his Cabinet members and other appointees – “loyalty” not to the laws or the Constitution or the duty of the executive to “take care that the laws be faithfully administered,” but to the person (and ever-changing whims) of Donald Trump – to Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung.

One of those indigestible compound words the Germans love to construct out of bits and pieces of their language, and a word that doesn’t have a convenient English translation, Gleichschaltung in practice meant subverting the power of agencies the Führer didn’t like by appointing people to run them who fundamentally disbelieved in what they were set up to do. As Trump put together his Island of Misfit Toys Cabinet in the wake of the November 5, 2024 election that returned him to the Presidency – a set of appointees so outrageously unqualified it reminded me of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his frequent pleas to Hitler that he needed to pick people who were qualified for their jobs instead of just long-time Nazis with “low Party numbers” – it was clear that Trump’s second-term Cabinet was Gleichschaltung on steroids.

Trump appointed Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News commentator, as Secretary of Defense when Hegseth’s only discernible qualification was having written a very nasty book denouncing the modern-day military as too “woke” – which in practice has meant firing all the top commanders who happened either to be female or people of color and replacing them with white men. As part of a deal Trump made with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to get him to withdraw his own independent 2024 Presidential campaign and endorse Trump, Kennedy got to be Secretary of Health and Human Services despite his well-known activism against vaccines. Now that he’s in office, he’s published a list of topics researchers at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, are not allowed to discuss in their papers unless they first send the drafts to “the NCI Clearance Team for review prior to publication.” Among the restricted topics are COVID-19, vaccines, bird flu, opiates, marijuana, obesity, stem cell or fetal tissue research, abortion, autism, peanut allergies, fluoride, measles, and “environmental justice.” (Source: ProPublica Web site, https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute-flagged-topics-vaccines-autism-rfk-jr.)

Trump appointed Linda McMahon, wife of a wrestling promoter, ostensibly to run the Department of Education but really to abolish it (a demand of Right-wing administrations at least since Ronald Reagan’s). As head of the FBI, Trump appointed Kash Patel, whose main qualifications seemed to be having published a book critical of the FBI – which contained an appendix listing all the supposed political “enemies” he would want to use the Bureau to prosecute – and having published anti-FBI propaganda that turned out to have been funded by Russian intelligence. To run the Justice Department, Trump hired two of his personal attorneys, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, to be Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, respectively. What’s more, Trump showed up at the Justice Department offices on March 14 and gave an hour-long speech that was essentially marching orders to his appointees to use the Justice Department to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Trump’s March 14 speech was basically a performance of Trump’s Greatest Hits. He boasted that he’d pardoned all 1,500 of the Capitol rioters from January 6, 2021, calling them “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated.” He also said that the greatest day of his first term had been when he fired former FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017. Comey’s sins, in Trump’s eyes, had been his authorization of a special counsel investigation into allegations that Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign had been helped by Russia and Comey’s refusal to swear “loyalty” to the person of Donald Trump. What’s more, the day Trump fired Comey he had two high officials from the Russian government in his office: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Trump boasted to both that by firing Comey he had quashed the Russia investigation.

While heaping praise on judges who’d ruled in his favor, like Florida District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, Trump blasted both judges who ruled against him and FBI and Department of Justice officials who had been involved in investigations against him. Even before that, Trump had ordered the mass firings of FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who had worked on the January 6, 2021 cases, the investigations into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents when he left the Presidency the first time, and anyone else who had the temerity to investigate him or his friends. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations,” Trump said. “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”

A master of what George Orwell, in his book 1984, called “doublethink” – “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” – Trump accused former President Joe Biden of “weaponizing” the Justice Department against him while “weaponizing” it himself against Democrats, news media and anyone else on Trump’s “enemies list.” Trump named specific individuals he wants to see prosecuted, including Andrew Weissmann, who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged ties between Trump and Russia in 2016; Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to investigate the January 6, 2021 riots and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents; and Norm Eisen, who formerly worked with an organization called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Trump misidentified Eisen as a current staff member of CREW.

Trump also called for the direct prosecution of news media outlets like CNN and MS-NBC (which he invariably calls “MS-DNC” as part of his claim that they’re a propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee). “I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party,” he said. “And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.” As usual, he hasn’t made it clear just what he wants them prosecuted for, but there’s evidence that Trump’s jeremiads against the media have already started to work.

Trump has already won a $15 million defamation settlement from ABC for having said a New York court found him liable for raping journalist E. Jean Carroll (based on a quirk in New York law that defines “rape” as penile penetration; Trump fucked Carroll against her will with his finger, not his dick, and was found liable for “sexually assaulting” her). The multi-billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times pulled their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 campaign at the last minute in what Yale professor and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder called “anticipatory obedience,” and Trump rewarded Amazon.com and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos with a front-row seat at his inaugural along with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. And MS-NBC did their own en masse firing or demotion of various show hosts, including African-Americans Joy Reid and Jonathan Capehart and most of their Arab-Americans.

Between Elon Musk’s chainsaw-like firings of massive numbers of federal employees (the chain saw was his own metaphor, wielded at a radical-Right political gathering, though he copied it from Argentinian President Javier Milei, a Trump-like faux “populist” politician), Trump’s blatant disregard of the media’s First Amendment-guaranteed right to criticize him, his descriptions of immigrants as “savages,” “animals,” and “monsters” (elsewhere I’ve noted that immigrants are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler: an all-purpose scapegoat he can blame for virtually anything), and his blatant disregard of court orders against him (including a New York judge’s order attempting to block deportation flights of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador), Trump not only wants to become America’s Führer, he’s well on his way to achieving it.

Trump’s affection for foreign strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin became apparent when he sent U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Saudi Arabia to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine – without inviting any Ukrainians. It became even more obvious when Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance met with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky at the White House on February 28 and went out of their way to humiliate him. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump taunted Zelensky, saying that “I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” Trump told Zelensky the U.S would be “out” if Zelensky didn’t make a deal with Putin, and Trump put America’s money where his mouth was by cutting off military and intelligence support to Ukraine.

In a fascinating interview with podcaster Anand Giridharardas, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) predicted that the next few months will determine whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerates into tyranny. “I think what you’re seeing is that a lot of people are actually very transparently up for that transition,” Murphy said. “There are a lot of people in this country, and a lot of the folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress, who don’t even need to defend democratic norms and democracy. This idea that took root within the conservative movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated, and needs to be replaced by a CEO model, is now pretty mainstreamed.” (Source: complete podcast at https://the.ink/p/watch-dem-senator-warns-us-may-be; my transcript at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2025/03/us-senator-chris-murphy-talks-with.html.)

We may not even have those few months. Already Trump, Vance, Musk and the others in their entourages are sweeping through what’s left of the federal government at warp speed. Last April PBS aired a three-part British documentary on Julius Caesar, who successfully destroyed ancient Rome’s experiment in republican governance after 500 years (twice as long as ours), reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-1.html, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-2.html, and https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/04/julius-caesar-making-of-dictator-part-3.html. Though the makers of this series didn’t make the Caesar=Trump parallel themselves, the inference was unmistakable: both Caesar and Trump were men born into wealth and privilege who determined to use their money and power to destroy republican government and declare themselves absolute rulers. In my review I wrote, “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.”

Trump has successfully neutralized just about any possible source of opposition to him. His own Republican Party is cowed into submission; half its voters are diehard Trump supporters while the other half are frightened not only for their political lives but their personal lives and those of their families. Remember that Trump began his second Presidency by pardoning all 1,500 of the January 6, 2021 criminals – many of whom went on social media immediately and proclaimed their willingness to commit political violence on Trump’s behalf again. The Democratic Party, such as it still is, has been neutralized; enough Democratic Senators went along with Trump’s and the Republican House majority’s bill to keep the government open on their terms out of fear that in case of a government shutdown, Trump and Musk would have even more carte blanche authority to cut government programs than they do now.

By purging the U.S. military of its top leadership and replacing them with his loyalists, Trump has ensured that the next time he orders the military to shoot and kill unarmed civilian protesters, they will do it. That will immediately evaporate any and all street resistance to Trump’s agenda on the part of ordinary Americans. Trump is still so bitter at former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley for refusing to go along with such orders in the first Trump Presidency that he ordered Milley’s photo taken down from the walls of the Pentagon just 10 days after it went up.

While I was writing the above, I got a phone call from a Mexican-American friend of mine who said the U.S. of 2025 is reminding him of the Mexico of the 1980’s, before the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) actually started losing elections. I’ve long felt that the U.S. Republican Party has wanted the same kind of total political dominance the PRI had in Mexico during the last two-thirds of the 20th Century. They allowed other parties to exist and go through the motions of campaigning, but the PRI always won, either legitimately or through rigging the elections to make sure that happened.

Also while I was writing the above, I’ve been watching TV news coverage of the court case in Washington, D.C. that attempted to stop the Trump administration from unilaterally deporting over 250 Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, whose government is being paid by ours to host these detainees. The Trump administration is using a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act that had hitherto been used only against enemies in declared wars (the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II). They claim the deportees are members of a gang called Tren de Aragua (“Aragua Train”), but they flew them out of the country without giving them any chance to offer evidence that they are not part of the gang. Adam Isaacson, of the human-rights group Washington Office of Latin America, said, “Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense.”

What makes this even more ominous is that the federal judge, James Boasberg, had issued an order telling the Trump Administration to have the planes turned around and flown back to the U.S. pending a hearing in his court on the case – and the Trump Administration basically told him to fuck off. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Levitt, said, “Federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion” – even though the U.S. is not at war, declared or otherwise, with Venezuela and the “invasion” is only a piece of Trump rhetoric denouncing immigrants in general.

“Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing – and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly an order from the Supreme Court – then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told podcaster Anand Giridharardas February 18. “And I don’t think that we need to cross that bridge right now. But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kinds of things that citizens should be doing.” Already the Trump administration has openly defied a court order and said that they don’t consider themselves bound by it – one more step in the rapid transition of the United States of America from a democratic republic to a corrupt authoritarian oligarchy.

Murphy also said on that podcast, “The idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in an hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live among people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked in, tells us that we’re better off and safer retreating to our tribes.” America’s 250-year experiment in republican self-governance managed to survive Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and even Donald Trump’s first term, but it is highly unlikely to survive Trump 2.0 and the likely succession of Trump’s children once he’s termed out in 2028.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy Talks with Anand Giridharadas on The.Ink Podcast

The day after Donald Trump's Nuremberg rally – oops, I mean his address to a joint session of Congress – I intended to write a Zenger's Newsmagazine blog post (my first in nearly four months) about the Führer's speech. Instead I stumbled on this post from The.Ink podcast with host Anand Giridharadas and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). Murphy's appearance here drew attention from the rest of the medla largely because of his prediction that the next few months will determine whether the U.S. remains a democratic republic or becomes an authoritarian oligarchy ruled in perpetuity by Donald Trump, his "hand" Elon Musk, and their ultra-rich cronies. But he had a lot more to say than that, including what it will take to get the Democratic Party to stand up for democracy and resist Trump's autocratic takeover with all the tools at their disposal. After I spent this afternoon transcribing this blog post, which you can watch at https://the.ink/p/watch-dem-senator-warns-us-may-be, I found myself wishing that last night, when Congressmember Al Green (D-Texas) was expelled from the speech for challenging the President's lies, the entire Democratic delegations of both houses of Congress had walked out in solidarity and staged their own event on the Capitol steps. Instead they once again succumbed to what Giridharadas calls their "politeness problem." – Mark Gabrish Conlan, March 5, 2025

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Anand Giridharadas: O.K., we are live. Hey, everyone pouring in. It takes a second for everyone to get in, but welcome to another live show of The.Ink. I’m very delighted to be here today with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who is no doubt familiar to many of you, and has been especially familiar in recent weeks as one of the most fiery and visible sources of opposition to the madness of the second Trump administration. So, Senator, thank you so much for making time to chat with us.

Chris Murphy: Yeah, awesome. Great to be with you.

Giridharadas: You know, you’re someone who’s in the arena, as the saying goes, but you’re also sort of unusually – you write books, you’re a student of American history, and also you’ve studied the various stages in the history of this country, through wars, crises, insurrections, fractures, serious things. I wonder at this hour how you would define this moment in that sweep. How would you define what this is that we are living through and how you would situate it in the sweep of the very serious things this country has been through in its history?

Murphy: Yeah. Listen, I’m very reluctant to engage in too much hyperbole here, but I think this is increasingly becoming the most serious moment since the Civil War. And I just think it’s a miracle that we have lasted as long as we have: 240 years of multicultural democracy. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea that gets pulled apart at its seams every generation or so, because it’s unnatural.

The idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in an hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live among people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked in, tells us that we’re better off and safer retreating to our tribes.

So what we’ve done is unnatural: self-governance in a society that’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial. And so of course there are these times when folks get told it would just be a lot more efficient if one guy made all the decisions. We’d get stuff done a lot faster. And wouldn’t it be easier if we just kicked out everybody that doesn’t look and feel and sound like us? That’d be a lot simpler.

So I think that this is increasingly serious, because I think what you’re seeing is that a lot of people are actually very transparently up for that transition. There are a lot of people in this country, and a lot of the folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress, who don’t even need to defend democratic norms and democracy. This idea that took root within the “conservative” movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated, and needs to be replaced by a CEO model, is now pretty mainstreamed.

And I think we have to realize that we need to confront it head-on, instead of sort of thinking that Republicans are really for democracy in their hearts, but are being cowed into silence by a really strong leader. We need to understand that actually now a lot of them, more than you’d think, are on board for this whole transition. And that’s why we have to take it head-on.

Giridharadas: That comparison you make, which I think is valid, to the most serious crisis since the Civil War. Obviously we know how that one was resolved. I don’t think anyone thinks that that kind of way of resolving this one would be what anyone wants, or certainly what you or I would want. But I’m curious for you, maybe to speak personally first. How have you – I think we’ve all witnessed you, it’s not to say you were a wallflower before, but I think we’ve witnessed you go through something publicly in the last few weeks.

You’ve been very clear about a lot of things for a few years, but I think we’ve all seen you go through something, and you’ve become very visible to maybe people who didn’t know you two months ago, outside your state. Can you talk about what kind of experience you’ve gone through to get to that place of realizing the gravity, in spite of how seriously you took it before? What has been your kind of radicalization around this in the last few weeks, and how have you changed?

Murphy: Well, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last two or three years just stepping back and doing a lot of thinking about the spiritual state of the country. And I think I came into this moment maybe understanding, better than some other people, how angry and anxious this country is, and how many people are in a truly revolutionary mood. And so for me, it made sense that there were a lot of folks in this country who were really willing to entertain the idea of throwing out 240 years of democracy.

Now that’s not the majority of the country, but it’s a strong, powerful minority. And listen, I’ve been pretty angry at my party for not sort of realizing the spiritual unspooling that was happening in America and finding ways to plug into it in a more powerful, more constructive manner. But I also watched very carefully over the last four years, as the anti-democratic “conservative” movement very methodically put together a plan and an infrastructure to make sure that they were able to seize this moment.

I think a lot of folks thought that Trump 2 was going to be like Trump 1. Just a lot of bluster. We’d survive. But I watched them get ready for this moment. And so I’m just convinced that they are operationalizing, as we speak, a plan to convert our democracy into something fundamentally different: an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, in which only a handful of people have power, and the rest of us are just pawns for profit and gain to that small set of elites.

And so all of the moves that have been made – the targeting of independent journalists, the conversion of our justice system into an exercise in forcing loyalty to Donald Trump, the normalization and endorsement of political violence – they are not all just sort of random points on a map. They all exist on a continuum, part of an effort ultimately to try to install Donald Trump and his family in power permanently.

And I think this has been coming. The groundwork has been laid for this moment for four years, and I am just absolutely confident that it is as grave and as significant as the crises that we faced 150 years ago.

Giridharadas: You know, I don’t know if you can see the chat, but what’s emerging in the chat is a lot of people listening to that, I think, appreciate you personally and, from what they’ve seen, you reflect the gravity. I think it is no surprise to you that most people watching this, and I think most Democrats out there, feel completely abandoned by the vast majority of your colleagues.

I think, to characterize it loosely, there is a sense of being texted a lot for $5 by Democrats, often sometimes by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars in their own bank accounts, asking you for $5. And then, when we’re living through what you say is the most serious crisis since the Civil War, they’re just not there, right? And I’m sure you could point to things someone said in the committee and things that are being done that we just don’t know about.

But I think you probably sympathize with the broad feeling, that I’m sure you’ve heard from your constituents and others, that basically people feel completely undefended by the Democratic Party in the worst crisis since the Civil War. So let’s say you’re an exception to that, which I think most people would agree with. Just put it as bluntly as you can: what is going wrong with your party that they are leaving so many of their most loyal supporters feeling this way?

Murphy: Well, I think there’s a lot of things going on. One is that it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning if you convince yourself that everything is going to be O.K., right? It’s a lot easier to sort of go do your job if you think that all of these things are just random points on a grid, and that this is going to look a lot like the first four years [of the Trump Presidency] looked. If you actually think that we are months away from the destruction of our democracy, such that it is irreversible, man, that requires a different level of energy when you wake up every morning: a different level of urgency that frankly not everybody inside the Democratic political infrastructure has.

I think it’s also true that when you get to this level of power, you start to care deeply about the institutions and you want to protect your institution. And so here in the Senate there’s still a lot of talk about working with Republicans and not fighting Donald Trump on everything, because we want to make sure that the Senate is preserved as a place where bipartisanship can happen.

But that’s illogical when you’re fighting against a would-be tyrant who doesn’t give a shit about institutions or norms, and is willing to shatter every single one. If the rest of the field is burned to the ground and the Senate still stands on the top of a pedestal, what does it matter? So for me, it was easy to say I’m not voting for any of Trump’s nominees, I’m not expediting any of these nominees, until this constitutional crisis is solved. I’m not going to be complicit in populating an administration by people who are going to violate the rule of law.

And then the last thing is it’s hard when you’re fighting liars. It really is. I mean, we do hold ourselves to some concept of truth, and provable truth. And so I think it has caused us not to be clear about what is likely happening, because we’re not absolutely sure. Right, like what is Musk doing inside the Treasury right now? Do we have irrefutable proof that he is stealing people’s data in order to enrich himself, or ultimately to withhold your Social Security benefits because you posted something ugly about him on Twitter?

Like no, I don’t have the smoking gun, but why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt about anything? I am going to lay out the worst-case possible scenario because I think the worst-case possible scenario is the most likely one. But a lot of Democrats, until they have that smoking gun, don’t want to leap to conclusions. So I think those are a set of factors that play into people’s frustrations that not everybody in the party is talking the same way.

Giridharadas: Does what you just said justify leadership changes in the House and the Senate immediately?

Murphy: I think the Senate and the House are stepping up here. I think you have seen my colleagues come to the decision, almost to a person, that they are not going to support these nominees. I think you will see a very vigorous effort to oppose the upcoming reconciliation bill, which is their attempt to steal money from the rest of us [and] cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits to fund their tax cuts. So I think you are going to see Democrats starting to rise to this moment, and I’m going to continue to try to rally them to rise to this moment.

Giridharadas: But I think people are asking in the chat specifically about Senator [Chuck] Schumer and [House Democratic] leader [Hakeem] Jeffries. If you’re right about [us being] months away [from losing our democracy], if you’re right about [this being] the worst crisis in 150 plus 60 years, is it time at least to think about new leadership in terms of either of them?

Murphy: I think they both have very difficult jobs. I wish that all 47 Senate Democrats were really easy to sort of marshal and push into one direction, but they aren’t. We have a diverse cast of characters, and so our leadership is pretty easy to critique from the outside. It’s harder to operationalize on the inside. And remember, leadership doesn’t only come from the folks that have the official titles. Leadership comes from AOC. Leadership comes from Jasmine Crockett. Leadership comes from me, right, from other Senators. So I think the job is harder than people think. And I think that leadership comes from a variety of different places.

Giridharadas: I wanted to ask you about the kind of broader point that people were making last year, when there was debate about whether President Biden should stay on the ticket. And I think it’s come up again in what you’re talking about now, which is the question about whether Democrats have a “culture of politeness” problem that prevents the stating of hard truths. [Murphy nods.]

You and I have spoken in the past about the “subtlety problem,” which is a slightly different thing about picking fights. But I’m talking about a culture of politeness, where things everybody was saying in group chats about President Biden’s capacity were not being said out loud. Things maybe everybody is saying privately about this moment don’t necessarily reflect what they say in front of the cameras. Is there a politeness problem that needs to be shaken off, given the stakes that you’re talking about?

Murphy: That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about it as a “politeness problem.” But, listen, there certainly has been a shaming exercise that has happened inside the party on folks that get too far out of the conventional wisdom. In retrospect, though I didn’t support his candidacy, [Biden’s primary opponent] Dean Phillips understood something about where the American public was that it took the rest of us far too long to understand.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren still get shamed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party because they are “dangerously populist,” even though they are plugged into the actual conversations that people are having in this country about … [Sound cuts out at this moment, 15:01, and doesn’t resume until 15:48.]

Giridharadas: Thank you all for joining in while we’re waiting. And I’m glad we’re getting to have this conversation. I think this is a very blunt and plain-spoken conversation. All right, let’s see if we can get him back. … [At 17:54:] I think this has been a really fascinating conversation thus far, and I think even news-making, I would say. I need to kind of process everything we’ve been hearing, but it’s been a really powerful and clear message, and I think it’s kind of been a benchmark for what we should expect to hear from Democrats in general. I mean, this should be the basic floor of what we think. …

Giridharadas [Returns with Murphy at 19:32]: O.K. I was telling the good people, while we were waiting for you, that this is the problem when the tech oligarchs are the people doing the constitutional crisis. It’s not so helpful. It would be better if they were in the furniture business, or something.

Murphy: No, at worst they are watching us and interfering with content they don’t like. At best, they’re just not paying attention to their technology because they are spending all of their time trying to destroy the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration].

Giridharadas: Exactly, and a quite perfect time to do that, also. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the new chair of the Democratic Party [former Minnesota Democratic chair Ken Martin]. There was a question of how fundamental should the change be. That was litigated during the actual election. You had quite a range of voices from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, to the moderates.

And there was some debate about whether Ken Martin, the new chair, said that the message was kind of great and mostly fine versus more of an overhaul. What is the process at this point, do you think, of really rethinking the party in the way that you were trying to do in the last few years, and now with greater urgency? It’s obviously really difficult to do when you’re running 80 miles an hour. How can this happen right now?

Murphy: So, I mean, a) I don’t think we should overhype the power of the Democratic National Committee. It has never been a thought leader inside the Democratic Party. I’m not saying it isn’t relevant. I weighed in on behalf of another candidate, because I do think it’s important to have the right person there. But I think Ken Martin will do just fine and will be a very good party chair.

But yes, it does feel overwhelming. There was this – and it still exists – this meme, this idea that the resistance didn’t work in 2017, and so we shouldn’t do it again. And in part, because people want to focus on a bigger project, which is rebuilding the Democratic Party brand and winning back all those working-class voters – and, I mean, I’ve talked a lot about that as well. I think the problem is we actually have to do the resistance and rebuild the party, and we have to do both at the same time. And I actually don’t think there’s a choice.

The resistance, to my mind, worked. I mean, we didn’t stop the big tax cut in 2017, but we stopped the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. We literally saved tens of thousands of lives. We won in the midterms in 2018. We beat him in 2020. Did it solve the underlying problems in the party? No, but there were political wins, and really big ones. There were policy wins, and some really big ones. So I think you’ve got to do that again so that you shave the edges off of their policy agenda, and ultimately you put yourselves in the best position to win in 2018 [sic].

But we have to rebuild the party, because the party brand is just fundamentally broken. We are the party of elites. We are the party of the status quo right now. We are the party of market-based reforms. And people want really big revolutionary economic change. They want the system unrigged. They want their democracy unrigged. And right now we are not the party selling that convincing message.

So I admit that these are two big projects that have to happen simultaneously. Rebuild some form of the traditional political day-to-day resistance, and convince folks that we cannot run back the Democratic Party that got our clocks cleaned in 2024. We’ve got to build a new party.

Giridharadas: One idea – so there’s obviously, in what you said, that there’s the idea of actual, substantive policy, proposing much bigger, bolder things than in the past. And then there’s also the question that you and I have spoken about in the past, of just how you communicate ideas and connect with people in the kind of revolutionary mood you’re talking about? And that communication has, again, seemed incredibly fractured in recent weeks, as we’re going through this very serious thing? Again, people will turn to you, people will turn to AOC, but just very fractured.

One idea that’s been proposed is creating some kind of unorthodox thing of a single point of communication. Some people have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who’s kind of out of government right now, do a daily response, or various shadow Cabinets. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of these proposals. Do you think any of those things are interesting, as a way to solve this problem of so much bile being thrown at people, and people not really having a clear response?

Murphy: Not really. I’m all for people searching for new ideas, but that just sounds like something else for people to compete over. If you were to create a shadow Cabinet and you had to pick Democrats to be in each one of those positions, you’d have to come up with a process. There’d be campaigns, and there’d be back-room efforts to try to be the shadow Secretary of Defense. I mean, it would be a lot of wasted energy, and I’m not sure ultimately it would result in the best people being in those positions.

I mean, what’s happening now is a little meritocratic. I mean, the folks who are having the more amplified voices are the folks that are just more plugged in with the actual emotional Zeitgeist of the country. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with a moment in which the folks that are portraying the kind of urgency that the American public wants are the folks that actually are being kind of self-selected by the movement in the country as leaders inside the party.

Now, do I think that we have an information distribution problem? Yes. But I think that that is something that needs to be solved in a really thoughtful, well-planned way. We don’t have the echo chamber that Republicans have because they spent money on it, and we didn’t. We spent a billion dollars – two billion dollars – in the last election, and most of that was on 30-second TV ads. That was a horrible mistake.

We should be building the kinds of permanent, owned media, the permanent set of influencers and amplifiers, that the Right has. That should be our project, not coming up with a sort of bullshit “shadow Cabinet.” Sorry. If that’s your idea, I feel bad about it now.

Giridharadas: Not at all. So you’ve talked about blanket holds as something that you’ve discussed. Senator Schatz of Hawai’i has talked about that also. Are there other things beyond that, that are kind of tactics in your arsenal? Maybe ones we haven’t been talking about, maybe more serious ones than that? Are there tools besides that, that you have in mind to, if you say we’re possibly a few months away from irreversibly losing democracy, what else have you got besides blanket holds?

Murphy: Listen, there are a limited number of tools in our toolbox as the minority party in the Senate and the House. The House has very few. The Senate has a handful. One of them is just kind of gumming up the works and making things take a little bit longer, but that tactically only prevents nominations or legislation from occurring by hours.

The other is just to signal that we are not being complicit in any of this, and we’re not going to support them doing anything legislatively, or we’re not going to support any nominations, until they take seriously the destruction of our democracy and the handover of our government to billionaires. And so I at the same time don’t want to overhype what we can do internally, while also telling my colleagues, “You better do everything you can do.” And that’s still an internal debate. I mean, there are still a lot of my colleagues who are voting for these nominees because they’ve got a lot of reasons they do that. But one of them is that they don’t think that our internal day-to-day tactics don’t translate to the outside; that nobody pays attention to what happens inside the Beltway.

I don’t think that’s true. I’m not saying everybody pays attention to whether there’s 47 of us or 21 of us voting against the nominee to go to the Department of Agriculture. But I do think that the most committed activists don’t love it when the Democratic Party isn’t putting up the loudest fight that they can. And if we aren’t putting up a loud fight, then they aren’t willing to give four hours or six hours or eight hours or 12 hours a day to the fight.

And when that inner ring of the most committed activists aren’t doing that, the next ring of potential committed activists aren’t stepping in. So I think that there are ripples that start here in the United States Senate, and so that’s why I argue to use every tool that we have, because I actually do believe that over time, that’s one of the tactics that helps build a meaningful, loud national opposition with scope.

Giridharadas: Two more things before I let you go. I know your time is limited, and you’ve been generous with it. When you look at the “Musk coup” element of this surprising Presidency already, I’ve talked to scholars of fascism who’ve said, “I’ve seen every trick in the book, but this thing feels actually quite unprecedented and hard to imagine: planting a very rich man as your sort of boss.” Do you believe that Elon Musk has broken federal laws, as far as you’ve seen the reporting, what you know to have happened in recent weeks? And should he be prosecuted for that, if so?

Murphy: I don’t know that he’s broken federal criminal laws. Certainly, they have smashed statutory protections for agencies. They have violated the Constitution. I don’t know whether he has broken individual criminal laws. And part of it is that they have cloaked this entire thing in secrecy, between the firings of the inspectors general, the gag orders, the intimidation of the press.

And we haven’t even talked about that: the fact that it’s just not clear that the press is asking the kinds of questions that they might otherwise, because the owners of these outlets are deeply scared of President Trump and Elon Musk. So there may be criminal statutes that have been violated, but I don’t know that to be a fact.

Giridharadas: I want to end by talking about what people can do. I mean, obviously I was pressing you and your party on what you can do for people, But obviously this is a democracy, and at the end of the day people need to make their own voices heard and pressure people to do things. People know the usual: call your representative, call folks that you know. There were protests yesterday [February 17, Presidents’ Day], as you know.

I think a lot of people are at a loss. I think a lot of people really don’t understand, because it’s not just a hijacking by 100 people. It’s a hijacking by 100 people with, as you said, the support of a significant number, tens of millions of people creating protection around the hijacking. What can people do, besides the obvious stuff that they know to do?

Murphy: Yeah, I think the obvious stuff that people know to do still works. And I think there are a lot of folks out there who doubt that, right? There were protests yesterday with hundreds of people, some with thousands, but not necessarily the size and scope that you would think this moment would demand. And I think that is due to the fact that a lot of folks don’t think that it has impact and influence – and it does.

The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Political gravity still exists in this country. It works a little bit differently than it did 10 or 20 years ago. But if the public is mobilized, it can and will have an impact. Because ultimately it may not persuade Elon Musk to stand down, but it will start to eat away at enough Republicans so that everything they want to do becomes a little bit harder; so that there is finally a little bit of legislative friction against the tasks that they are undertaking.

Donald Trump’s net popularity has come down by about six or seven points already. If that drops by another six or seven points because of our mobilization, well, then that frays a bit the hold that he has on the party. The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Now, right now, joining groups like Indivisible and Move On, calling, showing up, all of that matters. Volume matters.

I remember back in 2017 when their number one agenda item was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And they didn’t do it only because we mobilized; only because, in the end, we made just enough Republicans realize that this was not going to be worthwhile for them politically. That works now. Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing – and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly an order from the Supreme Court – then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics. And I don’t think that we need to cross that bridge right now.

But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kinds of things that citizens should be doing. But right now, traditional political mobilization can, and I think will, work. But we need more people than hundreds out at these protests. And part of that is our job: to have more people talking like me to convey the sense of urgency that will convince people to mobilize.

Giridharadas: There’s some talk among people [who] have suggested a general strike. Is that something you think people should look at?

Murphy: I think when we talk about those elevated tactics, right – general strikes, civil disobedience – I think people will know the moment when it comes. I will not tell you we are there yet, and you frankly don’t want to promise that you can do something that you can’t. So I think you’ve got to be very thoughtful and well-planned in those kinds of actions. I don’t think we’re there yet. If the moment comes, people will know it.

Giridharadas: Before I let you go, a lot of people appreciate your leadership right now. Are you thinking about running for President, and are you including – or beyond that – what would be your kind of commitment to people if this continues to get the very bad trajectory that you’ve talked about? What is your kind of vow to people about how you’re going to defend people who are feeling very defenseless?

Murphy: Yeah, I don’t know. You asked me the question at the beginning about why are people paying attention to me now. I think it’s in part because I legitimately don’t have a personal agenda here. Like, I do not wake up every day thinking about my political future. I’ve got two kids whom I want to see grow up in a democracy, and I see it, right? I just have a vision of how dangerous this moment is. I have clarity.

I have existed in politics for a long time, plagued by a lot of grey. There are a lot of moments in my political career in which I saw my side, and I also saw their side. And, you know, no. I see what they are doing, and what they are doing is evil. And so I wake up every day speaking authentically and urgently, in part because I’m not thinking about sort of my next move here. I’m just – I will be satisfied if, at the end of the day, democracy is still here four years from now and we actually have a free and fair election for President.

And my commitment is just to not be afraid. That’s my only commitment. I mean, you can imagine the kinds of calls that we get into this office, given that political violence has been normalized, and given the fact that I’m out there talking in a way that not everybody else is talking. And so my only commitment is just to not be afraid in a way that a lot of other institutional players are clearly acting scared. I’m just not going to do it.

Giridharadas: I think many people here would join me in saying we hope that your attitude is contagious among your colleagues, and that you’re able to be an influence on them. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today, and for your voice in this time.

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!