Trump promised to be a dictator on Day 1: Here’s why the Insurrection Act blocks him
Julien Berman and Laura Dickinson – November 19, 2024
Could President-elect Donald Trump use the military within the U.S. to suppress protests on college campuses, patrol the southern border, and conduct mass deportations? By invoking the Insurrection Act — a little-known law that grants the president sweeping authority to deploy the military on American soil — he plans to do just that.
The Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime for the military to engage in domestic law enforcement. But the Insurrection Act provides a crucial exception to this rule, giving the president seemingly broad authority to deploy military forces on American soil. Historically, it has been invoked sparingly and responsibly — only 30 times in the 230 years since its inception. Most famously, the act enabled Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to desegregate schools in the South and protect civil rights marchers to enforce court orders over the objection of state officials.
But in a moment when our democracy hangs by a thread, when the president-elect has openly declared potentially authoritarian ambitions, it could become the legal mechanism for Trump (or any president) to transform our constitutional democracy into a military state.
In 2020, Trump wanted to deploy military forces to quash the Black Lives Matter protests, but was convinced not to by advisers such as Attorney General William Barr and Gen. Mark Milley. In his second term, with Trump pledging to purge independent voices and install loyalists across government, there may be no one left to say no.
The Insurrection Act contains three triggers for military deployment. The first is relatively uncontroversial because it requires a state to explicitly request military assistance to suppress an insurrection. But the other two triggers appear to grant the president virtually unchecked power to deploy troops without state consent — or even against state wishes.
The language in these other two sections of the law is breathtakingly broad. One section seems to allow the president to deploy troops whenever “unlawful obstructions” make it “impractical” to enforce federal law. The other goes further still, purporting to authorize the use of military force to suppress any “domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs” federal law enforcement.
Even more alarming, in addition to allowing the deployment of regular troops and federalizing the National Guard, the act permits the president to deputize “private militias.” In theory, Trump could grant federal law enforcement authority to the extremist groups who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 or to militant organizations like the Proud Boys.
Our military is primarily trained for overseas combat, not domestic law enforcement, which requires different rules of engagement and careful protection of constitutional rights. And coordination between federal troops, local police and state officials becomes a logistical nightmare.
But all is not yet lost.
The Biden administration and Congress have roughly two months to reform this dangerous law before Trump returns to office. Experts across the political spectrum have proposed crucial reforms. Congress could explicitly narrow the specific substantive circumstances in which the act can be invoked, eliminate the private militia provisions, or add procedural checks on the use of the act, for example by requiring congressional approval or judicial review.
But even without congressional reform, executive branch lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel can make it clear that the current language in the Insurrection Act is not as broad as it may seem. Indeed, OLC has long maintained that the act’s sweeping language must be read narrowly in conjunction with other specific constitutional provisions and historical practice. Now, faced with explicit threats to weaponize the act, OLC should forcefully clarify these constitutional constraints, while providing needed guidance to judges should they be required to interpret the scope of the act.
First, OLC should emphasize that Congress enacted much of the act’s broad language immediately after the Civil War pursuant to its authority under the 14th Amendment. Because the 14th Amendment requires state action, the Insurrection Act should too, preventing the president from unilaterally deploying troops unless state authorities are either actively denying federal rights or completely powerless to protect them.
Second, OLC should establish a high bar for military deployment not tied to enforcing specific court orders. Both the Supremacy Clause and Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution suggest that the president must demonstrate a genuine collapse of state and local authority, and that the statute should only be used as a last resort.
Under this constitutional framework, Trump’s threats to deploy troops against protesters or undocumented immigrants are clearly illegitimate. They involve neither state violations of constitutional rights nor a breakdown of civil authority.
The framers of our Constitution were deeply skeptical of standing armies and military involvement in civilian affairs. They understood that turning troops against citizens was a hallmark of tyranny. It is deeply embedded in our Constitution and tradition that, outside of invasion or rebellion, civilian law enforcement — not soldiers — would maintain domestic order.
Our military exists primarily to protect the nation from foreign threats, not to serve as any president’s personal enforcement army against the American people. Now, as we face four more years of a president who has shown contempt for democratic norms and institutional restraints, we must use every legal tool available to prevent the abuse of this extraordinary power.
Julien Berman is a Harvard undergraduate and op-eds editor of The Harvard Crimson.Laura Dickinson is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School.
Trump doubles down on provocative Cabinet picks as their fates hang in the balance
Analysis by Stephen Collinson – November 18, 2024
Donald Trump is refusing to back down over his Cabinet picks in the first clash in an epic battle he will wage against Washington when he takes office next year.
The coming days will show whether Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have staying power for confirmation fights in the new Republican Senate over their assignments to safeguard the rule of law, the US intelligence community, the military, and the health and well-being of all Americans.
Each of the most provocative selections is facing criticism that they lack the expertise and experience to run the vast, specialized bureaucracies that would be under their control.
And debate over their prospects is intensifying following fresh revelations and allegations about their pasts, which will set up a test for Trump’s intention to wield what he regards as almost uncheckable power from the Oval Office.
CNN reported this weekend that Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a settlement agreement that included a confidentiality clause, according to Hegseth’s attorney. The Fox News anchor has denied assaulting the woman, according to the attorney, and was not charged in any criminal case or named as a defendant in any civil lawsuit in connection with the 2017 incident. The initial sexual assault allegation against Hegseth had caught Trump’s team off guard last week, after the president-elect had already picked him.
Intrigue also deepened over a House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz, the potential attorney general, after a lawyer who represents two of the witnesses in the probe said Friday that one of his clients saw the Florida Republican, who resigned from Congress last week, having sex with a minor. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing, including ever having sex with a minor or paying for sex. He was not charged after a Department of Justice investigation.
There is also growing scrutiny over Gabbard’s suitability for the job of director of national intelligence because of her positions that sometimes amplified the propaganda of one of the covert community’s top adversaries — Russia.
And some senior medical experts are raising concerns over the qualifications of Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, to safeguard generations of medical advances as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, even though his outspokenness against processed food has found support among many top physicians.
Not all of Trump’s picks are causing uproar. The selection of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as secretary of state has won praise on both sides of the aisle. But in a conventional administration, controversies raging around at least four key Cabinet picks would be seen as a disaster.
Trump is adamant he’s not going to give in as he seeks people who will fulfill his goals of tearing down the Washington establishment in a second term he pledged to devote to retribution. A source told CNN over the weekend that Trump sees Gaetz as his most important pick. The president-elect wants the former Florida congressman confirmed “100%,” the source said. “He is not going to back off. He’s all in.”
Johnson tells CNN that releasing Gaetz ethics report would open a Pandora’s box’
Trump has called on the Senate to, if necessary, cooperate with him to make recess appointments if the picks cannot be confirmed. Using such a move as a first resort rather than a final one, as has happened in the past, would be a sign that Trump, with a compliant GOP, plans to bypass the constitutional checks and balances of Congress and act with sweeping, unrestrained authority as president.
The outcome of the coming showdown will depend on whether Republican senators are willing to abrogate their own power to vet nominees and will cave under the furious political pressure that is certain to be trained on them by the “Make America Great Again” movement. The issue represents the first political crisis to confront South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who will take over as Republican Senate majority leader next year. And even if senators take a stand over one or two nominees they view as unqualified, it’s unlikely they will deal a defeat to the new president by throwing out all of the most provocative picks, meaning that some of them are almost certain to take jobs atop key government departments.
The storm over Trump’s picks is deepening as the president-elect is working to complete his future governing team with positions such as treasury secretary and US trade representative — who will be critical to carrying out his populist trade and economic policies — still outstanding.
Gaetz — a pyrotechnical politician who made his name with his outspoken support for Trump and a series of political stunts — is attracting the most attention in part because of his decision to quit the House just days before the Ethics Committee was expected to release its report. Without him being a sitting member of Congress, the investigation will end with the report still under wraps, despite some GOP senators requesting to see what is in it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday that releasing the report would open a “Pandora’s box” since Gaetz had left Congress, even though such action would not be unprecedented. “The Senate has a role, the advise-and-consent role, under the Constitution, and they will perform it,” the Louisiana Republican said. “They will have a rigorous review and vetting process in the Senate, but they don’t need to rely upon a report, or a draft report, a rough draft report, that was prepared by the Ethics Committee for its very limited purposes.” Johnson also said he had not discussed the matter with Trump.
The president-elect’s son explains the plan
Gaetz and several other Trump picks have caused consternation in some circles given the questions about their qualifications and past behavior.
“I think the whole point with these nominees, several of them, is their un-qualification, is their affirmative disqualification,” Sen.-elect Adam Schiff said on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “That’s Trump’s point, because what he wants to do with these nominees is establish that the Congress of the United States will not stand up to him with anything,” the California Democrat said. “If they will confirm Matt Gaetz, they will do anything he wants.”
Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned Sunday that Republican senators should look to their legacies and not to Trump. “These people are manifestly unqualified, and they’re not prepared to run the very complicated organizations they have been asked to run,” the Connecticut Democrat said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He added: “A Republican senator who takes a vote to consent to the appointment of Matt Gaetz — a chaos agent, a performative social media, no-respect-for-the-rule-of-law individual — the Republican senator who votes to confirm Matt Gaetz or Robert Kennedy or Tulsi Gabbard will be remembered by history as somebody who completely gave up their responsibility to Donald Trump.”
Trump on the campaign trail made no secret of his plans if he won a second term. Many of his most committed supporters regard the federal government as a liberal deep state that has failed to respond to their needs. Trump, moreover, is still seething over the establishment’s attempts to rein him in during his first White House term. So selecting Cabinet picks who are seen as unqualified to lead their departments may be an attempt to deal a blow against the credibility of government in itself.
The strategy was explained by the president-elect’s son Donald Trump Jr. on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox Business. “The reality this time is, we actually know what we’re doing. We actually know who the good guys and the bad guys are. We know who the guys who are fake,” he said. “It’s about surrounding my father with people who are both competent and loyal. They will deliver on his promises. They will deliver on his message. They are not people who think they know better, as unelected bureaucrats.”
Trump Jr. also suggested that the uproar surrounding some of Trump’s picks was exactly why he chose them and that it proves their authenticity. “A lot of them are going to face pushback, for the same reasons. Again, they are going to be actual disrupters. That’s what the American people want.”
It would take a handful of Republican senators to block the most provocative Trump nominees early next year, given that Democrats are likely to vote en masse against them. But several GOP senators made clear Sunday they had no problems with the people Trump has picked to staff the government.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin has a long-standing personal feud with Gaetz and has in the past held his behavior in contempt. But the Oklahoma Republican said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would give Gaetz a “fair shot.” He added: “I’ve got a tough situation. … I’ve got to set my personal situation with Matt to the side and look at the facts. If he’s qualified, he’s qualified.”
Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt said he believed Trump’s nominees would get confirmed. “You have to have people you trust to go into these agencies and have a real reform agenda. And that’s why I think there’s real momentum, real momentum to get these nominations confirmed,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
On the same show, however, another Trump ally, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, warned there was “hard work” ahead in the confirmation process but praised Gaetz as a “fighter” who was loyal to the president-elect. “We have got the numbers. Let’s step to the plate, do our job, because we have to get this country back going in the right direction. President Trump only has a short period of time. Four years is not long.”
Across the aisle, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman looked ahead to those four years and urged Democrats to acknowledge the big picture rather than playing into Trump’s hands over every controversy. He said on “State of the Union” that the picks of Gaetz and some others were “just absolute trolls” that fit Trump’s purposes. “He gets the kind of thing that he wanted, like the freak-out. … If we’re having meltdowns every tweet or every appointment or all those things, I mean, it’s going to be four years.”
Column: Trump’s worst Cabinet picks aren’t just unqualified, they’re part of a bigger power grab
Doyle McManus – November 18, 2024
Donald Trump walks by Matt Gaetz, left, after a day in court during his criminal trial in New York this spring. Former Rep. Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has vowed to purge the Justice Department and FBI of anyone who might get in the president-elect’s way. (Mike Segar / Pool photo via Associated Press)More
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But there’s a more important and potentially more dangerous factor that ties their nominations together: They are foot soldiers in a power grab that, if it succeeds, would weaken the institutional guardrails that limit the president’s powers and concentrate more authority in Trump’s hands.
Former Rep. Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has promised to purge the Justice Department and FBI of anyone who might get in the president’s way. Trump “is going to hit the Department of Justice with a blowtorch — and that torch is Matt Gaetz,” former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon said last week.
Hegseth, the Fox News host who could become Defense secretary, has proposed purging military officers he sees as too committed to diversity, including Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The Pentagon likes to say our diversity is our strength,” Hegseth said on Fox News in June. “What a bunch of garbage.” (“Pete’s a leader,” Bannon said. “He’s kind of a madman — but hey, you need that.”)
Former Rep. Gabbard, who as director of National Intelligence would oversee the CIA and 17 other agencies, has criticized the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine so fervently that a Russian state television host once called her “our girlfriend.”
And Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist who is Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, has said he wants to fire hundreds of senior officials in the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health on “day one.” Trump has encouraged him to “go wild.”
Their pledges are all in keeping with Trump’s broader promise to dismantle much of the federal bureaucracy and bring what remains under his personal control.
“We will demolish the deep state,” the president-elect often said at his campaign rallies, “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
During his first term, Trump often expressed frustration at the legal and political limits on what he could do as president.
In 2018, he expressed an expansive view of his powers under the Constitution: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want.”
But in practice, he found himself hemmed in by experienced Cabinet officials, White House lawyers and military officers, some of whom dubbed themselves “the adults in the room.”
His attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, quietly sidelined his demands that they prosecute Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats.
Trump also denounced the CIA and other intelligence agencies for their finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election campaign to help him defeat Clinton — a judgment he seemed to consider partisan, rather than based on the evidence.
So it’s no surprise that he wants to bring those national security agencies to heel.
But Trump’s plans to expand his personal authority extend much further.
He has vowed to weaken civil service rules that protect federal bureaucrats from being fired if they disagree with their bosses’ decisions. “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president,” he said last year, adding: “I will wield that power very aggressively.”
Robert Shea, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration, explained the real world impact. “If you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical [or] unwise, they could brand you as disloyal and terminate you,” he said.
The result would be what one expert called “transformation by intimidation.”
Trump has also proposed weakening Congress’ power to direct federal spending — one of the legislative branch’s core functions.
He plans to revive the practice of “impounding” funds — blocking agencies from spending money that Congress has appropriated for programs he doesn’t like.
That tactic could enable him, for example, to stop parts of President Biden’s clean energy program from being implemented, even though Congress has already approved the expenditures.
A 1974 law made impoundment illegal, but Trump has suggested that he will ignore the prohibition and challenge it in court.
And, of course, Trump warned the Senate last week that if it refuses to confirm any of his Cabinet nominees, he may put them in office anyway — by using “recess appointments,” which allow a president to fill top jobs when Congress isn’t in session.
And if the Congress doesn’t recess, Trump may have another norm-shattering gambit in reserve. In his first term, he threatened to adjourn both chambers under a presidential power laid out in the Constitution for “extraordinary occasions.”
That wouldn’t just test the guardrails on a president’s powers, it would “crash through them,” wrote Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice.
That makes it all the more important that Republicans in the Senate, to preserve their constitutional powers, subject Trump’s nominees to searching scrutiny and reject any that are unqualified, dangerous or both.
Those controversial nominations will decide more than the future of the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community and the vast Department of Health and Human Services — although those stakes are high enough.
They will help determine whether Trump can undo the checks and balances the founders wrote into the Constitution, and turn the executive branch into an instrument of a would-be autocrat’s will.
Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.
Rachel Maddow and Allison Detzel – November 12, 2024
This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
The last time Donald Trump was president, his Interior secretary was embroiled in a corruption scandal and ended up referred to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. His Transportation secretary was also embroiled in her own corruption scandal and also was referred to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation.
It used to be if you had one Cabinet official involved in a big ethics and/or corruption scandal that forced them out of the job or led to them being referred for criminal investigations, that would be enough to brand your whole presidency a disgraced and scandal-ridden mistake.
Just consider Warren G. Harding — what’s remembered about his presidency? Maybe that he died in office? Or that he had an affair? No, it’s the Teapot Dome corruption scandal, which resulted in a Cabinet official being criminally charged. A century later, that one scandal involving one Cabinet official is basically all we remember about Harding’s presidency.
The first Trump term had so many Cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges that it’s actually hard to remember them all. However, despite an unprecedented number of Cabinet officials being referred for criminal investigations, the supposedly independent DOJ decided to bring charges against precisely none of them.
One of the more memorable ethical disasters along these lines from the first Trump term was a situation involving his secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. This might be the most memorable scandal because it happened right at the end of his administration, Dec. 10, 2020 — after Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden but before the Jan. 6 attack.
MaddowBlog’s headline at the time, by Steve Benen, read, “Yet another Trump Cabinet secretary caught up in scandal: As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an ignominious end, it’s apparently not too late for one more Cabinet controversy.”
The Justice Department didn’t charge Wilkie, just like they didn’t charge any of these guys. But more than 20 different veterans groups rose up in outrage against him. Disparate veterans groups with very different takes on the world banded together — everyone from the American Legion to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to the Veterans of Foreign Wars – all demanding that Wilkie resign or be fired.
It was just a disaster, and it was a sign that even right up to the very bitter and ultimately violent end of Trump’s first term, things weren’t merely bad. It’s not normal to have a half-dozen members of the Cabinet referred for investigations into potential crimes committed while they were serving in the Cabinet.
Now, as the nation marked Veteran’s Day, a day to honor and celebrate our veterans, we learned Trump has decided to bring Wilkie back, tapping him to lead the transition efforts for the entire Defense Department. At a time when the country is looking to the U.S. military for assurances that they won’t deploy against American civilians the way Trump has threatened, the guy charged with staffing up the Defense Department leadership for the military is same guy who left office last time while his “possible criminal conduct” was under investigation by federal prosecutors.
Wilkie is not the only one who’s been tapped for the second Trump administration in recent days. NBC News has learned Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once memorably cast aspersions on the size of Trump’s genitals in a presidential debate, is expected to be the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state.
Trump has also chosen Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be his national security adviser. Walz helped in the effort to try to overthrow the government and keep Trump in power after he lost re-election in 2020. Waltz has distinguished himself by claiming that Trump was not responsible for Jan. 6 and that Dulles Airport should be renamed the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” So clearly, he’s checked all the boxes he needs to be national security adviser.
We learned Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, will be his administration’s “border czar.” Remember when Republicans used to maintain with a straight face that it was a huge scandal and evidence of communism to call anyone the czar of anything?
Trump has put the other architect of family separation, Stephen Miller, in charge of all policy planning for the transition. A source tells NBC News that Miller will also serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the second Trump White House.
So anyone telling you that a second Trump administration is going to be at all moderate or normal in terms of what they’re going to do, that person is living on a nice planet that I’d like to visit sometime, but it’s not our planet.
Any expectation that the most extreme things Trump talked about were just talk and that normal people would come into his administration to do normal things, well, that wishful thinking hasn’t survived one week after the election.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday hammered Donald Trump’s hypocrisy when it comes to one particular demand the president-elect has made of his successor-turned-predecessor, outgoing President Joe Biden.
Trump insisted in a post on his Truth Social platform that “no Judges should be approved” until he’s back in the Oval Office “because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership.”
See the post here:
Truth Social
“As an assertion, that’s nuts, right?” asked Maddow.
“You’re not president now, my guy, and Republicans don’t control the Senate right now. So you and Republicans have no control,” she continued. “You have no say over whether or not Biden and the Democrats choose to pass more confirmations before you take power. You don’t get a say in that. You’re not in power yet.”
Republicans confirmed “at least 32 people” after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden and Biden became the president, Maddow noted.
“The idea that it would be somehow improper now for the Democrats to do the same thing, for the Democrats to spend this next two and a half months confirming Biden nominees including judges, to say that there is something wrong with that […] it’s just an absurd suggestion,” she said.
It’s “absurd bluster from Trump, where he is trying to pretend he’s already in power,” Maddow added.
In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better
Steve Benen – November 11, 2024
Then-President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office in 2020.
One of the forgotten stories of Donald Trump’s first term came around this time five years ago, when the then-president tried to arrange for a G7 summit to be held at one of his struggling businesses. Even by his standards, it was quite brazen.
Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.
To be sure, he ultimately backed off, but the effort was part of an ugly pattern. As The American Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit.”
Unfortunately, we can keep going down the same road: Trump also issued corrupt pardons to those who engaged in corruption. Members of his Cabinet faced so many corruption allegations that it was difficult to keep track of them all. For all intents and purposes, the result was effectively the first modern pro-corruption administration.
It’s nevertheless a safe bet that his second term in the White House will be considerably worse.
Indeed, less than a week after Election Day, there’s already some unsettling evidence coming to the fore. The New York Times reported, for example, that the president-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.
Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.
“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”
Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches.
But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows.
As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.
Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s unclear how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.”
Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.”
I suspect that if a pollster were to ask Americans whether they’re comfortable with government corruption, the vast majority would say no. And yet, we’re about to experience a brutal elections-have-consequences moment when it comes to the corrupting of the executive branch of the federal government.
What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
The long and winding political campaign road is ending (we hope) on the doorsteps of the 60th U.S. Presidential Election. This is only my 16th, my first was just after I joined the Army. But I would wager no other election in our history will compare to 2024’s, in length, breadth, cost or more importantly, historical consequence.
Most clear thinking voters refuse to believe pollsters, who claim this is way, way, too close to predict. They insist it will again come down to the smallest percentage of voters in a handful of states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada they say, hold the keys to the White House, and the fate of the Republic.
The residents of those swing states have suffered the brunt of the $16 billion onslaught of political ads. Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance floodgates sprung wide open to Corporate and special interest quid pro quo. This judicial abomination of the First Amendment has inflicted America with endless campaigning, astronomical expenditures and a potentially violent polarization. Too many MAGA faithful predict a Civil War on steroids, unless Trump is returned to his ordained position as their White Christian Savior and President.
But I’m not ready to give up on the American Experiment. I honestly and reasonably believe Kamala Harris could get between 6 and 15 million more popular votes that trump. The electoral congress is a bit uncertain, but the Dem’s should prevail; by how much depends on disaffected true Conservative Republicans. I believe the Democrats could take back the House of Representatives, and have an even chance at retaining the U.S. Senate. Hope springs eternal. Polling yesterday revealed a three point lead for V.P Harris, in Iowa of all states. And I like Colin Allred’s chances in Texas at last. The Democrats as usual, have enlisted highly qualified, intelligent, committed and honorable candidates across the country. The republi-cons have insisted on election denying, unthinking, dimwitted, sycophantic cult followers of trump Inc. Inquiring minds have to wonder why people who hate government and governing principles, run for positions running the government. I guess the answer is obvious.
OnSeptember 29, 2023 – Sarah Pruitt, a writer and editor based in New Hampshire wrote:
“The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart”
“Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.”
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
‘“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”’
“George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamiltononce called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”’
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
“In George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation, Washington and Hamilton worked closely together on the address, which took the form of a public letter to the American people. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. The letter included three main principles:”
1. Importance of Unity:
“After opening with an explanation of his choice not to seek a third term, Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole. “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,” Washington declared. “The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.”
“Regions such as North, South, East and West should see their common interests rather than their differences, he continued. “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty and…the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
“According to Washington, one of the chief dangers of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism, or the development of competing political parties. When Americans voted according to party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, Washington feared it would foster a “spirit of revenge,” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“In fact, political parties had already begun to emerge by the time Washington stepped aside. Federalists, who drew their support largely from New England, advocated a strong national government and the fiscal programs created by Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Republicans (later Democratic-Republicans) led by Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, opposed Hamilton’s economic policies. They also split with the Federalists in foreign policy, favoring a closer relationship with France over Great Britain.”
“Washington supported Hamilton’s financial programs and sided with the Federalists in supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain. By the end of his presidency, Washington was weathering increasingly bitter attacks from his Republican critics, and his farewell address represented his response to such attacks, as well as a more general statement of his principles.”
3. Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
“Just as regionalism would lead to the formation of political parties, Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially in commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
“Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergencies, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Sarah Pruitt, Updated July 6, 2023
Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be stunned and appalled at the current state of our multi-billion dollar campaigns and political divide.
“Consider, for example, that after a wealthy 25-year-old man named George Washington, in 1757, bought “$195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election,” the Virginia Legislature enacted a law prohibiting candidates, “or persons on their behalf,” from giving voters “money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision . . . any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.”
That historic guard rail hasn’t dissuaded Elon Musk from pledging to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, just for signing on the dotted line, and purportedly to vote for his BF Trump.
“Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole.”
But Trump’s first and foremost principle, is to divide America into MAGA’s and everyone else. To pit his faithful against the others. To demonize immigrants, in spite of two of his wives and in-laws being recent immigrants. And most recently, to scare the bejesus out of as many American’s as possible, on the dangers of immigration from non-Christians.
Washington warned:The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
It’s blaringly obvious that Trump and his myriad of sycophantic MAGAnians, are not loyal to the Republic or to our Democratic institutions, they’re government hating bomb throwers.
Washington feared:Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
But in this ever dangerous and fractured world, with growing numbers of anti-Democratic, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic and fascist regimes, NATO, the Indo-Pacific Alliance and other international pacts are necessarily more important than ever.
Unfortunately, trump and his followers are more aligned with leaders he admires and is clearly envious of; trump regards Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, and Nicolás Maduro as great world leaders to be applauded and emulated.
Trump, cowardly and treasonous Republi-cons in Congress, Musk and other billionaire MAGA benefactors, and the millions of MAGA, hate filled sheeple, and most importantly, a majority of extreme right supreme court justices, have failed American Democracy on all three of Washington’s governing principles.
The MAGA Republi-cons in the U.S. Senate could have stopped trump, at any time in his 5 year reign of Anti-American terrorism, and then failed to convict him at his two impeachments. The supreme court could have reigned in trump, instead, they gave him free rein to subvert the Department of Justice’s attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes and also ruled to allow him to commit even more consequential malfeasances if he’s returned to the White House.
Numerous journalists and news organizations have attempted to shine a light through the trump smoke-screen of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and countless lies he used to subvert, the Grand Old Party, the conservative movement and MAGA-ward Christians. We know what trump accomplished in his first term. Above all, he attempted to overthrow our Democracy and Democratic institutions, and hired government hating, self-serving like-minded operatives to turn over federal and state power to the rich and powerful, to fossil fuel and extractive benefactors and to enemies foreign and domestic. No opportunity to enrich himself and his friends and family was left untapped. And we know what trump and the MAGA republi-cons in congress would inflict on America and the world if they get control of the White House and the congress. More on the order of massive budget busting tax cuts for the ultra-rich and tax dodging corporations, 80% of which will go, as before, to the top 1%.
But a second trump administration will be operating in “Katie bar the door” territory, thanks to the SCOTUS.
MAGA operatives published their plans in a 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides.
FactCheck.org®A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center enlightens: “Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”
“It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”
“The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.”
“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.
Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)
“The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.”
“As for other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”
“One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.”
“For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.”
“For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.”
“The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.”
“Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.”
“The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.”
I would personally like to thank all the critical thinking patriots – journalists, activists, fact based news organizations and others, for helping America to think critically about who’s attempting to turn our Democratic Republic over to anti-Democratic autocrats, self-serving kleptocrats, theocrats, misogynists, white national racists and fascists. They’ve gallantly tried to help turn the page on America’s trump presidential nightmare.
Hundreds of true conservative, Eisenhower and Regan Republican party faithful, who’ve been driven out of the party, or fled for their lives, have advocated for and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this consequential election. There are Republican’s for Harris, scientists for Harris, historian’s for Harris, Puerto Rican’s for Harris, Dad’s for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Mom’s for Harris and probably dozens that I haven’t heard about.
Some, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and others, have went further and endorsed Democrats running against election denying trump apologists and January 6th sympathizers in congress. Many tens or hundreds of thousands have resigned themselves to vote against their long lost party. Virtually everyone who worked for trump in his administration have declared they would refuse to endorse or vote for trump in 2024.
trump, fearing another lost election, has become more unhinged from political reality. The MAGA rally lies and campaign promises have become more outrageous by the day. The twice impeached, 4 times indicted, thrice convicted felon, can’t help but envision himself spending time in a federal prison at the ripe old age of 80. If he loses, odds are favoring him fleeing the country before the Justice Department overcomes the $100 million dollars he’s spent trying to subvert a just reckoning. Also if he loses the election, the campaign faithful piggy-bank will dry up and he’ll be forced to spend his own dwindling wealth on his many legal defenses.
trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes darker and more ominous by the day. Aside from immigrants eating cats and dogs, something that should not even be repeated, trump blames immigrants for every crime, malady, immorality, and unfairness imposed on real white Christian citizens.
Kamala, on the other hand, preaches joy, inclusion, unity and optimism. Her message is somehow getting through the right-wing MAGA-phones, republi-con congressional treason and obfuscation, foreign interference, social media conspiracies, and trump’s fantasized, Democratic dystopian future.
Although Jeffrey Preston Bezos, American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, decided to block a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, most of the Post’s journalists have voiced their choices in the election, through their reporting and writings. “Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” It’s too bad that More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the paper. Don’t blame the messenger.
I, on the other hand, am not afraid of endorsing Kamala and Tim to bring America back from the abyss. I’m a Veteran who served my country for 3 years in the Army, in a nuclear missile artillery battalion. We had our missiles aimed at the Soviets and they had theirs aimed at us. I think I fell asleep 60 years ago, just woke up and nothing has changed. We’re still butting heads with the Russkies. We were required to have secret clearances to serve in our Pershing unit. We had monthly seminars from intelligence officers on the necessity of protecting secrets and documents, especially when we were out in public. We couldn’t even have a camera near the military Kaserne. They found a camera on one soldier and we never heard from him again. It shocks myself and fellow veterans how trump abused the national trust by illegally taking highly classified government secrets and documents from government intelligence agencies, and then refusing to turn them over when ordered by the courts, and also by recklessly storing them in a public bathroom. A president who betrays his country and his oath of office should not be returned to the White House. I can’t believe how any Veteran could vote for trump.
As a member of a dozen or so unions and working in manufacturing and construction, I vote for the folks who valiantly fought to stem the flight of manufacturing jobs offshore. Those were all Democrats, including Joe Biden, Three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats. The republi-cons in congress greased the pathways and fought for tax incentives for corporations to offshore high-paying middle class jobs.
trump and J.D. Vance have already proposed trying to overturn the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administrations Chips and Science Act. “The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion. The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China.
“When the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022, it had bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both political parties hailed the law’s importance for reviving US chip-making capacity in the face of China’s growing influence in the semiconductor sector.”
“But in the final days of this presidential election cycle, the law has become a point of contention between the political parties, putting its future in doubt.”
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who voted against the CHIPS Act, drew criticism after suggesting he would consider repealing the program under the Trump administration
“Analysts estimated that the act incentivized between 25 and 50 separate potential projects, with total projected investments of $160–200 billion and 25,000–45,000 new jobs.”
How can any laborer, union member or otherwise, vote for trump and his anti-labor supporters in congress, who overwhelmingly vote against labor issues at every chance.
President Biden, Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and the Democratic party as a whole, are strong supporters of labor and labor unions.
The Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have always, and will always fight for women’s reproductive freedom and the right to make their own healthcare decisions, and to have access to safe and legal abortions. Harris wants to restore Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion up until the time of fetal viability or about 22 weeks. The vast majority of voters agree with her; 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact.
If trump and his MAGA Christian supporters regain control of the White House, a national abortion ban will be at the top of their to-do lists.
For all these reasons, and the fact that trump is the absolute worst, most vile inhabitant of the White House in U.S. history, I believe the Democrats and Kamala Harris will prevail in this election and will be able to turn the page on this ugly and divisive period in our history. As she says, we’re not going back. I just hope that a large resounding victory, might force the republi-cons to alter their anti-Democratic mind set.
So where does that leave the MAGA republi-cons and the unholy, un Christ-like prosperity Christians who went all in on trump’s campaign of grievance, revenge and retribution? They ignored the hundreds of red flags, the habitual lies, the rampant self-serving, the crimes, the indiscretions, the flagrant immorality, and the daily un-presidential conduct. Millions of true and faithful conservative Republicans have fled the party, or the party has left them in it’s toxic wake. Are there enough influential, authentic, conservative Republican’s like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others, capable of resurrecting the Grand Old Party, or it it destined for the waste bin of history.
trump, Christian Nationalists, and MAGAnians in congress, believe scaring their faithful out of their wits, and holding together their coalition of disaffected, grievance based bro-crew faithful is enough to win trump a second term and keep him out of prison.
$170 million has already been wagered on this election, an abomination causing the founding fathers to turn over in their graves. Who will lose their political shirts.
I believe they’re wrong on all counts. The others, and especially women in every town and burb, in every corner of the nation are not settling for returning to the dark ages of female subjugation and purgatory. The women of America might just save the Republic.
What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed. “It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”
These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in. But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday. They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.
Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them. But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.
Partly, I just feel frozen with horror. This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis. Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.
My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.
If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past. This is what I envision when I think of MAGA fascism: people demonized as “vermin” being dragged off to camps, while dissent is violently crushed by the armed forces. I don’t know how anyone who has listened to Trump and those around him can dismiss this scenario as hysterical.
There will, I assume, be persecutions of Trump’s more high-profile enemies. We know that Trump, in his first term, harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ex-president and his allies have been clear about their intention to end the independence of the Justice Department. Mitt Romney is taking seriously the possibility that Trump will use the government to go after him, telling The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word.” Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and President Biden until he retired last year, told the journalist Bob Woodward that he fears Trump could have him recalled to duty and court-martialed for disloyalty. Anyone significant enough to threaten Trump could find themselves targeted.
And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.
Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance. The Washington Post’s decision to quash its editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris shocked so many of the paper’s readers because it seemed, despite the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ insistence to the contrary, like an act of corrupt capitulation.
As The Post itself has reported, Bezos’ companies have billions of dollars in government contracts at stake, and during the last Trump administration, the president went out of his way to punish the billionaire for Post coverage he didn’t like. In 2019, The Post reported, Marc Short, then Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told leaders of Bezos’ space exploration company, “You have a Washington Post problem.”
The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch. By the end of Trump’s first term, when the president was pressuring state officials to change vote totals, staffing the highest levels of government with thugs and lackeys, and, eventually, siccing a vigilante mob on the Capitol, we’d already gone farther on the path to authoritarianism than I’d once thought possible. The place we left off at in January 2021 will, in all likelihood, be the starting point for a Trump administration in 2025.
Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”
Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called — with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.
Days out from the election, pointing out the potential nightmares ahead feels like screaming into a void. Trump’s deep contempt for liberal democracy is, as they say, baked in. When Milley called Trump “fascist to the core,” and when Gen. John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said that he wanted to rule as a dictator, the political debate wasn’t about whether they were correct, but about whether their words would matter. (The consensus seemed to be no.) So those of us who recognize what Trump is lurch forward to Tuesday, a coin flip away from losing what we thought was our democratic birthright, trying and often failing to think through the aftermath of the unthinkable.
But even if the unthinkable happens, it won’t happen all at once. Hannah Arendt wrote, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about how the dislocations of World War I created a mass of stateless people who lived “outside the pale of the law.” Seeing these people deprived of human rights, those secure in their citizenship did not generally worry about their own. “It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule,” wrote Arendt.
My kids keep asking anxiously what will happen if Trump wins. I tell them that their lives won’t change, that we’ll have to try to stand up for others who are more vulnerable, but that we ourselves will be fine. The last two words I only say in my head: “For now.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
Trump Camp Attempts Damage Control After Johnson Caught Being Too Explicit About Gutting ACA
Emine Yücel – October 30, 2024
The Trump campaign continued its dance of bamboozlement on where the Republican Party actually stands when it comes to gutting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on Tuesday night, after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) acknowledged that Republicans will tackle “massive reform” of Obamacare should Donald Trump win the presidency and the GOP keep the House.
In a statement issued just after NBC News first reported on Johnson’s remarks, the campaign claimed that Trump does not support repealing the Affordable Care Act, attempting to put some distance between Trump’s vague “concepts of a plan” to supposedly improve the ACA and Johnson’s all out “no Obamacare” admission.
“This is not President Trump’s policy position,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday night. “As President Trump has said, he will make our healthcare system better by increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable healthcare and insurance options.”
Republicans’ longstanding interest in repealing the ACA is a political liability for Trump this cycle and, similar to his abortion policy positions, he’s avoided publicly endorsing anything specific about what he wants Congress to do should he win back the White House and control of the upper and lower chambers. During his first term, Trump and the all-Republican Congress attempted unsuccessfully to repeal the law.
The campaign’s clean up statement distancing Trump from Johnson comes just a day after the House Speaker indicated that Republicans are planning to either get rid of the popular ACA or substantially gut it during a campaign event in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania the Republican speaker attended for House candidate Ryan Mackenzie (R).
“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Johnson said on Monday, according to a video obtained by NBC News.
“No Obamacare?” an event attendee asked Johnson.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, reportedly rolling his eyes. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” Johnson continued. “And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy, and we’re going to fix these things.”
The 14-year-old ACA, which provides health coverage to tens of millions of Americans, has been a frequent target of Republicans.
Over the years, congressional Republicans have tried and failed to overturn Obamacare on many occasions.
During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump himself vowed to repeal Obamacare. During his presidency he tried several times to do just that, with the Senate in the summer of 2017 coming just one vote shy of overturning the ACA. Backlash to Republicans’ failed attempts to repeal the law helped Democrats take back the House in 2018. Since then, Republicans have tried to soften their stance on the issue to a position of reform over repeal.
“I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” Trump said in a Truth Social post in November 2023.
Trump’s been vague about his position ever since. In September, during the only presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump, the former president said Republicans will replace Obamacare under a second Trump presidency.
“Obamacare was lousy health care. Always was. It’s not very good today,” Trump said during the debate. “And what I said, that if we come up with something, and we are working on things, we’re going to do it and we’re going to replace it.”
When pressed about the specifics of his replacement plan, the former president did not offer anything beyond the now-infamous allusion to having “concepts of a plan.”
Meanwhile, drawing a stark contrast, Harris and Democrats have been campaigning on protecting and expanding Obamacare, highlighting Trump and the GOP’s past efforts to revoke the health coverage program every chance they get.
