By Kenneth Tiven
In 2016, Donald Trump was a novice politician, a demagogue, unprepared to lead the change even before the pandemic shut down the globe for nearly two years. Despite that he spent four years constantly complaining, culminating in a failed coup assault on the US Capitol. While President Joe Biden led the nation back to economic stability, Trump’s ad hoc cadre of right-wing advisers, unseen and undismayed, planned a sequential assault on democracy. If Trump won against a badly mismanaged Biden effort, his plan would attempt to put the Second American Revolution in place before the 250th anniversary of that first effort in July 1776.
American voters had four years to measure Trump by his public complaints, with a narrow popular vote giving him a second chance, just as major banks did after his string of six financial bankruptcies. His architects of revolution released Project 2025 as a campaign document, a fairytale version of Trump’s plan. You cannot say he didn’t warn the nation. But like drivers who ignore “cul-de-sac” signs, voters were not dismayed by the inherent authoritarian and racist threads sticking to their rights to vote for his racial and anti-immigrant positions.
The models for what is happening are obvious—Germany in 1932, Italy in mid-1920s, Russia for much of the 20th century. The major ingredient speeding everything up is the change in communications, with the Internet carrying messages further, faster than radio did for Adolf Hitler. The frenetic pace of the Trump administration is to mask several things:
- The reality of budget cuts and transfers of money helping poor people to really rich people.
- The reality of Trump’s probable involvement in the Jeffry Epstein sex trafficking files.
- The amount of contributions gained by preferential treatment.
- The transformation of a democracy into a perpetual dictatorship.
- A gesture to the world with a chaotic firing of government workers to terminate programmes domestically and globally that saved lives.
A Federal Appeals Court in 2-1 ruling has upheld Trump’s dramatic cuts to foreign-aid programmes upon which millions of people depended around the globe. Aid groups had gained a temporary injunction, but the Appeals Court ruled that only the Government Accountability Office, which serves as Congress’ independent watchdog, could challenge the president’s impoundment of the money. Republicans control Congress and that committee.
Could it be any clearer that President Trump wants America first! The rest of the globe can appeal to China or the European Union. Empathy has never been his strong suit, and “we don’t care,” has been his consistent message to non-believers wherever they live.
The US Department of Justice, created during the civil war as the government’s law firm, has been transformed into a partisan weapon that Trump wields against enemies real and imagined. Its lawyers have deceived federal court judges and ignored laws. Control of the Supreme Court and all federal courts and the Congress was easier than muscling law firms, universities, and businesses into accepting the core traits of fascism: opposition to liberalism, nationalism, and intolerance. One reader of a political blog wrote: “This is not Germany 1936. There are more of us than there are of them and we know a lot more now than was known then on how to resist and not fold.”
Many Americans know exactly what is going on because for much of the 20th century we read headlines similar to this: “Authoritarian Government Uses Pretext to Take Control of Police Force in Nation’s Capital”. We understood in an abstract way the fragility of democracy in the Third World. In the 20th century, we thought, “it can’t happen here,” but that fairy tale is dead in the 21st century. Trump’s takeover of the policing function in Washington, nation’s capitol district is legal, yet animated by what can only be called racism, as crime statistics have been plummeting there for several years. His praise singer for this mindset is Stephen Miller, a man who bends truth as Superman bends steel.
This deputy chief of staff, was tweeting without evidence: “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher. Everyone who lives in these areas knows this. They program their entire lives around it. Democrats are trying to unravel civilization. Pres Trump will save it.”
All five cities named by Trump are run by Black mayors. Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, said: “Sending in the national guard would only serve to destabilize our city and undermine our public safety efforts.” Brandon Scott, in Baltimore, said: “When it comes to public safety in Baltimore, he should turn off the right-wing propaganda and look at the facts. Baltimore is the safest it’s been in over 50 years.”
Barbara Lee, the mayor of Oakland, wrote on X: “President Trump’s characterization of Oakland is wrong and based in fear-mongering in an attempt to score cheap political points.”
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, where troops were sent earlier this month in a crackdown on protests, posted: “Another experiment by the Administration, another power grab from local government. This is performative. This is a stunt. It always has been and always will be.”
Over the next several months as tariffs impact the cost of everything, and global stability, while labour statistics are either withheld or mis-stated, it will be clear that the nation has changed. Is this irreversible? Unclear. For the moment it is feels as the United States of Disbelief.
The world is getting shock treatment with the cutting of international aid programmes and a range in how international support is managed, while domestic medical and educational benefits have startled many Trump voters. This is not the America of our parents, but an authoritarian effort as described in novels like 1984 and in movies like Casablanca, and Farenheit 451.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels