Very scared.
Four years ago, we thought it was all over. We really believed we could leave behind the national nightmare that was Trump, and look ahead to a more civil and unified future. But perhaps deep down we all knew better. The country was just too divided, the MAGA wing was just too ubiquitous, the republicans were just too well armed, and Biden just wasn’t up to the task of repairing the damage and maintaining the confidence of the American people.
So now we stand on the threshold of what promises to be another terrible four years, four years of more destruction and irreparable damage than we saw the first time around. It is especially terrifying not only because Trump has an even more ruthless agenda than he did eight years ago, but because he also possesses (or will be assembling) the structural and institutional support necessary to carry out that agenda. That’s a very, very bad combination.
The Structural and Institutional Support
The reality is that Trump knows better now how to manipulate the levers of American government, and he is inheriting a system that will already be easier for him to exploit. To some extent, this is the especially troubling part of the story, because it points out how few checks he will have on his madness.
The Trump Administration:
Forget about any polite nods in the directions of expertise or experience. As Trump’s earliest announced cabinet nominations and administrative appointments indicate, we’re going to have federal officials who not only subvert the charges of their respective positions, but also actively pursue programs that run explicitly contrary to those charges. Seventy-five years ago, Orwell imagined a dystopia where a Ministry of Truth falsifies public records, a Ministry of Peace maintains a perpetual state of war, a Ministry of Plenty keeps its citizenry in a state of ignorance and borderline starvation, and a Ministry of Love systematically tortures and breaks the spirits of people who dare reveal any spark of life. Today and in the coming days, we should not be surprised when we see criminals running the Department of Justice, liars running the Federal Communications Commission, polluters running the Environmental Protection Agency, hucksters running the Department of Education, crooks running the Department of Commerce, quack doctors running Medicare and Medicaid, conspiracy theorists running Health and Human Services, xenophobes running Immigration and Customs Enforcement, slumlords running Housing and Urban Development, and so on. In this regard, Trump II will be Trump I on steroids.
The Federal Civil Service:
Forget about competence and skill sets. Trump has plans to reclassify and fire thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of civil servants charged with executing the basic, non-partisan functions of government, and to replace them with loyalists, nepotists, cronies, sycophants, apparatchiks, and hatchet-men. In other words, Trump wants to remake federal government into an arm of a single “inner party,” serving his political needs rather than providing valuable nuts-and-bolts service to the American people. It looks like Orwell was actually right, but he just had the date and location wrong. It’s happening in 2024, not 1984; and the party is AMFASC, not INGSOC.
The Senate:
Forget the senate. For at least a generation or two, anyway. After democratic losses in West Virginia, Ohio, Montana, and (sadly) Pennsylvania, the republicans now hold a working uber-majority of 53-47, a majority that cannot be thwarted by the occasional show of sanity from Susan Collins and/or Lisa Murkowski. This means, of course, a lot of rubber-stamping of Trump’s policies and (especially) court appointments. And now that the era of ticket-splitting is moribund, this isn’t likely to get better anytime soon. In 2026, the democrats are at risk of losing three or four more seats, while they will realistically be able to target no more than one or two republican seats. Then in 2028, the democrats will have up to another half-dozen incumbents with bullseyes on them, while they will again be able to target no more than perhaps two republican seats. And after that, 2030 is 2024 all over again. In short, we may be looking at a more-or-less permanent republican senate for the foreseeable future. And that’s very bad news with any president. It’s catastrophic with Trump.
The Courts:
Forget it. To Biden’s credit, he has been working furiously to put fair-minded judges on the federal bench, but he’s running out of time. Trump, of course, had already loaded the bench with political hacks during his first administration, not to mention turning SCOTUS into a reactionary theocratic conclave. Expect a lot of “like replicating like” over the next four years – i.e., Trump appointing stooges, who get confirmed by his allies, and who then authorize all the questionable shit he tries to get away with. It used to be that if we collectively found abuse in local governance, or discriminatory laws in the legislature, or even presidential abuse of power, we could look to the courts (and especially the Supreme Court) as the last resort to uphold justice and constitutional principles. We are, put simply, running out of resorts.
The Impending Trump Onslaught
It’s hard to know where to begin here. We have nothing less (or more) than a demagogic strongman wannabe, frothing at the mouth in anger and testosterone, bolstered by a political infrastructure that is ready and able to turn his worst instincts into reality. We could try to extrapolate forthcoming policies from his speeches and debates, we could look to interviews with his various advisors and confidantes, or we could go right to Project 2025 and read it all straight from the horse’s asses. But this would produce too much of a tax on our sanity, and staying sane (and mutually connected) is our primary task during the coming onslaught.
So for now, the Toteboard proposes re-visiting, and re-ordering, what it previously identified as The Sorry Legacy of the Trump Era, i.e., a “bottom ten” list of the most depressing, painful, and destructive products of Trump’s days in office, as a serviceable point of reference for anticipating what is yet to come. Yes, using a farcical top-ten list is sort of a grotesque and perverse way of thinking about such grave matters, but these are grotesque and perverse times, so perhaps that justifies this approach. In any event, this will provide a warning in summary form of what we can anticipate.
Note: Two entries from the previous “bottom ten” do not appear in this installment. The former #6 entry, The Bungling of the Covid Crisis, is simply no longer relevant, though the pervasive mistrust of science and expertise certainly is. More significantly, the former #1 entry, The Collapse of (the Myth of) American Exceptionalism, is gone not because of questions of relevancy, but because, well, that gay cruise has already sailed. Any thought that the US is a light unto the nations or a city on the hill pretty much got pissed away when tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump three times, giving him close to popular majorities the first two times and just about 50% two weeks ago. If the 2016 election made America the laughingstock of the world, the 2024 election made it the pity.
10. The Exacerbation of Economic Inequality (Previously #10)
Who knows exactly what’s going to happen here. Will Trump try to eliminate the progressive taxation system? Will he try to replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax? Will he deregulate big business and bust unions? Trump’s preferred economic model of “spend, consume, don’t pay” certainly doesn’t seem like a very good blueprint for creating economic prosperity and/or making it available to anyone except the already obscenely wealthy. That this still appears last on the list is a testimony to how much more there is to worry about.
9. The Abdication of Environmental Stewardship (Previously #5)
As the Toteboard wrote four years ago: “Trump’s guiding life-principle is rapacious consumption and self-gratification, with utter disregard for who gets injured by his predations or who gets stuck cleaning up his mess, and so it’s hardly a surprise that Trump would treat the environment with the same rape-and-pillage attitude he brings to his pitiful human interactions.” The Toteboard sometimes wonders if Trump is actually in favor of global warming – is there a better way to get rid of those annoying Coastal Elites than to drown them in the rising ocean waters?
8. The Normalization of Sexism (Previously #8)
Trump’s campaign slogan may have just as well have been “make misogyny cool again,” as he clearly tailored much of his appeal to a particular sub-population of frustrated, angry males, not all of them white, who live in fear of disempowerment, marginalization, and emasculation. But let’s not forget that the former and next president is – and this is no exaggeration – a serial sexual predator who can single-handedly claim responsibility for the curtailing of women’s reproductive freedom. One wonders what kind of message this sends to young men? And to young women?
7. The Perversion of the Adversary Legal System (Previously #9)
It’s now official – anyone with enough money and political clout can successfully abuse the legal system. On offense, they can mount an interminable cascade of frivolous lawsuits, jabbing and crossing until they ooze into a loophole or exhaust their opponents. On defense, they can invoke endless procedural hurdles, seek every available stay and appeal, and even intimidate witnesses, until they find a sympathetic (or corrupt) judge or simply run out the clock. You think Trump will ever pay the millions he owes for civil fraud? How about the tens of millions he owes for sexual abuse? And we’ll soon find out if a president can pardon himself, a question one would never even imagine in an “exceptional” country. Liberals can take some consolation that Rudy Giuliani is running out of places to hide his wealth and possessions, but he’ll probably get lucky and die of hair-dye poisoning before he ever has a chance to pay up.
6. The Empowering of Christian Theocrats (Previously unrated)
Perhaps we all should have seen this one coming when Evangelical Christians made their Faustian bargain with Trump eight or nine years ago. The Dobbs decision was not the first, but it was certainly the loudest shot fired at the American public in the name of Christian nationalism. With the legislature and the courts now dominated by those who want to foist their interpretations of Christian morality onto American society and inject them into American law and policy, we could quickly find ourselves fretting about far more than the thought police seizing our condoms. Religious self-righteousness and political power is a noxious combination, and we will see exactly how noxious over the next four years.
5. The Devaluation of Truth (Previously #3)
There is no quality that truly defines Trump more than his systematic and pathological compulsion to lie, and to do so habitually and shamelessly. To quote the Toteboard once again, “Trump has so normalized contempt for the truth and the embrace of ‘alternative facts,’ that it seems at times like reality itself is under assault.” Sadly, this pretty much holds up a mirror to the ethos of contemporary America, which merely shrugs at everything from bogus campaign promises to fraudulent advertising, from misleading journalism to academic and literary plagiarism, from inflated resumes to phony dating profiles, as though this is simply “the way things are” and always will be. “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
4. The Inflaming of Racism and Xenophobia (Previously #7)
If Trump’s habit is dishonesty, and his brand is abuse, then his stock-in-trade as a “leader” is turning people against one another. Trump doesn’t really care whether Haitians are eating pets – he cares about whether he can convince the American people to cannibalize those that he and the delusional right-wing construct as enemies. Certainly, Trump has Nixon beat when it comes to identifying his enemies – democrats, journalists, feminists, intellectuals, etc. – and raging against them, but his lowest hanging fruit will continue to be those ethnic/cultural groups he can most easily otherize, like immigrants (legal or otherwise), Muslims, urban Blacks, and so on. Will we really see more brutal crackdowns at the southern border, or immigration officials stopping people randomly on the street or breaking into homes to demand proof-of-residency documents, or the massive deportations that Trump promised during his campaign? What’s more, will we see Trump encouraging white supremacist and neo-fascist militant groups to further instill a climate of fear? Don’t bet against any of this. Speaking of bets, how soon do you think Muslim and Arab Americans who voted for Trump will start to feel buyer’s remorse?
3. The Enabling of Global Fascism (Previously unrated)
It used to seem that Trump was simply an incompetent clown on the world stage, falling for the flattery and exchanging handjobs with brutal, conscienceless dictators like Putin, Orbán, and Kim. But since then, it has become clear that something much more sinister is afoot. Yes, there was something terribly wrong with the United States acting as the world’s policeman, starting more new fires than it successfully put out in far too many parts of the world. But Trump’s isolationist plan to nod and wink at despots intent on invading sovereign nations, committing war crimes, and terrorizing their own people sets the stage for human tragedy of catastrophic proportions. The world will almost certainly be an even less stable, less safe place four years down the road.
2. The Undermining of Government Checks and Balances (Previously #4)
Note: This was formerly titled The Corruption of an Independent Judiciary.
One of the tremendous paradoxes of our open society is that public safety depends on a certain level of collective civility – it would be incredibly easy for some idiot or sociopath to lob a stink bomb into a crowded elevator or subway, or walk through a parking lot keying every car he passes, but for the most part that just doesn’t happen, as people generally observe basic rules of human decency. But far too often, mass murderers do go and attack places like schools, crowded clubs, and outdoor concerts, precisely because they are not well guarded and contain the most vulnerable possible victims. In fact, it is the calling-card of people we correctly call terrorists to attack soft targets, to violate humanitarian rules of warfare, and even to celebrate human collateral damage. Along those lines, it has been clear for quite some time that Trump and his co-conspirators have essentially been the political version of terrorists, as they have worked tirelessly to corrupt and undermine aspects of American government and society that assume a certain level of good-faith participation. It is a basic characteristic of fascists everywhere to view any system of checks and balances not as a healthy mechanism for preventing overly concentrated power, but as an obstacle to their own accumulation of power. What if you need the senate to enact unfair economic policy or authorize unjust warfare? Pack the senate with sycophants and flunkies who refuse to engage in oversight. What if judges can overrule unconstitutional laws or executive overreach? Pack the court with stooges who are happy to authorize your agenda. As the Toteboard noted before, there are a lot of procedures in place to prevent this sort of abuse, but those procedures won’t work if there are bad actors playing at every level. We will now have bad actors at every level.
1. The Abuse of Power (Previously #2)
This is the big one. On election night, New York Times bloggers noted with astonishment the extent of voter “Trump amnesia,” a seemingly willful blindness to recalling how during his term in office, Trump profited personally from government actions, rewarded crooked loyalists, solicited election interference from foreign governments, purged officials who dared speak the truth, issued pardons to cronies and sycophants, incited followers to violence, and attempted to steal a presidential election. Now we will certainly get more of the same, though with higher stakes, like high administrative positions given to dangerous attack dogs (à la Marjorie Taylor Greene), or pardons going to violent criminals who mounted the Capitol insurrection. But the scariest thing to consider this time is that Trump, delusionally thinking his 49%+ popular vote victory amounts to some kind of blank-check mandate, may actually try to deploy the Department of Justice to retaliate against his political opponents, or utilize the military and local governments to harass, arrest, or simply beat the shit out of ordinary citizens who have pissed him off in one way or another. Yes, this is still America, and the Toteboard is relatively confident that armed forces won’t show up in the middle of the night to drag away someone who has the audacity of, say, a left-wing editorial writer, a hostile legal scholar, or even an unfriendly amateur blogger, but frankly, it wishes it were more confident. Trump will have the power to make a lot of people’s lives miserable – is there any reason to think he won’t wield that power? Oh, and by the way, the Toteboard will bet even money against any taker that Trump tries to run for another term in 2028, Constitution be damned.
On a More Positive Note . . .
Yes, this may have been the darkest, most pessimistic post since the Toteboard first starting predicting the results of state primaries. So perhaps it’s worth ending on at least one bit of good news. There are only 1,519 days to go until the end of Trump’s term. Let's take a lot of deep breaths between now and then.
Note: This is the first in series of reflections on the 2024 elections. Stay tuned for future posts.