THE TRUMP CULT – MORE OF THE SAME…ONLY WORSE

 Donald Trump’s new term in power is beginning just the way the other one ended, with utter disrespect for the law, for the justice system, for law enforcement, for every single person who isn’t a hundred percent behind the Führer or who doesn’t fall within the narrow characteristics of the MAGA ideal, and with open contempt for compromise and unity, and for the Constitution of the United States.  It has begun, literally, “with a vengeance” and with a burning desire to further divide Americans rather than bringing them together.

He wasn’t in office more than a few hours before he overrode investigators, the federal courts system and juries that had worked tirelessly to bring to justice insurrectionists who had raided the Capitol Building on January Sixth of 2021, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, injuring one hundred forty police officers, some very seriously, and killing another, while threatening with bodily harm or murder, members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. Fifteen hundred rioters in total, some still in the process of trial and conviction, and hundreds of others already serving or having served sentences. He also commuted the sentences of six dangerous urban terrorist leaders who conspired to mount the insurrection—among them were Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the so-called Oath Keepers and Enrique Tario, leader of the self-styled Proud Boys gang, perhaps the most militant of the shock-force groups supporting Trump.

The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist ad hoc organization that Tario describes as “Western chauvinists”.  It is an all-male, white-supremacist, domestic terrorist gang. They emerged on the national stage as an active terrorist counterforce during violent race riots following the public suffocation-torture and  murder of Minnesota African American George Floyd by veteran white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in May of 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term.

When, during the 2020 presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would denounce white-supremacy, the then-president hedged. When his opponent, Joe Biden, mentioned the Proud Boys, Wallace asked what Trump had to say to that group. Chillingly, Trump answered that he would tell them to “Stand back, and stand by.”

After he lost the election later that year and, after failing to legitimize his false claim that the election had been “stolen”, the meaning of that ominous message to the Proud Boys became clear, as they, in the style of Mussolini’s Blackshirts of old, led other extremists in mounting the January Sixth Insurrection, which will go down in history as one of the darkest days in the history of American democracy. Despite the fact that, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election Trump surrogates including Vice President J.D. Vance had assured the public that violent criminals involved in the J-6 riots would not be pardoned, Trump’s sweeping decree has fully pardoned or commuted the sentences of virtually every insurrectionist involved in those tragic events, and has stymied the trials of hundreds of others still under investigation.

Trump continues to tout the insurrectionists and terrorist gangs that took part in the extreme violence at the Capitol as “patriots”, and as “hostages” of the Biden administration. Underlying those patently false descriptions, however, is an effort by Trump to obfuscate his own responsibility for the insurrection. Clearly, there were well-documented federal criminal charges against him for inciting the January Sixth Insurrection, prior to his winning the 2024 election, which rendered his prosecution moot. By casting the insurrectionists as “patriots”, perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and pardoning every single person involved, as if the whole thing had merely been cooked up by the Biden administration, Trump may well be offering up a hail Mary that charges against him will simply go away completely once he is no longer president.

In his first hours in office, President Trump has also come with promises—more like blood oaths, actually—to “go after” all of those who did their jobs and served their country, the rule of law and democracy in seeking to prosecute him, to the full extent of the law, for the provable and proven misdeeds that he perpetrated during his first administration (which, in any country or party that cared one iota about democracy and the rule of law, should have been his last). And he makes no secret of the fact that he will weaponize the Justice Department to do it, while falsely claiming that it was weaponized against him and his cronies.

The newly installed president has been chomping at the bit for four years. Not to put forward a formula to make the US a better, kinder, more inclusive place for all Americans, but rather, to exact revenge for his own personal grievances, and to undo every good and humanitarian measure enacted by all administrations but his own going back a quarter of a century. All the way back, indeed, to the Bush junior era, in which that administration introduced plans for legal status and a path to citizenship for twelve million undocumented immigrants, as well as being at least half-heartedly empathic toward the LGBTQ community. As Tim Marshall of Seattle Pride puts it, “Thanks George W. Bush, for being the least regressive GOP politician of the ‘00s. We’ll remember you like a pair of ultra-low-rise jeans: a pain to live with but impossible to forget.”

Regarding this point, clearly, during his last administration, Trump targeted women’s reproductive rights by packing the Supreme Court with radical far-right justices who overturned Roe v Wade, a half-century-old landmark precedent that protected women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. New restrictions on women’s rights are expected as the far-right’s Project 2025 starts meshing with executive action. But this time, Trump also seems bent of annulling all of the progress the LBGTQ community has made in attaining equal rights over the course of the last quarter-century. Trump pointedly announced during his whining, bullying, divisive and self-congratulatory inaugural address that “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”  Note, that he said “of the US government,” not of his administration, presuming, then, to speak for all three branches, regardless of opinions and/or legislation to the contrary. Spoken, in other words, like the despot he plans to be.

He hours later backed this up by signing a sweeping executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and directing federal agencies to cease promotion of the concept of gender transition. Trump is actively promoting discrimination against the LGBTQ community by vowing to his radically right-wing base that he will rid the US of what he calls “transgender insanity”. This is an only thinly veiled invitation to his radicalized followers to marginalize LGBTQ people across American society.  

Indeed, Trump’s immediate authoritarianism has extended beyond the two-gender rule to also do away with all measures currently promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, measures which, until now, have been a bastion of fairness and humanitarianism hard fought and earned over long years since the Civil Rights Era.  His orders regarding the civil rights of these minority sectors of society include giving departments and agencies of the Executive Branch an ultimatum to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs within sixty days, as of his first day in office.

This action includes firing all chief diversity officers and scrapping all equity action plans. He is also ordering a veritable witch-hunt requiring all departments and agencies to give the  White House Office of Management and Budget a full accounting of any and all previous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, including the listing of names of DEI grant recipients and DEI government contractors. In short, in the mean and vindictive second autocracy of Donald Trump, diversity, equity and inclusion will have no place. Indeed, they will be areas targeted for persecution, with the Trump administration already encouraging government workers to report any attempt to keep some form of DEI alive in their bureaus.

Other rights violations are in the offing.

For instance, Trump plans—and has issued an executive order to prove it—to do away with birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship (fittingly in this immigrant nation, in which most of use descended, not from indigenous peoples, but from boats) is guaranteed  under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In other words, anyone born on US soil is automatically an American.  Trump’s  order arbitrarily asserts that a child born in the US is not a citizen if  the mother doesn’t have legal immigration status or “is in the country legally but only temporarily,” and if the father is not a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order further forbids US agencies from issuing any document recognizing such a child as a citizen or from accepting any state document recognizing such citizenship.

In other words, Trump is rendering children across an entire segment of US society virtually stateless, and robbing native citizens of their birthright. This is already under challenge in the federal court system.

Oh, and, remember George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, which gave us the invasive Patriot Act, with all of its “state of siege”-style tweaking of the Bill of Rights, the introduction of torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation”, and the holding of certain types of prisoners, without charges and at the disposal of the Executive Branch—all things that administration had in common with every dictatorship I’ve ever covered as a journalist? Well, Trump is now going that one better by planning to use the military in domestic policing operations, with the excuse that illegal immigration is “a matter of national security and an invasion,” that entitles him,  as commander-in-chief, to call out “his” troops.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Never mind that this is a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts use of military personnel in domestic law enforcement actions. As I pored over Trump’s barrage of royal decrees, I was recalling the night of the military coup in Argentina in 1976. The Junta issued a series of repressive decrees to let the country know that there was a new sheriff in town and that the constitutional rulebook had just been heaved into the dumpster.

Trump has made it clear that churches and schools will no longer be considered off-limits in plans for government persecution of the undocumented. This brought back memories of my leaving the newspaper where I worked late on that March night in ’76. There were Army trucks everywhere, and soldiers armed with carbines, sidearms, shotguns and light machine guns were checking papers and loading people onto the trucks for transport. Now too, I imagine churches and schools in the US surrounded by military convoys and people being dragged away to concentration camps.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Oh yes, did I forget to mention that Trump has also enunciated plans to use military bases to create concentration camps for undocumented migrants? Yes, he’s calling them “migrant camps”, but make no mistake, the idea is to create concentration camps within military jurisdictions. And don’t kid yourself, once the genie is out of the bottle in terms of authoritarian designs, there’s no putting it back. Nor is there any reason to believe that, in a state of virtual lawlessness, other sectors of American society could not also find themselves in an autocrat’s sights. There is a reason, in a healthy democracy, that the role of the military is external, not domestic, and a reason too that soldiers and officers alike swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, not a king or dictator.

In short, I’ve seen (lived) this movie before, elsewhere in the world, and know how it ends. And it doesn’t end well. This is not the American representative democracy that we grew up with. This is a populist authoritarian regime, headed up by a megalomaniacal demagogue, whose only goal is to be the most powerful man on earth.