“Trump is back in power – nastier, more ruthless, and better organized with more dedicated, focused lieutenants, than before,” Eleanor Clift wrote in The Daily Beast. “America has voted for a lunatic, boundary-breaking authoritarian. Decent Americans, and the rest of the world, can only watch on in unnerved horror.”
Warned MSNBC columnist Charlie Sykes: There will be the inevitable and immediate attempts to downplay the well-established threat of a second Donald Trump presidency. But this time we need to take Trump both seriously and literally. This includes preparing for the possibility of him initiating a massive purge of the federal workforce and the process of mass deportations. Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will likely begin trying to implement their variously damaging and possibly unconstitutional ideas.
“We can expect Trump will pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he may instruct the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He will likely abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump can, if he wishes, go about trying to gut or kill Obamacare outright, while also trying to impose massive new tariffs on the economy.”
Charles P. Pierce indicted Trump voters in his Esquire column. “I am absolutely sure that a majority of my fellow citizens will get exactly what they want. They will get pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists and an end to any federal prosecution of the incoming president, now and forever. They will get the attacks of the free press and on political dissent that they have been slavering for. They will get the validation for their rage, and the outlet for their promised vengeance, beyond their wildest fantasies. They will get the chaos for which they voted, and which they apparently fervently desire. And there is absolutely nothing that god, man, or the Constitution can do about it, because we did it to ourselves.”
Trump evidently has won a trifecta: the White House, a GOP Senate, and probably a Republican House.
Pundits right, left and center, will be arguing for days, if not months, about how he did it. Doubtless, historians will, too, long after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil. Last February — Presidents Month — a panel of 154 distinguished historians rated him the worst ever-president.
In June, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists wrote a letter declaring “we believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”
Obviously, a majority of voters didn’t buy what the historians or economists were selling. A robust anti-intellectualism is one of the hallmarks of Trumpism.
Time was, conservative Republican presidential hopefuls going back to Richard Nixon were content to race-bait via dog whistling. Trump blares bigotry through a bullhorn. Like the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, a distant foreshadowing of the Tea Party and MAGA movements, he also broadened his hate vocabulary to include sexism, misogyny, nativism, and xenophobia.
Murray State University historian Brian Clardy expects that Trump, much to the delight of the most fervent folks in the MAGA base, will ramp up the divisive us-versus-them demagoguery, the boorishness, the mindless machismo (from a guy who hid behind questionable medical deferments to keep himself out of the draft and Vietnam) and the venom and vitriol.
“Statements that he and his supporters made would have tanked any other candidacy,” Clardy said. “But his behavior has been normalized. It has become acceptable in politics.”
Clardy said in his first term, Trump was somewhat restrained by guardrails — some close aides and associates who tried to temper his authoritarianism. This time, he’ll surround himself with sycophants.
“The Supreme Court has given him immunity for his actions as president, and there is nothing to restrain him this time in domestic or foreign policy. That is the most frightening thing about his presidency.”
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