REMAKING AMERICA

IN TRUMP’S HANDS AMERICA HAS ALREADY BECOME A DIFFERENT NATION, WITH A GOVERNMENT THAT LIVES APART FROM THE PEOPLE, IN UNHEALTHY LEAGUE WITH WEALTH, AND OPEN HOSTILITY FOR FRIENDS.

It starts at the top.  It began with a swift mass induction of the Republican congress into Trump’s MAGA movement, using the fear of his popular support among voters  to tease elected officials’ primary fears, and his gross manipulation of social media and gushing cable platforms like Fox to keep individuals in their place.  They signed up willingly. Trump blends an uncanny mix of (at least what was) his personal appeal, pandering to congressmen and women who like the idea of belonging to a club that is looking indestructible, and not insignificantly, a $175 thousand salary and very cushy benefits they’d just as soon keep.  He lied his way into office and is muscling a path to permanency.

But this article is not about how an orange-stained, dishonest, narcissistic, 240 pound Id was twice elected president, the second time after felony and sexual assault convictions, or an attempt to pry apart that ball of election wax.  We know that millions of voters left the Democratic Party; in this country millions of voters don’t vote for Libertarian Jill Stein, they vote for the other party or don’t vote at all.  We’ll leave post mortems on how all that came to pass for later.  Here I am addressing what today passes for reality—a fundamentally altered United States of America.

The techniques Trump used to sway Republicans and 77.3 million voters in 2024 to his demagoguery were, for the most part, all soft techniques.  They consisted of  political manipulation, huge lies about what good things they would do, cloakroom arm-twisting of the sort that has always gone on.  They cleverly concealed the moves that were to come once Trump took office, stuff which he would do with the help of a hand-picked cabinet of collaborators. Or, you might say, quislings, men and a few women who were quite agreeable to function as the opposite of their constitutionally assigned role of separated government, apostates from a formerly bipartisan democratic republic.

Together, Trump and his sidekicks now run the country, practically unopposed:

• The Attorney General rules over what once was a central, independent authority based exclusively on the rule of law and surprisingly free from political influence, into a dictator’s hammer that arrests, charges and indicts Americans at the snap of the impulsive president’s fingers.  Among the many hypocritical claims made by this president is his stated need to punish the previous administration’s “weaponization of law enforcement”; let’s hope the public recalls that it was Trump who invented the weaponization of law enforcement, sustains and grows it, and has christened it as the shiniest shibboleth in his closet of gut punches to the republic.

• Trump has evolved the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE Investigators and police into a pretorian guard that walks the nation’s streets knocking suspected undocumented immigrants to the ground for shouting at them or playing Darth Vader’s Imperial March.  They’re not only dressed for the worst kind of violent  combat, they act it out unprovoked.  ICE is massively funded and soon will employ 31,000 agents nationwide, up from today’s 21,000, offering huge signup bonuses, educational loan forgiveness and salaries up to $90,000.  With the reduced hiring standards that will be needed to gather such numbers within the period of a year, it will gain us some very angry and unqualified agents.  Over time, it will be a very small step from tracking undocumented immigrants to general policing activity breezily explained away as a ‘threat to the national security’.

• Our Defense Department, colloquially called the Department of War, is becoming a board game to satisfy the president’s whimsical compulsion to throw military weight  around.  Unanswerable to anyone but Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth is illegally killing alleged narco-terrorists at will, moving staggering naval power to the Caribbean, threatening outright war, and ignoring the constitutional equities of congress.  You are most likely seeing the precursor steps of a coming clash between the misuse of constitutionally enshrined civilian authority and a senior  officer corps that treasures the way things used to be and seeks to preserve itself from that civilian chieftain who is now a befouled instrument of corruption.  Our Officers will not allow themselves to be abused and their purpose profaned.

• It is impossible to find any sign of good in the Department of Health and Human Services’ leader, RFK Jr., or OMB’s grim Russel Vought.  The former has deliberately weakened American health care, now and for the future, appears batty and insouciant most of the time on camera, incapable of understanding science’s ability and purpose to lead us.  The latter is fully compos mentis, but bent on the malicious destruction of departments, jobs, people and has proclaimed the astonishing goal of intentionally causing federal workers “to suffer” and to “put them in trauma”. These are the emperor’s courtiers who are better qualified for prison correctional officers than authors of what should be beneficial policies for all Americans.

• Lastly, in what perforce is an incomplete list of many governmental transgressions, this administration has with considerable deliberation eliminated precious scientific and medical research, programs to assist in special education, food for the working poor, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a host of other admirable social goals that would be critical to a conscientious and caring government.  These things are not just examples of unalloyed power projections; they bear the earmarks of senseless cruelty, of penalizing the sick and weak among us.  Not only do they lack humanity, they radiate a taste for evil.

These are techniques and measures that are not the soft ones mentioned above.  They are, on the contrary, very hard, frightening, unprecedented steps.  They are proceeding at breakneck speed to throw a rope around sensible, well-intentioned and conventional controls.  They are meant to strangle efforts to slow or stop what has become a bald seizure of the United States. The seizure has already happened and is continuing.  We are on a road the end of which is hard to ascertain now, other than the certainty that it is passing through a discredited democracy of demonstrably reduced privileges.  It openly beckons a mare’s nest of lawlessness and chaos.