Trump’s second presidency – the warnings
Donald Trump, and the party which provides him with a platform and power, will likely, if he is elected again, create the worst and ugliest government in US history.
He will threaten almost everything that most citizens of the USA and the world value in terms of security, equality, human rights, human dignity, the environment and democratic representation, all to give permanent, unlimited power to himself and his backers. These backers include the Republican Party, the corporate giants who wish to extend their power and wealth, the militant and fundamentalist religionists – largely white Christian nationalists, and those foreign autocracies in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who wish to weaken the USA, demolish its democracy, and replace it with a government congenial to themselves.
There will be no turning back from the very nasty, authoritarian, fascist dictatorship which Trump, the Republicans and their backers will create, short of a very bloody revolution.
Many respected media and individual sources have researched and publicised the potential implications of a second Trump presidential election victory.
A leading autocratic nation
Mary Trump, psychologist, author of Too Much and Never Enough and The Reckoning, and the presidential candidate’s niece, in an interview with CNN, described the scenario as “absolutely disastrous” for American democracy and global liberal democracies.
“America would become a leading autocratic nation, thereby encouraging similar tendencies in countries like North Korea, China, Hungary, and Turkey.”
She emphasises the dangers of her uncle gaining another term in office, not just for the United States but also for the Western alliance and the global order of liberal democracies.
The end of the Republic
Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney was interviewed on CBS recently about her book ‘Oath & Honor’. She said:
“Trump winning a second term would signal the end of the Republic. The once-reliable institutions meant to curb executive overreach would no longer apply if Trump was voted back into the presidency. Trump has told us what he will do. People don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”
Most dangerous politician
James Scaminaci III, sociologist and retired intelligence analyst, briefed the Salon newsletter on the escalating dangers embodied by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement:
“Trump is the most dangerous politician in America, perhaps even more dangerous than the treasonous, seditious original Confederates that seceded from the Union. Trump has pursued a Fourth Generation Warfare strategy to delegitimize the federal government, especially but not limited to those with the real power to detect, investigate, and prosecute him for federal crimes up to treason: the FBI, the DOJ, the NSA, the CIA, and the DOD.
“His objective if he becomes the 47th president is to completely gut these institutions, what the revolutionary MAGA call the ‘deep state’. He will eviscerate the civil service and completely destroy the rule of law, transparency in government, and efficient, non-partisan bureaucratic institutions. For all intents and purposes, democracy will be over, and the peace and security of Europe and the Asia-Pacific region jeopardized for hundreds of millions of people for generations.”
‘Poisoning the blood of our country’
Gordon Brown writes in the Guardian:
“A second Trump administration, in which he has brazenly vowed to be a dictator on day one, would be a disaster. Domestically, Trump’s ‘new independence’ is no longer just an economic agenda. Gone is the 2016 talk of massive deregulation, privatisation of public services and big tax cuts. Instead, his policies are based on his personal prejudices and his desire for vengeance: deporting homeless people from urban areas, imposing death sentences on drug traffickers, legitimising ‘shoot and kill’ even for shoplifters, repatriating the children of illegal immigrants whom he accuses of ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, purging free-thinking academics in educational institutions, and – what he says he will make his first act – clearing out what he calls the ‘vermin’ and ‘traitors’, namely those government officials who would refuse to be yes men for his grotesque policies.
“When Trump engages in the conspiracy-theory politics of destroying ‘the deep state’, what he really means is that he will rule by presidential decree and where possible undermine independent federal institutions, thus destroying the checks and balances that have for two and a half centuries been at the heart of the American constitution. No longer would we be able to say that the rule of law and democracy prevails in America, that voting is free of interference or intimidation, or that power is properly accountable.”
The American republic has not faced a threat as profound as Trump since the Civil War. The threat comes in three parts, says Susan Glasser, co-author of The Divider, a book on Trump’s first term:
- Personnel – Trump felt constrained by conventional conservatives in his first term but he won’t make that mistake again: Project 2025, proposed by The Heritage Foundation think tank, envisages 20,000 political appointments to federal departments in the first year of a new Trump administration.
- Time – in 2016, Trump’s transition was unexpected and a rush. Next time it won’t be (Agenda 47, Project 2025).
- Madness – Trump is in a “spiral of escalation” Glasser says. “He needs to do more and more outrageous things to keep the adoring audience that he lives for.”
An explosive reaction
Violent and often racist immigration rhetoric is central to Trump’s appeal. He used his conspiratorial campaign over ex-President Barack Obama’s birthplace as a springboard for his political career. Slandering Mexicans energised his campaign language right from his first speech in the summer of 2015.
Trump knows that his speeches cause an explosive reaction in the media, which he can then exploit to argue to his supporters that the ‘left’ is caught up in a conspiracy against him, and by extension, them. Trump has spoken admiringly of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and his ‘illiberal democracy’ but in fact his own plans go even further as Nafeez Ahmed has recently pointed out.
Orban is part of the ideological connective tissue that links Trump, Putin and other leaders who espouse white nationalism, authoritarian rule and orthodox Christianity. They erode political and electoral systems to enhance their own power and weaken the press and the courts — institutions that hold their anti-democratic impulses in check. Orban is Putin’s top ally inside the European Union, and is campaigning, like Trump, to shut off Ukraine’s financial and military lifeline to make it helpless against the Russian leader’s unprovoked and brutal invasion – to all intents and purposes a proxy war against the West.
But the most profound question raised by Trump’s zealotry and bigotry is this: What does it say about America, its political culture and mood of its people at this critical moment in history that millions of voters appear ready to embrace his extremism?
An imminent catastrophe
We are witnessing the third biggest event in US history.
If Trump’s Republicans win the election, many more people may die than in the War of Independence and Civil War combined, as a result for example of abolishing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and other welfare programmes, rounding up immigrants, imposing enormous tariffs on imports which will seriously damage the economy and living standards, giving free rein to The Proud Boys, removing gun laws, banning all abortions, shooting shop-lifters, jailing opponents, weakening the FBI, de-regulating everything, approving all gas and oil licences thereby adding immensely to the damage of climate change, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, abolishing State and Federal protective agencies, withholding foreign aid, letting Russia win in Ukraine and Israel in Palestine, emboldening Russia to invade a NATO country and China to invade Taiwan, and worse.
Trump represents a fraternity of authoritarians, oligarchic figures, and organisations, who are completely antithetical to democratic and civilised values and who will stoop to virtually any behaviour to impose their will and plunder America as much as they can to ensure that their own power and wealth increases. Trump and his cohorts have enlisted some very gullible people who enjoy wearing silly hats to assist them – they, too, will soon be cast aside in the event of a Trump victory.
Europe and the UK should strengthen themselves to avoid the same fate.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article written earlier in the year. With the election close, and the imminent possibility of a Trump presidency it has become even more topical.
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