The time has come to face the fact that Donald J. Trump can no longer be called a dictator wannabe, as I have been calling him for years. He’s a full-fledged dictator now. We Americans are living in a dictatorship.
As Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience a few nights ago, “We’re beyond waiting and seeing now. … We are there. It is here.”
She’s right. Look at him.
He is having his masked, anonymous, uncredentialed and unprincipled ICE agents (his Secret Police, his Stormtroopers, his Gestapo) arrive in unmarked cars and arrest people without warrants, and for no other reason than their skin isn’t white enough. Then they send their prey off to prisons where they are locked away in squalid conditions and given poor access to decent food and medical care. They are often tortured, and they are denied access to lawyers. Only a dictator could do that and get away with it, and Trump does both.
Trump also is turning the military inward on the American people, as when he put 800 Marines on the streets of Los Angeles “to protect federal property.” Marines are not trained for defense, only offense, and they would have had no idea what to do if problems broke out. (I know; I was in the Marines.) Again, only a dictator could do that and get away with it, and Trump does both.
(Aside: I hope our servicepersons will remember they took an oath to honor the Constitution, not their commander-in-chief, and refuse to take up arms against their fellow Americans. They could be dishonorably discharged for doing that, but if that happens they should frame their certificates of discharge and hang them on their walls with pride. Maybe someone will start a project to put up billboards near military bases to remind our servicepersons of their oath.)
Anyway, there is plenty more evidence – no, plenty more proof — that Trump is a dictator now, no longer a wannabe. A few more examples follow:
The Supreme Court has granted Trump the right to commit any crime he wants to and not be punished, the only restriction being that his crime must be an official act. No one in America has ever had that power.
He has granted himself the right to establish, alter and cancel tariffs on goods from countries around the world, although the Constitution specifically reserves that power for Congress. Our spineless, GOP-controlled Congress sheepishly lets him.
He intimidates the news media into doing his will, such as the recent sale of CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, to Skydance. The sale was approved only after the two parties agreed to several of Trump’s demands. That is right out of the dictators’ playbook
He fires top officials who speak the truth rather than repeat his lies, as he did Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics. She released a jobs report that showed numbers he did not like so he fired her, and a few days later he came up with phantom numbers – no evidence at all that they are accurate – that showed everything is all rosy. (Incidentally, McEntarfer had nothing to do with the numbers. She was just the messenger reporting unbiased data.)
Trump decries elite colleges and universities – Columbia, Brown, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, others – as places of extreme liberal ideology and antisemitism, and he forces them to do his will by withholding billions of dollars in research funds until they bow to him.
He terminates government contracts with large law firms he doesn’t like and bars their lawyers from entering public buildings. Sometimes he even prevents federal employees from communicating with members of those firms, as he did to the Arnold & Porter firm because its attorney, former Atty. Gen. Merrick B. Garland, defended Jack Smith, the Justice Department lawyer who oversaw two criminal investigations into Trump during the Biden administration, one into Trump’s handling of classified documents, the other as to whether his actions on Jan. 6th, 2021, were an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Both cases were dismissed.
He commands that the Smithsonian Institution display his version of history, and his version only, and has announced that his administration will review current and planned exhibitions in the Smithsonian Institution’s 20 museums for “divisive or ideologically driven language.” The museums would have 120 days to replace any content that Trump doesn’t like.
He approves spending a billion dollars of our money so that he can have a gold-laced “palace in the sky” airplane, after illegally receiving it as a gift from Quatar.
He willfully causes the deaths of millions of people – call it what it is: mass murder — because they do not live in America and are not white.
He approves spending $35 million or so to give himself a military parade as a birthday present, just like all the other dictators get.
Et Cetera!
And he gets away with all of it.
In short, Trump said during his campaign that he had never heard of Project 2025, which is an instruction book on how to become a dictator, but as soon as he was elected he hired the project’s top authors to guide him as he put it into effect. They did, he obeyed, and it worked. It made him the dictator he has become.
But the good news is that he need not remain a dictator. He is weak, and he can be overthrown.
He let Vladimir Putin make a fool of him at their summit meeting in Alaska. He is an ignoramus who shuns reading his daily news briefings and instead gets what he knows of the world from – God help us — Fox News. He has deserted the people who elected him in favor of his billionaire friends, and even many of his most ardent fans are turning against him. There is a good chance that he soon will be shown to be a pedophile – a child rapist, in plainer words. And more. So he’s there for the plucking.
And we can do it. We’ve done it before and we can do it again. King George III was a much stronger king than Trump is a dictator. But even though then – as now – we had no congress, court system or press to help us, We the People nevertheless got rid of him.
There are other times in history when plain people banded together to accomplish an impossible-seeming goal, and succeeded. Think of Black Americans in the 1960s as they rightfully declared themselves free of any law that discriminated against them, and with very little help from anybody, succeeded. Or Black people in South Africa who tossed off apartheid in the 1980s. They did it by sticking together, knowing they were right, and refusing to give up.
And so can we. We’ve done it before and we can do it again. We can, we must, and we will get rid of Trump. We just need to stay together, keep doing what we’re doing, involve more people, and never give up. And if we o that, we will win.
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- Maddow Blog | Expanding his radical ambitions, Trump intervenes in private American businesses
- Senate Democrat: Trump ‘playing dictator,’ pushing democracy to ‘brink’
- Trump’s 7 most authoritarian moves so far
- Accused of acting like a ‘dictator,’ Trump offers an unsettling response
- DEMAND ACTION: UnMask ICE!
