Shortly after Trump got reelected way back when–all I can remember is that at the time it seemed like a horrific nightmare that upon awakening I thought I would soon forget–I recall going in for a routine checkup with my doctor when I was alerted that for the first time in my life my blood pressure was quite high and should be monitored. She gave me a prescription for meds and a clever blood pressure monitoring device that I am supposed to use every day to send the results directly over the internet to my health care provider. Normal blood pressure is supposed to be in the 110-120 range (systolic). For most of the time since the initial scare, with the meds my blood pressure has been in the 135-145 range, high but not fatal. By the time of the inauguration, however, my blood pressure had inched up again and on that woeful day registered over 200. Five alarm fire! I am now on a heavier dose of blood pressure meds and have given up booze except for special occasions, which thankfully occur frequently enough to cushion the hardship. It dropped back down for a while and then yesterday I checked again, and it was back up to 188. Another alarm! Embry’s orders: “You are not to watch any more MSNBC, read any articles in the newspaper about Trump, or watch any news except for the evening news on PBS, which is ok since you sleep through most of that anyway. Plus no more political blogging! I am going to send Trump a bill to cover your burial expenses if he ends up killing you!”

She is right. The current situation has gotten to me. I have to backoff, calm down, take a break. This will be my last political blog post–at least for a while. My next series will be called: “The Final Chapter: What It’s Like to Live in a ‘Life Plan’ Retirement Community.” In exactly one month we will be moving to Collington, the retirement community in suburban Maryland, which was the community that was the first assignment my fledging consulting firm did feasibility research for. That was 45 years ago–in 1981. Full circle, as they say.

So how worried should we be about Trump, Musk, and their radical agenda? The short answer is “very.” Of course, you know this. Everyone I know knows this. As far as I can tell everyone I know is terrified. My heart goes out to all those people in USAID who have lost their jobs, and in many cases their homes, and had their careers jolted. Those working overseas have been uprooted, having to pull their kids out of school and figure out what to do next. Even more tragic is what will happen to all the people they were helping, who desperately have depended on them for food, shelter and medicine. And this is just the beginning. Medicaid is on the chopping block, budgets of all federal agencies are being slashed, and good people are being laid off or fired in every agency. I was at a board meeting yesterday of one of the nonprofit, affordable housing corporations I belong to where we were warned that if the HUD money is sharply reduced or disappears–as appears likely–the hundreds of low income families we are serving in DC will end up back on the streets. Also many nonprofit organizations dependent on significant HUD funding will likely fail. Trump and Musk today announced that the HUD budget at a minimum would be slashed in half. No wonder my blood pressure has spiked again. Then there is the environment and the attack on all the environmental regulations that have been in place for years. If this is not a death knoll for life as we know it on the planet Earth, I don’t know what is. Add health care for poor people to the list. And income support for them. Instead, Trump and Musk are giving  tax breaks for the billionaires and tax increases for the middle class, the working class and the poor. Schools and educational support will be impacted. So will nutrition support for those living from paycheck to paycheck. And what about the outrageous cabinet appointments Trump has made? And if that is not enough, Trump is cozying up with Putin and showing signs of pulling out of NATO.

Lord have mercy!

And how is the Republican Party responding? With a couple of exceptions, Trump has the full support of every elected Republican official in the House and the Senate. They have become sycophants. Afraid of being “primaried out” by Musk, who has warned that if they do not fall in line, he will spend millions supporting a right wing, extremist opponent in their next election primary, they have caved. When Trump asks them to jump, their response is “how high.”

These are the times we find ourselves in. We knew it was going to be bad, but not this bad.

The existential question is will our democracy survive? The legislative guard rails have disappeared since Republicans control both the House and the Senate. It will come down to the Courts where the Republican appointed judges on the Supreme Court number six, at least two or three of whom fall into the sycophant category. The legal guardrails and the court system are all we have left standing between being a democratic republic or an authoritarian regime headed by an unhinged nutcase. We do not know what Trump will do when faced with a definitive court decision that prevents him from doing what he wants. The minute he tells the courts to stuff it and disobeys a binding decision, game over. Democracy has lost. Chalk up “the American Experiment” to history.

Some historians and those focusing on the Big Picture may take a more sanguine view and point out that nothing lasts forever. Great nations come and go. It was not all that long ago that the Greek Empire called the shots when the Greeks ruled the roost for about 600 years but eventually fell to the imperial Roman Empire, which lasted about 400 years. There was also the Ottoman Empire which lasted even longer, about 800 years, and the Brits, who were dominant for about 400 years and so it goes. The Mongols, the Spanish, the Russians, the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Chinese all had their time in the sun. Every great Empire has risen and fallen and ultimately come to an end, but life did not come to an end in those empires. Life changed but these countries morphed into something else, often for the better. Maybe it is just our time even though our world dominance did not really begin until after World War II. We have been Top Dog for only about 75 years. But, hey, things happen faster nowadays.

My concern is not so much about the United States. Many of our most vulnerable people will suffer under Trump, and that is a terrible thing, but eventually there will be a reckoning, and life will get better. We will stumble through this dark night of the soul though this does not necessarily translate to continuing to be the world’s dominant country. That honor will probably go to China or maybe eventually to India. Rather my concern is about the Planet Earth. What makes the times we are in now so different from everything which has preceded us are the two major threats that could alter life forever as we humans have known it. The first is the proliferation of nuclear weapons. One misjudgment or mistake or calculated action could end human life on the planet. The second, of course, is climate change and the inability of our small planet to continue to support a human population of the size of where we are now. There is a tipping point somewhere when there is very little that humans can do to alter the decline and demise of this beautiful blue planet, which we humans have trashed. Scientists warn us that we are edging closer to that point–just as our President is unravelling so many climate change initiatives. I suppose it comes down to the line from T.S. Elliot that the Earth does not end with a bang but a with whimper. Either way, the ending is not a happy one. In the few years I have left I am not concerned, but when I think of my grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and great, great….

This is it for woeful political stuff–at least for now. “The Final Chapter” starts next. Stay tuned.

 

 

From the Webster Dictionary: “Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime  that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with an autocratic government headed by dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

You may argue that we aren’t there yet, and that the definition does not apply to the Unites States. The key word here is “yet.”

Friends, we are surely headed in that direction. Trump’s lapdog vice president, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance, is arguing that the administration should ignore any action by a judge or court of law that prevents the Trump Administration from doing what it damn well pleases. The immediate issues are closing USAID, temporarily shutting off federal funding for most federal agencies, and firing career civil servants without cause. I don’t know what they teach at Yale Law School but suggest that Vance might have slept through his constitutional law class. What I learned as a history major at Davidson was that in the United States we have three equal branches of government, not a president with dictatorial powers, and that a system of checks and balances is key to preserving democracy. The next big test is whether Trump follows his vice president’s advice and tells the courts to stick it. Also coming up is birthright citizenship and Trump’s claim that it does not apply to children of undocumented parents despite the language in the Fourteenth Amendment. It will be interesting to see how the “originalists” Alito and Thomas get around that one. Surely most of these cases related to Trump’s presidential powers will end up in the Supreme Court, where the outcome remains unclear. Will the other “conservatives” other than Alito and Thomas fall in line with The Boss? There may be hope that Barrett and Roberts might join the three judges appointed by Democratic presidents, but who knows?

The third big issue will be the power of the purse. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to pass laws and to spend or not to spend money–not the President of the United States. In the bizarre Trump world we live in now, Trump has authorized Elon Musk, a private citizen, to use his cadre of whiz kids to rip through previously secure government computer systems to radically cut costs and realign priorities. Their goal is to reduce domestic federal spending by at least a trillion dollars (down from the original goal of three trillion) while reducing taxes for the billionaire class. Will Trump be able to get away with this?

And what will Congress do? Well, we know that the House and Senate Republicans today almost to a person stand by their man. Is there anything that Trump will do which will cause any of the Republicans to oppose him? And they control both Houses of Congress. 

Some of Trump’s advisors have argued that it really does not make any difference anyway what the Supreme Court or the Congress does because the enforcement of laws is the responsibility of the executive branch. Trump will simply order his minions at the Justice Department and the FBI not to lift a finger. Nothing will happen to anyone who breaks the law on Trump’s behalf.

Is it overreacting to label what we see unfolding as an attempted fascist takeover of the world’s oldest functioning democracy? Is it wishful thinking to ask what we can do to prevent this from happening?

Well, I admit that the movie has not yet ended. Indeed, it is just getting started. But how it ends will depend on the American people and the resilience and courage of those who oppose Trump to rise to the occasion. What that means and how effective that will be will soon become evident as the Resistance builds. Pray that it will prevent the worst from happening.

 

Trump was sworn in just over two weeks ago. During this time Trump’s Shock and Awe Campaign has resulted in these actions: pardoning everyone involved in the January 6 Insurrection, appealing  to  over two million people who are civilian government employees to leave government to  be replaced by Trump loyalists and sycophants, firing top officials in the CIA and FBI, threatening to make Canada the 51^st state, using tariffs to bludgeon Mexico and Canada into falling into line with  his mostly unnamed demands, threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal, closing down USAID, threatening to force Denmark to sell  Greenland to the United States, proposing that the U.S. take over Gaza, replacing the demolished buildings with luxury resorts and hotels while shipping off the residents who remain to undisclosed locations, using Guantanamo as the first site for relocating undocumented immigrants while standing by his pledge to get rid of all 12 million undocumented people, threatening organizations involved in DEI or climate change initiatives, and empowering Elon Musk to use AI to radically reduce government spending across every agency. What have I missed? Oh yes, no trans people on girls’ sports teams anymore, criminal investigations of everyone involved in the numerous legal actions against him and pledging to radically reduce taxes for billionaires. Plus he has nominated the worst people for cabinet positions in the history of the Republic. And all this has happened in just 16 days. By tomorrow the list of horrific threats and actions by Trump will surely be even longer.

In the meantime, while Democrats are shell shocked, Republican senators and congressmen are standing by their man, terrified as to what might happen if they do not fall in line. Any elected official who opposes Trump is fearful of being “primaried out” in the next election with massive financial support provided to their opponents by Musk and his billionaire and techbro friends.  And Republicans control all branches of government including the Supreme Court where at least four judges (Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch) will never let Trump down.

Can all this really be happening?

The fundamental questions are whether there are any guardrails left and will they hold. For the first time in my long life of (almost) 83 years, this is the first time that pundits are pondering whether this may mark the end of our democracy as we have known it.

Fasten your seatbelts. It is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Keep the faith that it will get better and do what you can to make a difference: give money to organizations like the ACLU and CASA who support immigrants, support Democrats who will be running in two years, speak out, write to your elected officials to oppose these outrageous actions, and when the opportunity comes, join peaceful demonstrations. Have faith that we will get through this.