For millions of Americans who had hung their hopes on the presidential campaign of Democrat Kamala Harris, Donald Trump’s victory in the race for the White House was an outcome that was sad but not surprising, alarming but not unexpected. Vice President Kamala Harris hoped for a hundred-day miracle when she started her hasty, come-from-behind campaign after her boss, President Joe Biden, dropped out of contention following his disastrous and desultory debate performance against Trump earlier this year.
Trump is the first president since Grover Cleveland to win two non-consecutive terms. Cleveland was first elected to the presidency in 1884, during this nation’s Gilded Age, when the conspicuous wealth of the few contrasted with the poverty and pain of millions of Americans. The Democrat lost the presidency to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election, but mounted a successful comeback bid for the White House in 1892, making Cleveland both the 22nd and 24th president.
Grover Cleveland spoke words in 1895 that are relevant after the election of 2024: “There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice.” While Trump’s voters savor his decisive win, the millions who voted against him are worried about the future of our country and our planet. Still, millions of other Americans seem all too willing to submit to wrong and injustice carried out in the name of a president given immunity from the law by the Supreme Court recently.
The Supreme Court’s decision came down in July, around the time that America celebrated the July 4 holiday marking the time nearly 250 years ago when colonists defied a king and set a fledgling nation on a flight through history. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump and future presidents can enjoy kingly legal immunity, and Trump will probably get to appoint more members to the high court to join the three he has already put on the bench. Dissenting liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a salient point when she wrote, “Ironic, isn’t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them.”
Indeed, the guardrails are down. In his first term Trump had a few grownups in the room, like Chief of Staff John Kelly and Gen. Mark Milley, both of whom have decried what they called Trump’s fascist tendencies. After he is inaugurated on Jan. 20, look for Trump to pack his administration with lickspittle loyalists, yes men and sycophants who will blithely back an authoritarian regime emanating from the White House, Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower.
In 1935 American writer Sinclair Lewis penned It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about America under fascism. In the fictional work, fascism did happen here when a homegrown Hitler held a nation in thrall. In today’s America, it can happen here and it is. Writing in The New York Times on Nov. 6, historian Jon Meacham lamented that Trump is “willing to follow through on the authoritarian threats he so freely makes.” He called the once and future president “a genuine aberration in our history—a man whose contempt for constitutional democracy makes him a unique threat to the nation.”
Republicans have for decades salivated at the thought of gutting or eliminating Social Security. Now they may have their chance. The GOP’s Project 2025 is a blueprint for installing an atavistic agenda that pushes plutocracy at the expense of the people. Trump mentioned a “golden age” after his victory, but instead a new Gilded Age may be in the offing.
In 2010, long before Trump and his MAGA minions came to power in Washington, author and activist Noam Chomsky said, “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio, and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering. The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime.” Chomsky is now 95 years old, and in his long life he has seen the rise of demagogues at home and abroad. His warnings from 2010 hold true in 2024.
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