We Need To Say It Out Loud...

One of the things hindering us, in a way that is counter intuitive, is that leadership which should be oppositional to an authoritarian remaking of US government and society, in terms of institutional politics (Democrats) and the news media (who should always be holding any power to account), haven't been capable of imaging the worst. There's a social taboo against imagining the worst. We call it catastrophizing. From the time we're young, we're warned against it, and for good reason. It's rare for worst or the best of what human beings can imagine to happen. There's certainly a taboo against political leaders and/or "responsible/respectable" news media publicly acknowledging the worst possible outcomes, as if they are indeed possible. There's also a degree to which American Exceptionalism plays a role here. We love to believe we're exceptional, which means the worst couldn't happen here, we're just too darned good, too darned smart and too darned freedom loving to let that happen, by golly gee whiz. 

The worst that I'm referring to, in this case, is a homegrown authoritarian movement lead, created and manipulated by some portion of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful. It's pretty clearly what we are experiencing. Right now, especially where Trump's tariffs are concerned, there's a whole lot of people in power and in our media, trying to remain as calm as possible, so as not to freak the public out too badly while saying, "What the fuck are they doing? Why the fuck are they doing this? This makes no sense." It seems to me, they're incapable of allowing themselves to consider one of the worst possible options is indeed what is happening, and why it's happening. 

There's a kind of practical analysis of what is motivating power of any kind, whether it's the US government or employees trying to divine what their employers motivation for a decision is, that says, "Look at what they're doing. Don't pay attention to what they're promising. Look at what they're doing." One of the problems we've been banging out heads against, is that US media has steadfastly refused to just face up to the fact that Trump, and what was traditionally US conservatism, are serially lying to the public through the media. Lying has always been a part of US politics. It's a part of politics everywhere, so US media has been treating Trump and this authoritarian movement as if they're engaging in the usual version of politics within a democracy. Spin is putting an issue or idea in terms of a perspective that allowed for a different way to see it. It's always been a part of how politicians and their parties sell themselves to the public, and is so embedded, that combined with this movement coming from within one of the longest traditions and most powerful institutions in US politics (the Republican Party) news organizations have lost the ability to just outright call a lie a lie and a liar a liar. They are caught in that strange wasteland that is having to try to report what these people are saying, needing access to them so they can report on what they're saying, giving some relative amount of analysis, and the fact that they're just flat out lying, whenever and however it suits them. 

Like Tressie McMillan Cottom, I think it's a failure of imagination and an inability to look directly at the truth when people assume Trump as just an idiot, too stupid to do anything but wreck things as he bumbles around trying to look competent and tough. The degree to which he has sufficiently outmaneuvered and outflanked his opposition proves the great Dr. McMillan Cottom correct in saying, "If you want to keep losing, keep believing your enemy is stupid." This doesn't mean Donald Trump is a man of grand plans. He's a creature of short to medium term plans, instinct and appetite. Those instincts are for adulation, adoration, and the accrual of wealth and power. His plans, tend to be short to medium term cons. There are a list of things often brought up about his business record in order to portray him as an idiot. Bankrupting casinos, Trump University, personal bankruptcies etc. All of these can also be seen as manipulations of the existing systems, which if we're really honest, have been shaped to allow rich, amoral, willful men to manipulate them for their benefit. Human history demonstrates that wealth and power are amoral. Amorality was a hallmark of Trump's life long before he came to political prominence. The man will do everything to skip on bills from vendor, event spaces and services and it's always been that way. Throughout the eighties and nineties, New York papers were running stories about lawsuits he had incurred, constantly. He was a slumlord for a good while too. Trump's perspective is not so different from that of private equity, which is able to engage in the complete destruction of whatever it sets its sights on, whether it's a single company or an entire industry, no matter the cost, as long as it produces a profit for its executives and investors. A number of agencies the Trump administration is dismantling were all established to provide some protection to the public from the malfeasance of con artists and amoral profiteers, which is why he and his billionaire cadre are so gleefully smashing them. 

Not being a man of grand plans, he tends to turn to other people for those. One of the reasons chaos in has been such a consistent part of his businesses and of his political career, is that he will give someone a chance to show him some results, if they promise him their plan will deliver him adoration, adulation or more power and/or wealth. If those results aren't forthcoming in short order, out they go, and in someone else comes to try the next plan he thinks sounds feasible. We can see now though, in how closely the actions of his administration have hued to it, the current plan is Project 2025. For those of us with any familiarity with the dark side of US foreign policy, we've seen it before. It's nearly identical to what the US intelligence community and US business community have partnered to achieve in a number of nations whose proposed or enacted policies didn't align with "US interests." Toppling democracies has never been an option we were unwilling to consider, and fortunes have been made or added to every time. If you could slide a rabbit's hair between the interests of the US as a nation and the interests of the wealthiest US corporate conglomerates, I'd think you were going to turn water into wine next. 

In toppling those democracies, the United States propped up dictators for the further enrichment of corporations and head of industry. Now, this is just happening here, and they don't need the intelligence community, because the actions they've taken to achieve this are largely legal for domestic actors. Musk can buy Twitter. He bought himself access to the White House, and a place at the head of DOGE. Is what he's doing legal? Who's going to stop him when the Department of Justice is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oval Office and everyone who isn't or might not be loyal to Trump took a boot in the ass? Bezos can buy the Washington Post, on top of having an amount of control over commercial, through Amazon, that is genuinely insane. Thiel can bankrupt Gawker, and finance all manner of weird extremist think tanks, podcasts and so on. Zuckerberg can make some yattering, meaningless noises with his mouth about Meta attempting to prevent extremists from using its services to recruit and organize and skip happily down the road to whatever his next cloyingly pathetic attempt at an identity the public might embrace is. Harlan Crow can buy a Supreme Court judge or two, and anyone with a big enough pile of cash can buy a member of Congress. 

What does this have to do with tariffs? The thing about Project 2025 that Democratic Party leadership and the media haven't been able to look at or have been afraid to publicly declare is that it's a plan for a fascist theocracy. How do these tariffs fit into that? 

One of the measures used in those efforts was destabilizing the economies of those countries. Destabilizing the economy would produce further hardship for its citizens, and the combination of very wealthy interests inside those nations who agreed to collude with US corporations and US backed or aided media campaigns worked to radicalize as much of the population as possible. They would target populations they recognized as vulnerable to radicalization, from the poor to the bourgeoisie, in order to gain support for the dictator they were backing. They would inflame whatever divisions which would aid, whether they were ethnic, racial, cultural or otherwise. 

Inevitably, once a dictator or authoritarian was in power, a small number of that nations already wealthy, who'd helped topple their democracy and install that dictator, saw their fortunes sore as they were given preferential treatment by the dictator, the US government and US companies as they all raked in the profits. This history is the primary reason so many other nations distrust US interference. 

We're seeing a rare moment of near unanimity among media, political leadership, economists and really, everyone who lips aren't stuck to Donald Trump's stinking ass. Tariffs are going to impose a cascade of economic pain on Americans. Everyone seems very confused, but if you look at the examples which are the foundation for Project 2025, it's pretty clear why Trump and company would be engaging in destruction of the US economy. It will enable the billionaires who are his backers to suck up every asset whose value falls, and consolidate any industries they have a large enough presence in. Additionally, it makes more acute the financial pain many millions of Americans are living with, which furthers the ability of the right wing media to entrench or extend radicalization. 

In combination, all this points to what the version of "better" they're expecting will come, and it's not better for the overwhelming majority of Americans, but it is better for a small cadre of the most wealthy, and of course, Trump himself, if his advanced age doesn't get him first. 

Step back, and think for a second about the fullness of what they've been doing. The Department of Education... gutted. Health and Human Services, the CDC, medical research of every variety... gutted. Veterans Affairs... gutted. They're trying to raid Social Security, which is an actual entitlement. If you've paid income tax, you've paid into Social Security, and are therefore entitled to it. It is our money, and despite the lies they're dealing in, it's an incredibly efficient government program. They're also trying to do away with Medicare, which would cause even more deprivation for many millions of seniors and people with disabilities. We're learning as well, that ICE is about as discriminating in who it picks up, detains and sends to a gulag as a California wildfire is discriminating in what it burns. Oh, that reminds me... We're a few months from hurricane season, and they've gutted the NOAA, and FEMA. Amazing to announce gutting the NOAA as "once in a century storms" which now seem to happen annually, are ravaging the midwest and south. Every federal law enforcement agency? Purged of anyone who hasn't demonstrated sufficient loyalty. They're making a lot of noise about purging the courts too. The military? Also purged of any high ranking members who are perceived as insufficiently loyal. 

We're beyond the point of acting as if this administration and the fascist movement it heads are not interested in inflicting a maximum amount of pain on the American people, and being unaccountable for it, which is what the purge of federal law enforcement achieves. Purging the courts would render null any attempts to hold them accountable via institutional power. As I write this, Chief Justice John Roberts has issued a stay on a court order that required the Trump administration to bring back people illegally sent to El Salvador, so... sending citizens to foreign gulags seems to be on the table now. If we look at the examples of what has happened in other nations where plans like Project 2025 have been carried out, what does that mean is in store? It means, basically, we have a short window of time now before we feel the full brunt of the consolidation of power and the impact of immense economic upheaval. 

Why would they want to do this? They're trying to push the pain point to a great enough level to make the cost of non-cooperation and non-compliance too high for the majority of the population to even consider it. The cumulation of what they've already done is going to mean additional deprivation and suffering for those already experiencing it, and the introduction of it into the lives of millions more. Whether it's pure authoritarian madness, the sadistic need for power in a relative few or it's a portion of the ultra rich who want complete control of the nation, it's people and it's military to consolidate resources as climate change intensifies, doesn't really matter. What matters is that the obvious direction and plan is causing compounding, exponential pain to the people of the nation as the method of gaining control. 

They are intent on putting the American people into a position where we basically have three choices. 1) We can start engaging in civil disobedience and direct action, a disruption to business as usual and the daily lives of people in power or who are collaborating with this fascist regime and movement, ASAP, as a way to start trying to create schisms, and make the cost of operating harder for them. 2) We can do pretty much what we've been doing, and slide into an acceptance of a full on, mask off fascist theocracy. 3) We can wait until the fascists miscalculate, and the pain reaches an inflection point which triggers what would likely be a long, drawn out civil war fought by means of guerilla tactics. 

Option 1 involves incurring a cost, from the level of minor, consistent, nuisance to destruction of their ability to do the work that makes them necessary to the regime or able to collaborate with it. Whether it's local or state governments, federal agencies, companies in league with them or even not taking sufficient action to resist or disrupt the regimes demands, they should be considered viable. Look to the history of US social movements from suffrage to labor to migrant workers to civil rights for examples. There are many, and they are varied. They do not all involve protest marches, rallies or flashy direct actions. The cost of small daily nuisance is cumulative, and compounded by the instances of more direct, more public actions when those are well organized and appropriate. Think creatively. Additionally, the history of Chile, Argentina, Spain... Learn what work to rule means, and how many different examples of it there are. The idea is making life and work as hard as possible for people who are in Trump's circle or who are collaborating with the regime's efforts and demands. This does not necessarily mean you neighbor whose a Trump supporter, if there's nothing they're doing other than being a loudmouth. The best response for this is to let them stew in the inevitable impact of the regimes actions, until they're willing to forego their support of it. If you think giving them aid may help to give them reason to drop that support, that's up to you, and it can only really be decided by people in those individual situations. The goal is to incur such a cost that it creates and inflames schisms between the regime and any of its allies and collaborators, by making the cost of following it too high. It also encourages mistakes by the regime, by putting them under a constant pressure. How long this takes depends more on how many are willing to engage in it than anything else. 

Option 2 doesn't need to be discussed too deeply. It's pretty self explanatory. Wait around for industrialized murder and genocide to get under way, which it will, given the preference for eugenics in so many of the people in the inner circle, and Trump's own sadistic joy in punishing anyone he perceives as either an enemy or weak. At best, it's worth reading up on resistance in Poland, France, and the other nations the Nazis invaded, as well as Chile, Argentina, Egypt under Mubarak and the like. If anything is going to scare you out of considering that a viable option

Option 3? I have no experience with it, no in depth knowledge of it, so I can't speak to it. What I do know is that it tends to involve decades of blood and death, from civilians as well as "official combatants," and it tends to leave the nations and people that experience it in tatters, even once it's over. 

We need to start saying this out loud. Avoiding it, acting like it's not what is happening, only serves to let them further their aims, consolidate power, and be closer to their goals.