The Referee Goes AWOL
One problem with being punch-drunk is that not only do you feel funny, but you begin to think everything else is a little funny, too. Demanding the Panama Canal and Greenland, not to mention Canada, is the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a Saturday Night Live skit. As it turns out, though, it's neither a caricature nor a joke. In fact, Donald Trump has transformed this presidential transition period into a Theater of the Absurd performance. And while some of his most outrageous statements may indeed turn out to be mere political theater, in the post-November 5th world, we won't be waiting for Godot, but for the other shoe to drop.
And that's undoubtedly been part of Trump's point with his recent flurry of absurdities. He's already testing how far he can go without meeting any meaningful resistance. How hard can he hit (and how far below the belt) before the referee blows the whistle and stops the fight? Or is there even a referee anymore?
Our problem (and the rest of the world's, too) is that the fight is rigged and anyone who might have refereed it is either too corrupt, too terrified, or too absent to do the job. Don't count on the courts, not after the Supreme Court granted the soon-to-be sitting president more or less blanket immunity for anything he does on the job. Too many Republican members of Congress, never known for possessing spines of steel, now seem perfectly happy to relinquish their lawmaking powers to unelected First Buddy Elon Musk, ducking and covering when he threatens their reelection prospects with primary fights.
With Congress and the judiciary unwilling or unable to do the job, the executive branch will undoubtedly be largely left to referee itself. Foxes and hen houses, anyone? In fact, at least since Ronald Reagan, no president has sought to reduce the power of the executive, while the once-fringe theory of a "unitary executive" has increasingly come to underpin the moves of successive administrations, locating ever more power in the person of the president. That principle was fundamental to Project 2025, the transition program the Heritage Foundation prepared for the next Trump presidency. The central premise of its key document, Mandate for Leadership, is that all executive government functions belong under direct presidential control. That control would extend even to those offices Congress made independent, such as the Federal Reserve, various special prosecutors and inspectors general, and agencies like the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the reasoning behind Project 2025's plan to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with Trumpist political appointees, who will serve only at the pleasure of the president.
During his recent campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or its architects. But today, the project and the key individuals connected to it are once again openly in his good graces. In fact, he plans to restore one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to his old job directing the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, a low-profile agency with tremendous power. The National Archives describes it this way:
"The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President."
In other words, the head of the most powerful office in the executive branch will, under President Donald Trump, be someone whose understanding of the role of president is frankly monarchical -- that is, the government of a single, all-powerful ruler.
Still Standing -- and Not Standing Still
So, if we can't count on this country's vaunted checks and balances to either check or balance the power of an absurdist president, where else can we look?
Well, there's the media. Its freedom is enshrined in the first article of the Bill of Rights and the rest of us must do what we can to protect journalists (whether from U.S. missiles flying in Gaza, or Trumpian threats at home). Of course, it's also worth remembering journalist A.J. Liebling's classic observation that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Such prescient words first appeared in his 1960 New Yorker article about the disappearance of competing newspapers in various markets. I doubt he would be at all surprised, more than 60 years later, by the spectacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial staffs from publishing pre-election endorsements of Kamala Harris. I wonder what he would have made of ABC's abject $15-million surrender to Donald Trump's patently frivolous defamation lawsuit.
A free media will remain crucial in the coming period, but though it pains my writer's soul to admit it, there are limits to the power of the written (or even the spoken) word. To check a power-mad president and his fascist handlers, those of us who are already punch-drunk but still standing in the ring will have to find new ways to amplify our commitment to freedom and human dignity through collective action.
We can undoubtedly look to existing organizations like the fighting unions of today's reinvigorated labor movement for guidance and inspiration. We can value our own narratives in the fashion of Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who creates the space for women to tell our stories in Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We can work with any number of national progressive electoral organizations like Seed the Vote, Swing Left, or Indivisible. We can support organizations dedicated to defending the groups that even many mainstream Democrats are ready to blame for their loss of the White House -- among them undocumented immigrants and transgender folks.
Seeing Negative Spaces
I really do believe what I just wrote. We must continue learning and practicing the skills, discipline, and joys of collective action. However, I wonder whether there's something else we -- each of us individually -- need to do as well in the new age of Trump.
Over the last year, I've been trying to learn to draw. As I struggle with line and value, and my never-very-impressive hand-eye coordination, I remember how my father, a painter and illustrator, used to say that he could teach anyone the basic skills. He's been gone for more than a decade now and, though I'm glad he didn't live to see Donald Trump in the White House, I'm sad that I never asked him to teach me to draw. So, I've turned elsewhere.
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