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All I can say is: thank heavens for Bernie Sanders. (If only he had been elected president instead of You Know Who!) Responding to Donald Trump's recent decision to try to freeze trillions -- yes, trillions! -- of dollars in federal grants and loans, he said, "If President Trump wants to change our nation's laws he has the right to ask Congress to change them. He does not have the right to violate the United States Constitution. He is not a king."
No, indeed he's not, but it seems that, until Sanders spoke up, no one had told him that and, the second time around in the White House, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, he feels all too regal and has been acting accordingly. As a climate-change denier of the first order, he's similarly moved to freeze the Department of Energy's $50 billion budget, while preparing to cut out of it any funding that might be heading in a climate-friendly direction, part of an effort to halt any climate-positive policies instituted by the Biden administration.
And keep in mind, of course, that those acts, as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall wrote recently, were just part of "a frenzied week of pardons, executive orders, threatening phone calls, and emergency declarations," all of which also involved concentrating ever more power in -- oh, yes, his hands (or perhaps His hands). And that's just a start, of course. Where we're going nobody really knows, not even Donald Trump. (Or do I mean, especially not Donald Trump?) But I can't help thinking of that classic line attributed to King Louis XV of France: "Apr??s moi, le de'luge" ("After me, the flood").
Whether that deluge proves to be the Trump-aided overheating of the planet or who knows what else, the future is looking anything but cheery right now, as Rebecca Gordon makes so vividly clear today. Tom
King Donald
Or Facing the Rise of Fascism Like Fools for Freedom
This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We've been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That's how it's been with the group we call "Group" (or sometimes "A Closed Group with No Name"). We've seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.
We've been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the "Global War on Terror"), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we're facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group's latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump's new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.
Finally, I thought: If I can't talk about him with these women I've known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, "Do you think we'll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?"
I didn't even need to say the end of what: of American democracy, the rule of law, and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? "The end" alone signified all of that and so much more.
"Absolutely we will," was my partner's instant response. The other women agreed that Trump's second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it's as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.
It's often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important -- say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade -- and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It's so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you're in the middle of one. It's easier when you've been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.
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