MANIFESTO
Donald T**** is an aspiring autocrat. His stated goal is to take one-man, strong-arm control of the reins of government. The ultra-Conservative Foundation published a detailed description of this plan in its 900-page “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise”, the hard-right’s program for a government takeover. If he achieves even half of what he covets, the face of the America will be radically altered.
Let’s be clear. T****’s form of populism is a cancer on the American body politic and a stain on the American society. He is a huckster and grifter who has failed at virtually every endeavor he has undertaken, including a previous term as president. Lacking every quality and criterion that defines an honest, intelligent, ethical, genteel man, he is a misogynist, a racist, a bigot, a cheat and a liar with delusions of autocratic grandeur.
His victory in a nutshell: his personal grievances, fantasy political message and dark character matched those of the greater MAGA movement, the Republican Party, and ultimately nearly half the electorate. Almost inconceivably, a convicted felon has been elected President. And incredibly, almost half the women in the country voted for a convicted rapist. By the millions, Hispanics voted to support his extreme immigration-deportation solution which almost exclusively targets them. Pundits will be processing this one for months, but the truths of this election defy rational explanation.
Make no mistake. Should T**** and the MAGAs succeed in their Project 2025 agenda, the fate of America will be written in black. For starters, what’s left of the middle and lower classes will be crushed under a tax structure that supports corporations and the rich. To secure the hundreds of billions dollars needed for T****’s economic debacle, domestic programs including Social Security, and Medical will be gutted and millions of Americans will lose their medical coverage as the Affordable Care Act is repealed. The inflationary spiral caused, among other things, by his misguided tariff program that will be paid for by American consumers.
Millions of women in “red” states will lose their right to contraception and abortions. Hundreds of thousands of females will tragically be forced to bear the children of rape and incest. Unknown numbers will perish for lack of vital pre-natal care. Millions of people will be rounded up, housed in hastily-constructed concentration camps and, with barely the appearance of due process, summarily deported.
Racial and sexual discrimination will be tolerated in society if not law. T****’s brand of hatred and bigotry will become the norm, and we will witness the continued emergence into the mainstream of racism, anti-semitism, white-supremacy, fascism, and worse. Same-sex marriages will come under attack; LBGTQ+ citizens will become marginalized, their lifestyles outlawed. The rights of non-white citizens, including the right to vote, will be further suppressed, as will First Amendment rights across the board. Avenues of dissent will be pinched off and those who engage in public criticism of the T**** regime will be prosecuted. Public demonstrations will be crushed by military force as the country is bent to the will of a heavy-handed autocrat unencumbered by the restraint of the rule of law. I’m not making this up; this is what he has promised.
For the past decade, Donald T**** has told us who and what he is and how he intends not to govern, but to rule. Yet millions of Americans willfully chose either not to believe or worse, to do so. True, prices for food, gas and some other important commodities which, as he has promised, a president can’t simply “fix,” are squeezing people’s budgets. The American economy is stronger than any other country in the world. It didn’t matter. His simplistic political message was composed of evoking a false nostalgia of a low inflation and high-living economy he did not create, and fighting an immigration crisis that does not exist. Coupled with a dark vision of America’s future, and virtually all of it based on lies, this was T****’s essential message. He repeated this false reality ad nauseam, and it was enough.
But his attraction runs much deeper than his fanciful political posturing. The well of support from his MAGA base of older, mostly under-educated Americans (53% of white women and 59% of white men voted for T****) is internal, gut level, and answers to no logical reasoning. Demographic and inevitable, these people know that by 2050, white people will be in a minority in this country. They believe the ultra-Right’s conspiratorial Replacement Theory which T**** promotes and which alleges that Democrats are allowing millions of Brown people into the country (his “Poisoning America blood” claim) and asserting that they will all vote for Democrats against them. Knowing that they are coming to the end the era of white privilege, T****’s conservative, right-wing followers respond viscerally and are preparing to respond violently to his racist messaging. They are afraid that, when the tipping point comes, people of color will do to them what they have been doing to people of color for over 400 years. T**** and the MAGA-Right channel that fear into votes.
For in truth, Donald T**** is not a lighthouse shining on a brighter future. To the overwhelming majority of his followers he is, rather, a mirror. He is the emperor with no clothes: misogynist, racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, Islamophobic, under-educated, crude and vulgar, unsophisticated and unschooled in history, science or the arts. His followers recognize these dark, uncomfortable and unholy places in themselves. His arrogant, unapologetic persona is what they would wish to be if they, too, were fabulously wealthy and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame. To them he has become an icon to which they can genuflect, and they follow him almost as a matter of faith.
Here is the tragedy I see unfolding. Historically, autocratic power only expands its grip. Thankfully, I will not be around to see the worst of this, but my children will. And my grandchildren. And my great-grandchildren. And so will yours. Traditional liberal platitudes like “safeguarding our institutions,” or “keeping democracy alive,” or “we are all in this together” will be of little avail against a rising tide of autocratic rule.
And do not believe for a moment that once T**** and the MAGAs are established in the White House that they will leave of their own volition. He has already said that he should never have left office after his defeat in 2020, and there is no reason to believe they will voluntarily do so in 2028. What will come is already being scripted by the ultra Right, a suspension of the constitution followed by one-party, dictatorial rule. Derailing and defeating this openly-espoused plot can easily tear the country apart. There will be violence. This is what I fear is in store for America.
The dilemma is, how should people who love and wish to preserve our democracy respond? As with any dictator, submission to T**** and the MAGAs is unacceptable. That is what tyrants require. But the answer to the existential threat T**** poses cannot be to tell ourselves that he’s not really like that, or that he’s lying as usual and doesn’t really mean it, or that if we simply endeavor to go along to get along, all will eventually be OK. No, that will only lead to ruin.
Because if History teaches us nothing else, it teaches us this: There is only one response to what is in store for ourselves, for our families, for our country. There is only one response to the rise of autocratic, dictatorial rule. Only one way to preserve freedom and a way of life. Only one path forward.
From the Maccabees in the Holy Land in the 2nd century BCE to the Maquis in France in the Second World War, that path is written large in the annals of human civilization.
RESIST