Neither Shocked nor Awed*
Just sad, pissed, and reenergized to work to preserve the U.S. as a constitutional democratic republic
“Dictators, autocrats, and strongmen thrive on chaos in the beginning of their rise to power. At first they come to that power legally, within domestic law. Once in power the autocrat takes the law and uses it and bends it, eventually shaping it to his will. This is not an easy process and history shows that this phase of totalitarianism can be marked with strife, chaos, and even bloodshed in the streets. Though the law is a bulwark against tyranny it can also advance it.”
Vigilantes, Brown Shirts, and the Attack on the Rule of Law (David M. Crane, Jurist News, September 7, 2020).
As his loyalists in Congress cheer and dance on the rubble, it is nonetheless disheartening to watch him demolish American exceptionalism as he attempts to create chaos, destroying alliances and dismantling the institutions designed to protect and advance the health, safety, welfare, and security of the United States and all of its citizens and provide them each the opportunity to have a say in government.
Given who he is and his “day-one” rhetoric, I am puzzled there are those who didn’t think he would follow through with his alarming campaign pledges or that implementing Project 25 was among his top priorities. With presidential immunity from prosecution, zero barriers between the White House and Department of Justice, the overarching influence of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, the dangerous incompetence of his compromised cabinet nominees — which appears to be the point — and the power to pardon the growing list of loyalists eager to implement sadistic inhumanity and anti-democracy, very little stands in his way. Certainly not Congress. The courts have no enforcement power or mechanism, even if they intervene, in the likelihood that he defies their lawful orders. He is simply executing the completely foreseeable and unsubtle plan he telegraphed to turn the United States into a fascist state to be led by him and the richest of the rich and to do so, it is becoming more evident, in the tradition advanced by a far-right German political party. See Musk Follows That Salute by Telling Germans: Don’t Feel ‘Guilt’ Over Country’s Past (Liam Archacki, Daily Beast, January 25, 2025).
Coupled with the Supreme Court’s creation of immunity from thin air for most everything he does, it would have come as a surprise had he not set out to eliminate all remaining oversight and checks on executive overreach, abuse of power, and corruption. Everyone paying attention knows he will use the office to line his pockets and the pockets of those who control, manipulate, and censor information in ways favorable to him.
Of course he would pardon or commute the sentences of all Jan. 6 convicts and defendants, especially those who were violent, as part of his scheme to rewrite history and recast them as patriot victims, to exonerate his own egregious criminality and have a group of violent loyalist “brown shirts” standing back and standing by to do his bidding.
Of course the ICE raids have begun. As the former “family separation” president, he scapegoated immigrants throughout his campaign, promising mass detention and deportation of millions of people that will entail mass human and civil rights violations and, again, tear families apart and do serious damage to the economy. That shit helped get him elected.
Of course he would lay the groundwork to weaponize the executive and the agencies under his control to mete out revenge, to retaliate against the people who did their jobs by investigating and exposing his corruption and criminality.
On the subject of merit-based hiring, everyone knew he would nominate people for high government positions whose only “qualification” — or the only credential that mattered — was unwavering loyalty to him. Compliant, irresponsible senators — who care less about the country’s health, safety, and security and their oaths than they do preserving their seats in the Senate — are in the process of eagerly approving his incompetent choices.
By demonizing “others,” flagrant racism in every quarter of government — under the thinly veiled pretext of merit-based hiring as a way to divide and control — is central to his plan to sow chaos and will be a hallmark of his administration. Again, that shit helped get him elected.
For example, this week’s unsurprising events included the Office of Personnel issuing a MEMORANDUM that notified all heads and acting heads of departments and agencies that Trump was eliminating all DEIA offices and related contracts. The memorandum included a template email to all employees, threatening “consequences” for not “informing” on others, and setting up a destructive false equivalency. It included:
“We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.
“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.
“We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances . . . within 10 days.
“There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”
(Emphasis added.) See The attack on the federal workforce is an attack on the Black middle class (Jarvis DeBerry, MSNBC Opinion Editor, January 26, 2025); ‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies (Liz Crampton, Nick Niedzwiadek, Kevin Bogardus, Nahal Toosi and Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico, January 25, 2025).
Indeed, it is no surprise that he pulled a key DEI initiative for cancer studies from the FDA’s center of excellence which the FDA’s Oncology for Excellence implemented to make clinical trials for treatment more accessible to people who were underrepresented in past research. Whether cancer drugs are evaluated for approval “based on data from a diverse group of study participants,” is simply an impediment to his racist agenda. The FDA pulls key DEI initiative for cancer studies from its website (Sydney Lupkin, NPR, January 25, 2025).
Given his remarkable history with Covid, it should be no surprise that just as incidents of bird flu — and the price of eggs — dramatically increase, he has declared war on government science. War On Government Science May Be Underway (Jonathan Cohn, Huffington Post, January 25, 2025).
As a subscriber to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, I look forward to her near-daily posts. Yesterday, she treated her readers with a brief history of the Battle of the Bulge, the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II, which resulted when Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe refused Germany’s demand to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes. She explained that the Allied soldiers fought “against, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy, instead maintaining that some men were better than others.”
She continued:
“German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler had taken that ideology to its logical end, insisting that an elite few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They organized the people as if they were at war, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together to consolidate their power. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, fascists demonized opponents into an ‘other’ that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it.
“In contrast to that system was democracy, based on the idea that all people should be treated equally before the law and should have a say in their government. That philosophy maintained that the government should work for ordinary people, rather than an elite few. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the American people to defend their democracy — however imperfectly they had constructed it in the years before the war — and when World War II was over, Americans and their allies tried to create a world that would forever secure democracy over fascism.” (Emphasis added.)
She then summarized the United States’ post-war efforts to stop the spread of and eradicate diseases here and throughout the world, to invest in infrastructure which connected the country, created jobs for veterans and others, and “fueled the economy,” and to “put the racial segregation that had inspired Hitler behind them, using the federal government to level the playing field between white Americans, Black Americans, and people of color.” Yes, Hitler took inspiration for his racism from America’s ugly example. She explained:
“This democratic government was popular, but as the memory of the dangers of fascism faded, opponents began to insist that such a government was leading the United States to communism. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, along with the deregulation of business and cuts to the social safety net, began to concentrate wealth at the top of society. As wealth moved upward, lawmakers chipped away at the postwar government that defended democracy.
“And now, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday, the dismantling of that system is happening all at once.
On foreign policy, she explained:
“The Guardian reported today that incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a halt to almost all foreign aid, with the exception of military assistance to Israel and Egypt. The Guardian notes that this order is likely unlawful, since Congress sets the budget and in 1974 declared it illegal for the president to impound funds. Still, a source foresaw the end of the global influence the U.S. has had since World War II, telling The Guardian: ‘Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners — likely US competitors and adversaries — to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues.”
“As Peter Baker of the New York Times notes, . . . president Donald Trump is trying to break NATO by demanding that members increase military spending to 5% of their nations’ economies, although the U.S. currently spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. If we were to meet that requirement, Baker points out, the U.S. would have to increase its defense budget by $567 billion a year. Isabel van Brugen of Newsweek reports that an Italian news agency says that Trump intends to pull about 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe and wants Europe to pay to maintain the rest.
“Trump has undertaken to dismantle the postwar democratic government at home, too. He has stopped the funding for repairing roads, bridges, airports, and ports that passed Congress in a bipartisan vote in 2022, as well as taken away funding for new solar manufacturing plants and other new systems to address climate change.
“He has frozen all travel and communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. ‘We’ve never seen anything like this,’ one researcher told Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Mark Johnson of the Washington Post. ‘This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.’
“And, of course, Trump has declared a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In his revoking of LBJ’s Executive Order 11246, itself based on FDR’s Executive Order 8802, he explicitly rejected the principles for which the Americans fought in World War II.”
(Emphasis added.)
By threatening employees to become informers to “expose” DEI hires, positions, or contracts, the administration is following the fascist playbook described by Heather Cox Richardson to “demonize opponents into an ‘other’ that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it.”
As explained in the Wiener Holocaust Library:
“Informers had various motives including antisemitism, racism, a strong belief in Nazi ideology and governance, fear, personal gain, professional gain, and personal disagreements (e.g. informing the Gestapo that someone was a communist in response to a personal dislike or argument with that person). Most informers were aware of the consequences of their actions.
“While the Nazi leadership led the way in creating their racist ideology, the anti-Jewish laws and propaganda were implemented and bound into law by those working for the Civil Service. Those who continued to work in the Civil Service following the Nazi rise to power therefore directly contributed to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.
“For example, teachers in the Third Reich collaborated with the Nazis by teaching antisemitic propaganda, using antisemitic textbooks, participating in excluding Jewish students from normal schools, and helping to eliminate (or not standing up for) Jewish teachers from their jobs. The example of teachers’ collaboration shows how each act of collaboration contributed to the exclusion and persecution of Jews.”
The Holocaust Explained: German collaboration and complicity
Sound familiar?
The debate over Critical Race Theory and the whitewashing American history is but one example. As I have previously written, a fair history of the United States cannot be told without a clear focus on, and thorough exposition of, the centrality of Africans and Black Americans — including their integral role in shaping the country and its course and the courageous examples of innovation, sacrifice, perseverance, and creative problem-solving in the face of insurmountable obstacles — from the country’s earliest days to the present.
Those who claim the history of Africans and Blacks as taught in American schools is its own form of racist ideology do so for crass political purposes, manufacturing a false equivalency. In structuring a whitewashed curriculum, they fully recognize their false equivalency supports a theory they characterize as dangerous, one they must renounce with all conceivable measures. On balance, they control that narrative in that way precisely because it is disadvantageous to underprivileged people and sustains and perpetuates a structurally favored status they deny exists while consciously enjoying its benefits.
As planned and executed, it also continues to engender chaos, hostility, and division, the perfect environment to justify despotic measures.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
**My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.