Today's Three Facebook Posts

July 3, 2025

Trump has now accomplished what Republicans have been trying to accomplish for decades, yet there is a difference between him and earlier Republicans. Earlier Republicans were socially and economically conservative and were in the pockets of the wealthy and the big corporations, but they weren't fascists. They bought political results with their money, but they never attacked democracy itself, or at least I'm not aware that they ever did to any significant extent. Trump is an American fascist. About that there is not the slightest doubt. He does not believe in democracy. Rather, he wants to be an authoritarian if not totalitarian ruler. He thinks he can issue laws of his own, and they will actually be laws. He says he isn't sure if the president must obey the Constitution, and he disobeys the federal courts that interpret the Constitution and other federal laws all the time. He has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult in much the same way Hitler did with the Nazi Party in Germany and Stalin did with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the USSR. No, we are not dealing with typical red state politics here, as appalling as red state politics often are. We are dealing with a threat to the rule of law, and that threat controls two-thirds of our federal government and has way too much influence in the third. Will decent Americans wake up and stop Trump and his unthinking followers from accomplishing even more of his goals? Only time will tell.

Republicans have been working for decades to destroy America's social safety net. Perhaps it started with Reagan's "welfare queens." Or perhaps it started when Republicans opposed FDR's New Deal. Nixon was no Trump, but he was no friend of the poor and vulnerable. Republicans have been doing in red states what they want to impose on the rest of us nationally for very long time, doing everything they can to make life for those in need worse than it has to be. And the Democrats have let them get away with it. They let them get away with it nominating people like DINO Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama, who turned out to be nowhere near as progressive as some of us convinced ourselves he would be. Joe Biden is a decent man and was a decent president, but he was hardly a truly radical reformer. Can the Democrats develop a spine and a meaningful program to counter MAGA? Will they? I wish I were more confident that the answer to both of those questions was yes.

We're screwed. Trump and his congressional acolytes have finally succeeded in passing a law that deals a body blow to American's already inadequate social safety net. I just read that some cities are canceling Fourth of July celebrations at least in part out of concerns that ICE would use the gatherings to arrest people. We've reached the stage what people are actively trying not to give the Gestapo a chance to do its dirty work. Sure, we can vote the fascists out of Congress late next year, and we can elect someone who's not a fascist president in 2028. But there is at least as good a chance that we won't as that we will. But who'd ever have thought this country would sink so low that saying things like that is a perfectly reasonable and even necessary evaluation of America slipping into American fascism. Like I said, for now at least, we're screwed.