Uh-huh
Can we stop parroting that we can’t normalize Donald Trump? Or autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, etc.? Look around.
Anyone who says, “Well, that’s never going to happen,” to warnings that some batshit insane event might happen under the coming Trump administration has not been paying attention over the last decade. “Well, that’s never going to happen” keeps happening.
A brief review (in no particular order):
- Americans elected Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no political experience, a man with a reputation in his hometown as a con man, a repeat adulterer and sexual predator, to be president of the United States. Backed by Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.
- After Trump’s dark, “American carnage” inauguration speech, former president George W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird shit.”
- The world watched Trump reject the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and take Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not interfered with the 2016 election. In front of the world’s press. After meeting the former KGB officer in private with no advisers or note-takers.
- An American president ordered immigrations officials to separate migrant parents and children, losing track of the children and/or locking them in cages.
- The same president attempted to withhold appropriated weapons from an American ally fighting off a Russian invasion unless Ukraine launched (or at least announced) an investigation into a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. He was impeached (but not convicted) for it.
- The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
- At a NATO summit, Trump was caught on camera “shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of the photo line.”
- Trump dismissed the COVID-19 plague that had already killed hundreds of Americans as going away on its own by Easter 2020, then promoted quack remedies as tens of thousands more died.
- The America president told so many blatant lies that a major newspaper kept count, discontinuing its tally at somewhere over 30,000.
- Trump wanted to buy Greenland and talked about nuking hurricanes.
- Trump and Republican allies around the country attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
- On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol. The mob battled the police for hours, breached and sacked the building, threatening to lynch lawmakers, as Trump sat for hours watching on TV, doing nothing. Several people died. Trump told rioters he loved them. He was impeached but not convicted a second time.
- Trump left the White House after stealing hundreds of classified documents. It was just one of the many acts for which he’s been federally indicted, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- New York juries convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for business fraud and found him guilty of rape in a civil lawsuit.
- Trump held a xenophobic, misogynistic rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the German American Bund rally held there in 1939.
After all of the above and much, much more — and yet still more — Americans elected Donald John Trump as president for a second time on Nov. 5, 2024.
Let’s contemplate some of what may come next.
- Trump means to staff his administration with anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
- He will direct the Department of Justice to prosecute and jail his political enemies, and demand military tribunals for generals who crossed him.
- He will ethnically cleanse the country of millions of (face it) nonwhite, undocumented residents using perhaps active-duty troops.
- Trump hopes to denaturalize others and strip birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of the undocumented, and the Roberts Supreme Court will let him.
- He plans to abandon Ukraine to Russian annexation and precipitate the collapse of NATO.
- He plans to wholesale fire dedicated, career civil servants, and staff what’s left of the government with inexperienced, fawning sycophants led by anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
- Women’s rights will be under more threat than in the past half-century.
- Trump’s administration will, in effect, declare open season on the LGBTQ+ community and allow Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs on the nation, including on Christians who find their beliefs abhorrent.
Look, fighting back against what’s coming is not just righteous, but patriotic. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. But for all its flaws, the ideal of America that MAGA Republicans want to unmake with extreme prejudice is worth fighting for. I’m sorry I’m not more upbeat about it like James Fallows or Rebecca Solnit. That doesn’t lessen the imperative, especially since there is no guarantee how low the foes of freedom won’t stoop once they get rolling.
Tell me again, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”