A second Trump term could fulfill the right’s darkest fantasies
After Donald Trump won election in 2016, some friends and colleagues in the progressosphere began moving off social media platforms and to more secure communications channels. The fear was that Trump and his lieutenants would crack down on dissenters using state surveillance. In the end, while damaging, the early Trump administration was too bungling and incompetent, too unfamiliar with where the levers of power were and how to work them. That may not be true in a second Trump administration. Project 2025, and all that.
When he’s not seething inside a cold courtroom, Trump is signaling his second term will be more corrupt that his first, and more blatant about it. His promise to supporters, Greg Sargent satirizes, is a simple promise: I have seen elite corruption and self-dealing from the inside, and I will put that know-how to work for you.
Sargent writes:
A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.
More worrisome is how newer, bluer meanies in his employ might direct executive power against political enemies. Trump views power more as a means to wealth and criminal immunity. His allies see power itself as their primary goal and money as a perk. Disarming the left not simply through electoral shenannigans but in every way imaginable could be how they do it. Not unlike how the right has attacked education in red states during the Biden administration, only more so and nationwide.
Michelle Goldberg considers:
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”
Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.
If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”
That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.
Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.
In “Minority Rule,” Ari Berman leads readers through a mind-bending array of tactics Republicans have employed to secure their power in a time when their political base is shrinking steadily. Most are familiar to Hullabaloo readers. But the walk down memory lane is still unnerving. My God, the number and deviousness of them. Inventiveness that might be put to work solving social problems and improving people’s lives is instead dedicated to f#cking with democracy in ways I would never have conceived.
“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” as an old restaurant customer smiled.
What concerns Goldberg is how pro-Palestinian protests are spurring those criminal minds to more inventiveness and, as one nonprofit consultant put it, giving Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.” Legislation is in the works.
Goldberg concludes:
None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.
Ponder that.
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