Trump's Message Is Authoritarian, Ridiculous, and the Winning Formula

Trump spoke one sentence yesterday that will win it all for him in November.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

People can say what they want, but I no longer believe that a Biden victory is a reality. The country I thought I knew is no more. I have lived outside the country for nearly three decades, so I have genuinely lost contact with “many of them.” Even people I recall being in the past smart enough to see through the bullshit and rhetoric are affected.

Living in Russia, I was protected a lot from Russia’s worst behaviors because when there, and primarily through the 1990s to the mid-2000s, when the internet was not what it is today, it was easy not to see the horrors of Chechnya. I didn’t really start to become violently anti-Putin until 2015 when I spent much of my work traveling the world and returning to Russia. I was finally seeing the evils of Putin and the Russian military in Ukraine and Syria from different perspectives. 

America is a lot like Russia in that it is big enough to be safely isolated from world opinion. As clueless as Russians are about how people perceive their war of genocide, so too, Americans are criminally clueless about the power and importance of America. The world needs a “normal” America, and the world can’t tolerate a Trumpian fascist America. This is not some computer game that can be restarted when Trump wins, and he ends our democracy and shreds the Constitution, and yet everyone from the president on down is messing around with the future of this world.

Donald Trump shocked us in 2015 with his lunacy. Daily, he pushed the envelope to the edge of the table and dared us that he would push it off. We didn’t believe him, and each time he pushed, the envelope fell off. We were shocked, but we saw that we could still live with the envelope on the floor each time. We didn’t like it, but we got used to it, and it never seemed to be the “end of the world,” although his policies and ignorance indeed had the power to take us there.

As a communications professional, I spent years figuring out ways to spice up boring truths, so they acquired that special magic to make them stand out. You learn not to say, “sales were good,” but that they were “uniquely good,” and then focus on the “unique” part. People eventually forget the just good part and feel special having heard about the uniqueness.

Someone guiding Trump is having a field day with the lack of messaging coming from the Biden team. Biden’s people are focusing on, honestly, I don’t know what. Because I don’t live in the U.S., I am not seeing commercials. Is there a message being woven? Please let me know if you have seen something interesting. The Trump people yesterday launched something that I fear could become like Reagan’s “supply-side economics” lunacy. 

Trump said yesterday:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit (Trump Plans to Claim Sweeping Powers).”

Trump is telling us openly that he plans from day one to become an authoritarian leader. Many on the right laughed this off as Trump being Trump. Many of the more dim-witted contemplating third-party candidates didn’t even understand what Trump said. His comment was a preface to his Mein Kampf. 

What Trump is promising with the quote above is that he will make the president the absolute sole power in the U.S., and Congress will be able to do nothing to stop him. With a compromised Supreme Court thanks to the two obvious MAGidiots in Thomas and Alito and the questionable loyalties of the other three Trump appointees, when Trump seizes the power of the purse from Congress on January 20th, 2025, the dictatorship will be in full swing. Republicans in Congress demonstrate daily, especially with the way they have all lined up against the guilty verdict in New York, that they will do nothing to stop Trump’s plans for shredding the Constitution and turning the country into a right-wing dictatorship. 

This is how Democrats react to Trump’s vocalizing of chapter one of his Mein Kampf. 

“A blanket unconditional impoundment is clearly unconstitutional, and that would obviously create a crisis between the two branches” of government, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), a top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “It seems like Donald Trump is actually trying to redo his first administration, except on steroids, even worse, shredding the Constitution even further. I think the American people recognize the dangers and hopefully they’ll recognize that for this election (Trump Plans to Claim Sweeping Powers).”

This comment by Senator Chris Van Hollen is fine for me and others who pay attention to politics. His naivete that the “American people (will) recognize the dangers and hopefully they’ll recognize that for this election” scares the hell out of me. Is this the level of alarm other Democrats are feeling here? If it is, then we are doomed. The average American will not get that far in their thought process when considering what Trump said. They will hear how Trump plans to use the presidency to make “massive savings from the bloated budget,” which will “lower taxes” for everyone.

They won’t get into the details of how that will be done. They won’t consider that Trump will cut all green initiatives, resulting in more severe effects of climate change (look at Phoenix trying to prepare for a heat dome this week). People will not even be concerned about how this plan will end the balance of powers between the branches of government. They will think, “If that is how he plans to use his dictatorial powers, then it sounds good to me.”

Trump’s message is for the politically inactive, the intellectually lazy, and for people who just have no time or interest in “figuring shit out.” Biden’s message is still unrecognizable, and the drum beat about his age sounds louder and louder each day. He has a terrifically unpopular vice president who has not demonstrated that she is ready to step in when Biden becomes incapacitated by age or death should he win re-election. Despite what I think has been one of the best presidencies in our history, Biden had two things he had to do to ensure Trump didn’t win in November: step aside or change his vice president with someone Americans could see being president. He did neither, and his campaign seems to be floundering.

Everything good he did will be undone; our democracy will end, and climate change and, together with the tidal wave of fascist right-wing movements around the world, life on Earth will be a lot less pleasant, more violent, and ugly. But some dopes will then be able to say they stood up for principle and didn’t vote for Biden because of Gaza or that they voted for third-party candidates.

I am an American. But I differ from many because I don’t accept that that means I should spend my life being superfluous, selfish, and clueless.