By The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board / Dec. 13, 2023
If you have tuned out the many crazy things that Donald Trump has said since he left the White House, it’s time to start paying attention.
The twice-impeached insurrectionist holds more than a 40-point polling lead over his closest rival in the Republican primary, and many Americans remain in denial about how close we are to returning an aggrieved and emboldened authoritarian to power. As former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) warned recently, the U.S. “is sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship.”
How disastrous would a second Trump term be? Exponentially worse than the first, according to the former president himself. For months, Trump has been articulating an unmistakable plan to push the country into authoritarianism through a stream of outrageous comments at campaign events and on right-wing media and his own platform, Truth Social.
Here’s what he says he will do if reelected president in 2024:
Exact revenge on political enemies. Trump and his allies want to investigate, prosecute and punish his rivals and critics and use the justice system to go after the media for reporting on what he says and does. He wants to purge federal officials deemed disloyal and remove civil service protections to get rid of employees that won’t do his bidding.
“For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he told conservatives earlier this year.
Bar, banish and kill people he doesn’t like. Trump wants another Muslim ban. He has vowed to unleash the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, including people who are legally in the country. He would begin “ideological screening” for immigrants and end birthright citizenship.
He would round up people from homeless encampments and move them to tent cities on open parcels of land. He would send the National Guard to cities like Chicago and mount a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., in the name of fighting crime. He wants to execute drug smugglers.
Roll back rights and protections. He would attack transgender people, promote prayer in public schools and help arm teachers with concealed weapons. He has also proposed a national credentialing body to ensure teachers “embrace patriotic values,” in what sounds like a terrifying push for government indoctrination.
He would renege on the Paris climate accord and reverse all manner of environmental protections, even energy efficiency standards. He would almost certainly expand policies hostile to reproductive rights and appoint antiabortion activists to Health and Human Services positions and conservative Supreme Court justices like the ones that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. He wants to establish “freedom cities” on federal land with “baby bonuses” to encourage procreation.
Consolidate executive power. He says he would impound funds appropriated by Congress to paralyze government action, choking off federal money as a way to “obliterate the deep state, drain the swamp, and starve the warmongers … and the globalists out of government.” He plans to turn independent federal agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Reserve, into extensions of the White House that answer directly to the president.
When given the chance earlier this month to reassure the American people that he would not use a second term to abuse power and take retribution, Trump told Sean Hannity “no, no, no — other than day one.” Then a few days later he doubled down, saying “you know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
Trump has a history of saying vile things in a joke-like way that allows him to deny it later. The keep-you-guessing rhetoric is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders who thrive on murkiness and misinformation, and will tell you that you aren’t seeing what is happening before your very eyes.
This kind of anti-democratic language should tell you exactly what to expect from a man who refused to accept his defeat to Joe Biden and spent years peddling lies about the 2020 election to erode trust in U.S. democracy. His ugly and hate-filled “vermin” speech on Veterans Day showed just how willing he is to adopt the dehumanizing, scapegoating language of Nazi Germany and other authoritarian regimes.
But it’s not new. Trump is following, with a remarkable level of devotion, the authoritarian playbook employed by strongmen throughout history, and more recently by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein. And history shows it’s often not the ham-handed, failed first attempt at a coup that pushes societies into authoritarian rule, but the second or third try. It wasn’t the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 that put Adolf Hitler into power in Germany or the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks that put Cuba under Fidel Castro’s rule, but they were precursors.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s comments can’t be dismissed as just talk. He has already shown us with his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, the lengths to which he will go to stay in power. He and his allies are also building up an apparatus with which to make his dictatorial pronouncements and his desired expansion of presidential power a swift reality, including a well-funded presidential transition operation called Project 2025 that is lining up policies and personnel to put in place within the first 180 days of his return to office.
Americans should look past the noise of Trump’s timid rivals for the Republican nomination. There is no politics-as-usual left in the Republican Party. Listen clearly to what Trump is saying and take it both seriously and literally.
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We already have one sitting in the seat of Mayor of SD.
Hit the nail on the head Pat! And Vladimir Gloria’s dictatorship is in full view and a 100% matter of public record:
Exact revenge on political enemies:
Championed Eminent Domain in the State Assembly (AB 2492) to confiscate properties anywhere in the San Diego City jurisdiction
Championed AB 3243 to eliminate all public input in community development planning groups
Employed corporate real estate lobbyists to write what became SB9 and SB10 to hyper-accelerate build-to-rent policies permitting unmitigated development of Soviet block-style apartments while real estate corporations usurped every single family housing units for sale to manipulate the real estate market by creating a tsunami of unaffordability. Thus, eliminating the prosperity of home ownership for Millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z and every subsequent future generation by effectively creating the new segregated slave class,
Utilizes State Run Media to propagate for your Oligarchs. Or in our case corporate monopolist run media in control of our local stations by flushing them full of Corporate Real Estate advertising revenue in order to cash in by controlling false narratives and propagating the mythological “housing shortage”. All the while suppressing stories about One Party Rule State, County and City legislators that were actively conspiring to monopolize California housing on behalf of “the Party”.
Deployed a willful and deliberately slanderous misinformation propaganda campaign through the use of leaflets, or in our case mailers, ironically printed by Stephen Whitburn’s Chief of Staff and paid for with over $500,000 in dark money to use against your political rival. Henceforth, branding the Progressive Democrat candidate Barbara Bry as a Trump Republican Hell bent on somehow unilaterally fast-tracking Off-Shore Drilling in San Diego.
Ordering clear-cut removal the beautiful palm trees that lined the streets of the Ocean Beach hillside for over 75 years, then falsely accuse a federal agency of ordering their removal. Have the audacity to stand by the unsubstantiated propagated myth even when faced with a press statement issued by the FAA notifying the Mayor and the public they had never ordered any removal of any palm trees or otherwise in Ocean Beach, or Point Loma at anytime present nor past. All the while free from any discernible scrutiny by the corporate run media
Bar, banish and kill people:
Exploited the clauses included in the legislation that Gloria wrote in the Assembly (AB 2492) that targeted existing affordable housing and legalized renovation evictions or “reno-victions” that have dumped Californians into the streets by the tens of thousands?
Criminalized the victims of predatory development that are guilty of merely having no place to go?
Takes no action to prevent nor prosecute unlawful evictions?
Advocate for the arbitrary committal of Californians to mental institutions that can never be properly staffed as California cannot even employ 40% of the mental healthcare workers needed to service the current population and never will because they are undesirable and horribly compensated professions
Roll back rights and protections:
Utilize monies from Oligarchs to co-opt legislators on the new Jim Crow Council to:
Misinform voters to remove 30ft height protections in Sports Arena for “homes for working families” (for which all middle class units have now been conveniently eliminated from construction plans)?
Abolish Community all planning groups altogether.?
Impose completely opaque secretive and unconstitutional domestic surveillance systems to control the populous and track their every movement through license plate readers, big brother cameras and espionage grade listening devices ?
Arbitrarily implement paid paid parking on Bayard Street in Pacific Beach to begin privatizing beaches for his Oligarchs?
Co-Opt Sean Evil-Rivera to abuse his campaign funds to pay for mailers dishonestly deceiving the public into voting to paying for trash collection amidst the worst inflation in recent history (See La Preens SD’s “Misleading SD Mailer Supporting Trash Tax Sent by Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera’s Campaign Committee” https://laprensa.org/SDtrashtax
Consolidate executive power.
Seize the office ofSan Diego Strong Mayor through disinformation campaigns listed above
Buy off and Co-opt the Attorney General, or in our case City Attorney Mara Elliott, as your own personal Roy Cohn attorney in order to implement your profiteering agenda.
Implemented segregationist policies to implement soviet block style housing in the Southern most portion of the City along the border with Mexico to exile the impoverished in the new “Housing Projects”
SPORTS!!!
It’s truly frightening. Trumpers won’t get it until it hits them personally…and it will, one way or another. They don’t understand what truly makes America great. Despite what Fox “News” tells them, America is not great because it is white, straight, “Christian”, and armed. They won’t realize what they’ve lost until it’s too late. What happens when the gun-toting far right voters realize they’ve been had?
What will the under-educated primates do when the reality, the FEAR, strikes them and their families?
What primates always do! They’ve been screaming and scampering all over their cage, baring their teeth and growling for eight years and especially the last four, before they started throwing poop on Jan 6th 2021.
You’ve seen monkeys do that at the zoo, correct? Fear turns to Anger, and they become dangerous.
Primates are primates, especially when the Amygdala activates and trips the safety switch in our brains to the off position. That’s the one that overlays all rational and cognitive thinking.
The ancient Greek Stoics called anger a form of insanity. I agree with that concept.
Bluntly, I’ve gotten really, really angry before. Once, at a road rager on the I-15 heading for OB that swerved into my lane and ran me into the median at 65mph. And when I pulled over this really big guy got right behind me and jumped out and I kicked the side of his car in and was yelling at him while pointing at the traffic when he threw a couple fast right hooks at my head. Split my cheek wide open and the next thing I remember was being literally yanked off of him into the air by a black plumber dude who had also pulled over in his work truck that had seen what happened. I literally blanked out, don’t remember any of it except looking at the guy who pulled me off and stopped my hands and feet that were switching to him…and seeing the big dude get off the ground and stumble to his car and drive off. I have no idea how much damage I did to him.
My wife said she watched the entire incident, and said the 200+ pound 6’2″ gym rat hit me full power and it didn’t even rock my head back or make me step back. Fear=Anger and is damned powerful in primates.
I was a Purple Belt working towards a Blue Belt then at United Karate Federation of OB, and we had just moved to the top of Palomar Mt and were doing the daily drive into San Diego to drop off my spouse at her job and then OB to my ding repair shop off Sunset Cliffs…and I still have an absolutely blank in my memory about that. And a 40 yr old scar on my cheekbone under my left eye.
I scared myself that day. Something I’m not proud of in the least.
But these types of primates will start shooting their guns when they get scared/angry enough but it may take them a while to realize who they really need to shoot at.
Maybe it isn’t the people the Fox-informed MAGATS have been aiming at these last few years…you know, their Democrat and Lefty neighbors? But by then…bad freaking news for the rest of us is what I’m thinking.
But Trump’s new pick for AG will likely be confiscating their guns at some point because, in the history of dictators and totalitarian governments, the first thing they do when they gain absolute power is de-arm the citizenry. That’s a given. And that’s really going to piss of his base…but he doesn’t even like them anyway and has said so.
___
A month and six days left, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
Check out the date of this article; Dec 2023. Yet the LA Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, refused to endorse Harris a year later.