Illusion 2025

MAGAMEN

As we enter the Trump well again –we are assured of a news item about or from him every day for the next four years. We watch his wild ride begin as he gleefully and speedily selects key members of his administration gaining the help to right all the wrongs against him. His choices continue to stun people as he selects politicians, current and former office holders, people with absolutely no experience in the field they are to direct, all the while watching his two musketeers – Don Jr. and JD Vance (note the matching beards and initials) attempt to re-design and re-name the Republican Party and the Federal Government with the guidance of the Heritage Foundation.

What is a true revelation is that so many of those who voted for him mistakenly see this activity as “shaking things up” not as weakening the country or turning America into a new division of the Trump Organization.

When you stop educating your population for more than 65 years, you follow the lessons of World History – that all great powers lose their status because they’ve stopped educating their people. Once lost, that status is never regained.

Will we see the Republican Party become the America First Party? Will we see a major shrinking of our government so that wealthy business interests can once again control the government as it did in much of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th?

Will a majority of Americans care about any of this??

Ronald Reagan’s eight years as President essentially ended the liberal government policies of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK and Lyndon Johnston which endured during three-quarters of the 20th Century.
70% of Reagan’s policies followed the guidance of the Heritage Foundation. He used to give friends and acquaintances copies of the Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership as gifts.

Today, JD and Jr. have 900 pages of recommendations and directions composed specifically for the new Trump Administration by a staff composed of former members of Trump’s first administration. They know what the possibilities are and why – and despite Trump’s “make believe” that he hasn’t a clue about the Foundation, he most certainly does even if his thoughts and policies are very different from the Foundation’s.

A very happy Donald Trump is going to get even with those in Justice, Education, the military and the Health Department and by doing so actually work at making the Federal Government smaller and poorer so that he can manage it to reflect his will.

Authoritarian thy name is Donald.

In the meantime, his success – which overwhelmed the Democratic Party’s loss of program and leadership realities – means that he no longer has to hear his hard-edged, abusive Father call him a loser and as an added plus gave him control of the Senate and the House as well as the Presidency and the Court system.

It’s just the beginning. In a very telling closed meeting with members of the House he promised them that he would rotate certain House-member nominees he has selected to serve in his cabinet so they’d all have a chance at it, while suggesting that in the meantime, they should help figure out how he can run for a Third term. The comments got a good laugh.

No one should think he was kidding. During the campaign rallies he loved, he kept promising that after this election there wouldn’t be a need for another if people made him President.

His current nominees make it plain that he wishes to foster the MAGA approach to the Republican Party and involve the new voters from Hispanic and Black working class populations in an effort to keep them within the Republican Party fold…even if it’s called the America First party.

LOSING FOCUS

And what of the Democratic Party? Where did it go?

There has been much analysis of the entire mess: driving away a President already nominated unanimously by his party because of his very obvious personal problems as America’s oldest sitting President, selecting his clearly unprepared Vice President without giving her the time to install a campaign mechanism, making certain she was able to vary her positional stamp on policies from the President – like on food inflation and migrants–on-the-loose, no genuine budget with a billion dollars to spend and then running up a $20 million deficit at campaign’s end and even dealing with the matter of “she” as a candidate for President.

And yet, in New York City and State there is no longer a Republican Party able to elect a Mayor or a Governor.

The national tide that has given the Republican Party control of the Presidency, the legislative administration and the courts, has done nothing to lift the influence of the Republican Party in New York with a Mayoral election due in 2025 and a Governor’s race in 2026.

The Democratic Party completely controls the NY City Council and both houses of the New York State Legislature and with it the Mayor’s Office and the Governorship of the State.

The numbers vary but essentially there are six to eight Democratic votes for every one Republican vote in New York.

On a national level, Democrats seems to have lost their long-time constituency of the middle class which has all but become lost in America’s economy where the power and influence of money continues to rule America as it always has.

The middle class arose from the results of World War II and the working class which made that victory possible. It was a brief but vital era in which everyone worked for the success of those wars and they were successful because of that unified era. Unions, management, women, black men all worked together and at the end of the war, America sent its young men and women to college for free and Moms and Dads could buy a house, own a car and go on annual vacations.

All of that is gone now. Working men and women are concerned about job loss due to a new high-tech world of employment. New jobs with high salaries are now available for those who didn’t go to college.

Far from free, the cost of advanced learning for those who seek it, finds our young people over a trillion and a half dollars in debt.

But here is the most interesting part of this new formula, the very meaning of Democratic policies has not changed as much as it has been affected by money – the money various sources can give to the Democratic Party that used to only be available to the Republican Party.

Somehow this change has formulated itself into Democrats only seeking college-educated “elites” …those able to continue that support and wooed for it.

The leadership in New York is singularly divided between middle of the road Democrats who have essentially led New York for decades and the so-called ‘Progressive’ Democrats, influenced by the Democratic-Socialist organization and its public voice, and most influential national voice, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

It was this non- political party which led the efforts of a Northern Westchester woman – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez- an organizer for Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President in 2016 – to win her way into Congress when her long-term opponent Joseph Crowley never bothered to run a campaign against her because he took her for granted and was interested in ousting Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Washington, DC.

In the years that have followed, these generally younger New York Progressives have had a decidedly successful influence on public policy by running for and winning office in the city and across the State.

Bernie Sanders, in two campaigns for President, repeatedly stressed ending the power of corporate money to influence the development of policy; he still does so today.

His proteges with AOC in the lead, focused instead on the basic idea that New York could put an end to racism by Defunding the NY Police Department and permitting offenders to walk out of jail without having to pay bail to do so.

Winning a majority in the City Council and entire State Legislature, these proposals seem to take hold and helped cause a level of crime in the streets that NYC had not seen in years.

While the Mayor at the time, Bill DeBlasio, never took money away from the NYPD, he cancelled one graduating class and put an end to a policeman’s personal immunity: meaning anyone could bring a legal action against any policeman for whatever the cause.

The next Mayor, Eric Adams, a policeman for 22 years – who never made an arrest – has never reinstated that immunity.

Today New York’s Police do not protect and serve…instead crimes occur every day and the Police use drones to try to catch the criminals.

Progressives would make major streets in New York City and the boroughs into “Italian Piazzas”- turning driving lanes into tree-grown walkways, bike lanes and parking spots while essentially closing commercial traffic on several of the major commercial thoroughfares in the city…including Fifth Avenue, from Central Park to Union Square and McGuiness Boulevard connecting Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.

On the State level, Governor Kathy Hochul, who defeated her first opponent, Republican Lee Zeldin, principally because he was a committed Trumper, has reinstituted Congestion Pricing in NYC to help fund the MTA’s ability to afford maintaining NYC’s transit system, has reduced the daily tax in the business section to $9 from $16 even though the loss of money will mean that congestion itself is not going to be as effective as it was supposed to be.

Legal actions against the move are coming from everywhere. There is no evidence that the “progressives” have taken a stand one way or the other even as they try to expand bike lanes throughout the city.

What is evident is that there will be a number of contestants in the Mayoral race all coming from the Democrat side. With two extremely weak candidates in the last two Mayoral elections from the Republican side, there is nothing to indicate that this will change.

THE MEANING OF IT ALL

Joe Biden put together a strong program that won support even in the closest of margins in the Senate and Congress.

He had always been a man who understood the role of big business in government and had some good ideas of how to make it work for people in this country.

After all, this Knight of the Labor Roundtable was genuinely liked and supported by labor even as the power in his state of Delaware was DuPont. It took a clever man to make that balance work for almost fifty years.

But Joe himself was not a favorite among Democrats and few thought he’d have the stuff to defeat Trump, Their failure to understand how Trump operated and what people thought about it, resulted in their surprise when Biden won a close race – again within the Electoral College – because Americans understood Trump’s disquiet as he struggled with a worldwide pandemic.

Biden couldn’t pull it off again as the Republican tide was carried on by a public with no confidence in the Democratic candidate and what she knew or didn’t know and in the Democratic Party which certainly didn’t steer our American” Love Boat” in the right direction.

Today there are similar victories to be obtained in and by both traditional major political parties.

Will Trump succeed in remaking the Republican Party – new name and all and will the Democratic Party find the leadership strong enough to decide on and then rebuild its base – ‘progressives’ and traditionalists?

We suggest this: unless America decides to rebuild its system of education, so that we grow up to know how to read, write, and understand history our greatest teacher – we will remain unable to build leadership capable of re-entering a World which needs genuine leadership badly and without us, may find it in places we cannot abide.

Those of us who genuinely care, see leadership development as far more formidable and challenging than climate change.