In his first inaugural address, at a time when Wall St was in crisis and America on the edge of financial collapse, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
The Depression, banks closed for safety, America out of work – FDR saw it, heard it, felt it…fear of what was happening to America.
We are looking at fear in America today but this time it is fear of a man who seems determined to become our Dictator, rather than “just” our President.
We are looking at fear as the result of a display of an intense, anti-American power-grab that overrides anything we have ever witnessed.
Donald J. Trump, was literally handed his second opportunity to be President by a Democratic Party in shock at the alarming dissolution of its President, Joe Biden and the selection of Vice President Kamala Harris as its candidate – a woman totally unprepared to be a Presidential candidate and further pressured by a ridiculously short time to both learn what she needed to learn and then run with it.
So, the bleached blonde real estate developer and successful reality show host is President again, believing as only he would, that he has received a mandate and suddenly everyone is living in fear of inflation, recession, the loss of capital and the end of constitutional democracy and the basic rule of law. The nation is beginning to look and feel like a third World country under the strong-arm of a tyrant.
Working with a script developed for him by a private foundation working since the 1960’s to shrink government far beyond the usual views of ordinary conservatives, and assisted by the so-called wealthiest man in the World, who simply bought Mr. Trump as he buys whatever else he wants, DJT is on the loose swinging a home run bat like the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and not giving a damn about its impact on the present or the future.
And stunningly too many of those individuals and organizations most able to fight back are slinking away from the battle and collapsing into his arms hugging the man they clearly fear.
Just take a quick look at those in fear – it is a very impressive list:
The Republican Party – now either a MAGA Party or no party at all – completely silent as the MAGA influence erases any sense that the GOP we have known exists. The party is so weakened in New York that it once again runs to a radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa, as its candidate for Mayor, while it enlists recently reelected Congressman Mike Lawlor of upstate New York as its candidate for Governor. Lawlor, once a standard Republican Party representative, leaned toward Trump as he sought reelection and will be so considered by the New York electorate during his campaign against Democratic Governor, Kathy Hochul.
The Democratic Party – stumbling around bereft of leadership but for Chuck Schumer who was smart enough not to let the MAGAites close the government so it could only open those sections it wanted and is now facing negativity about that decision from those who either forgot how to think or never learned in the first place.
Democrats are also split in two – the old guard as best illustrated by Schumer vs. the Progressives, the new millennials – among the worst educated Americans in history. With an impressive list of wants but absolutely no idea of how to achieve them, all we hear is loud talk.
Universities – many in the prestigious Ivy League, fearful of losing billions of government grants because they have been lenient with students acting like anti-Semites and getting away with it. Columbia giving in to Trump demands but Harvard, richer and more powerful, ready to fight back.
Multi-million dollar law firms (Skadden Arps, Paul,Weiss (each partner made $6.6 million in salaries last year) and nine others, fearful that they will lose security clearances and clients as the result of hiring those who have been involved in lawsuits against Trump or who have represented people at odds with him, have gone to him pledging to do a billion dollars of free work.
They have been joined in this activity by Meta, by ABC News and others pledging assistance in order to get off of Trump’s major retribution list.
Both large business and tech companies as well as education institutions have pledged to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion programs as Trump has demanded.
And long time Alaskan Congresswoman Lisa Murkowski, admitting that she is afraid of the retribution inherent in every action against Trump but pledging to do the best she can standing up against his demands for all inclusive power.
All of this and tariff talk is well known. What is not as transparent is what else is being done to end the America the World has known.
Most of it comes from two activities: walking into every Congressionally developed organizations in all areas of American life – USAID, the CDC, the Social Security administration and on and on and simply firing people on the spot. The Executive branch has absolutely nothing to do with any of these but the administration is daring Congress, the Supreme Court and all of the legal protections that exist to take action and seeing none, they continue.
And there is news that these forces are going into the area of historical documentation and destroying everything having to do with slavery, with freedoms won over time, with protections established by our governments and destroying them, removing them from history and historical memory as if they never existed at all.
Thousands of other government web pages have also been taken down or seriously modified including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income employment of children, opioid addiction, and veteran’s affairs before a court order temporarily blocked part of this sweeping erasure.
A Justice Department database listing criminal charges and convictions following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol was removed .Segments of data sets were removed and those who produced them fired and mention of words like “Black” “women” and “discrimination” have been removed.
Archivists and historians are reporting that the Administration is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing Trump’s preferred version of America in the negative space of purged history. As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is at risk… Americans’ ability to access and evaluate our past and with it our already shaky trust in facts…the lack of transparency and slide towards secrecy is considered an erosion of democratic norms.
Trump’s long-held strangled view that high tariffs will push America into manufacturing again sees us with a tariff war against everybody but mostly against China. Those who believe that our economy will suffer badly are frightened…as the stock market suffers significant losses and then gains and then losses depending on what’s on Trump’s mind on a given day.
There are those who believe that China will start to put pressure on the huge number of American businesses there in order to control Trump.
RESPONSIBILITY
It is easy to believe that the person responsible for all of this is Donald J. Trump.
But that is too easy and deeply misleading. Mr. Trump is the result of 50 years of our failure to educate our people. All he is doing is taking advantage of what he knows to be true. We have an entire generation of young people who cannot sign their name to a legal document and cannot do enough arithmetic to make change when they go into a store.
Many of these young people will do quite well in the world of technology and that is the world America has chosen to pursue.
Manufacturing? What manufacturing when our business leaders taught us it was cheaper and more profitable to manufacturer somewhere else …any place else but America.
That manufacturing will come back because high tariffs will lead us/force us to manufacture again?
A 40 year old fractured dream of Mr. Trump’s that every mature, knowledgeable American knows is well past its time…never to return.
Here is what is not happening that must happen if this Trump tyranny of fear is to come to a rapid end: forces in the community – political, corporate, educational,, technological must rise up and slam Trump’s power grab into the ground once and for all.
Chuck Schumer has said over and over again that Mr. Trump is just raising money for the corporate tax cut he will announce when he is ready. He will need a budget to make it real and by closing down America in every way he is raising that money from the government itself to make the tax cut possible.
No one has risen up to tell Schumer he is crazy or dead wrong. It is what power is all about.
We need voices of truth. Bernie and AOC are having fun on the trail…Bernie saying what he has been saying for years and years and AOC looking good whatever she is saying. But that is not the public telling Mr. Trump and his fear tactics to go to hell.
Power is best dealt with by power.
There is still plenty of it in this country although it doesn’t look that way now.
The two dead political parties must wake up. They are asleep, stunned, shaken.
The courts need that support.
The Supreme Court must hear from the public.
Enough is enough.