Why This Time Will Be Worse

 Jeez, what a week.  And it will only get worse.  It seemed so obvious to me last summer/fall that Trump 2.0 would be worse and that enough people had memories of how bad Trump 1.0 was that enough people would vote against him.  Wishful thinking.  Anyhow, just one item typifies how bad this is and will get: the complete blocking of everything the National Institutes of Health does means cancer patients are already having their treatments stopped.  Trump's first week is already going to kill people who didn't have to die.  So, why will it be worse this time?

1. Trump is angrier and more resentful this time.  He has always been motivated by greed and grievance, but he is so much more pissed off at having lost four years ago and having to go through very humiliated legal proceedings (even if he didn't get the jail time he so much deserved).  
2. Trump and those wanting to use his power have had four years to scheme and much of this was done in public--Project 2025 is a checklist that they have been pretty damned faithful to in just one week.  If you want to know what this administration is going to do, skim it.  I assigned pieces to my US foreign policy class, and, yeah, it is a blueprint for doing awful, cruel things.
3. Trump thinks he has immunity and why not?  The Supreme Court protected him from being prosecuted for January 6th, judges he appointed protected him from the documents stuff, and so on.  I don't think he really was deterred by fear of consequences last time (it was always someone else who has paid for Trump's behavior), but this time, he has the green light.
4. Speaking of the courts, there will be much forum shopping to make sure the 5th Circuit gets the most important cases, and I think Trump is right that he can count on the Supreme Court to not get in his way.  The Birthright Citizenship case will be an early test--if the Court reinterprets the 14th amendment this time as badly as it did before over the Insurrectionist stuff, then we will know for sure that the Court will be helping Trump make everything worse.
5. Last time, various actors, such as Canada, used the American political system against Trump.  They threatened and enacted responses to Trump that would hurt key districts and states, forcing their Governors, Senators, and Representatives to put pressure on Trump and to vote against some of the worst stuff.  This time?  Those folks fear Musk and other actors that have lots of money to burn on primary candidates that oppose incumbents who might resist some of the Trump agenda.  As or more importantly, these politicians fear violence.  The pardoning of the J6 criminals sends a clear signal that actors can use violence on Trump's behalf and get away with it.  He has long signaled to his cultists to use violence against his opponents.  Now that he has immunity and is much more willing to pardon those who abet him, we live not in fear of the threat of political violence but we live in the reality of political violence.
6. Have I mentioned a thoroughly weaponized DoJ and FBI?  Oh my.
7. The media is not going to help much.  The LA Times and Washington Post have supplicated themselves to Trump's reign.  Social media in the form of Facebook and Twitter are doing Trump's bidding. Mainstream tv news just has no clue about how to handle this stuff.  Last week's SNL was on target--the media will chase every single crazy utterance and largely ignore the real harm Trump is doing to real people, including Trump voters.
8. Universities and corporations are obeying in advance despite scholars telling them that is the last thing they should do.

Damn, this is bleak.  Where is the hope?  What can we hope for?  MAGA assholes are not the only ones who learned from last time.  There will be plenty of resistance.  The economic pain and the failure of government services might just cause divisions within the MAGA universe.  Countries are not going to bend the knee as much as Trump thinks.  

But Americans are not used to autocracy, and we don't have a good playbook for responding to this stuff.  I will look to the scholars and activists who are building on the experiences of other countries and on the past, where American democracy was pretty limited.

So, this post is just about why things will be worse.  I hope to learn enough over the next few months to have a post on why things might get better.  But I am not in that headspace yet.

 

 

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