Trump's public plan for revenge hands Democrats "the greatest opportunity for a positive outcome"

There is frustration among Democrats and others who support President Joe Biden that the polls are increasingly showing how his many public policy successes are not being rewarded. In addition, it appears that Biden’s chances for victory in 2024 are being undermined by growing support for third party candidates and a loss of support among key Democratic Party constituencies.

As seen last week, Donald Trump is escalating his public threats and promises to become America’s first dictator with Hitler-like language and plans to put the country’s “internal enemies” and “vermin” (which here means President Biden and other leading Democrats, special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, journalists and reporters, non-white migrants and immigrants, Muslims, and anyone else who believes in the rule of law and democracy) in prison or worse. On this latest example of Trump’s evil and deployment of stochastic terrorism, Mike Tomasky writes at the New Republic:

His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only….

This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word….

No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him.

And no, he’s not going to be throwing anybody in a gas chamber. But that’s a pretty low bar for un-American behavior; that is, fascism was not so bad until it started exterminating people? The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them:

Shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.

The sum effect of these seemingly never-ending and simultaneous crises is an American people who are uncertain, discontent, and feeling weathered. And in a type of tragic feedback loop, it is these negative feelings that are fueling Trump and the Republican fascists and other malign right-wing actors who will only make matters worse if they take power in 2025. One must never forget that fascism is pain; Trump and the Republican fascists and the larger “conservative” movement are expert political sadists.

In an attempt to make better a sense of our collective emotions and how to (perhaps) orient ourselves in this time of great troubles and challenges, and where we are in the Age of Trump and what comes next, I asked a range of experts for their thoughts and suggestions.

These answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. The award-winning author of “Dying of Whiteness”. His forthcoming book is “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.”

I feel completely upside down to be honest. There have been some real moments of despair about alliances made and sustained over the course of a long time. But I am very hopeful that we are coming back together. It’s just such an urgent moment. But these past weeks have not been easy for many reasons. I am terrified. I think repeatedly about Jason Stanley’s work, suggesting that a divided opposition is one of the key opening points for the rise of fascism. I believe we’re going to need to come back together in common cause but part of that involves first, seeing how we are all being pulled apart right now, and who that serves.

I thought we were at the end. But perhaps we’re closer to the beginning. I am imagining someone in year three of the hundred years war from many years ago turning to his neighbor and saying, can you believe we’ve put up with three years of this crap? It just feels like an incredibly violent moment right now in so many ways and in so many places. With little reward for empathy, peace, or resolution. So, the stakes of everything feel incredibly high and the institutions that usually protect us feel incredibly embattled and in peril.

Jill Lawrence is an opinion writer and the author of "The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock."

A friend long involved in politics told me the other day that while walking his dog, he became overwhelmed by the crush of terrible events—in particular, the Middle East crisis that he feared was dividing Democrats to the point of ensuring another Donald Trump presidency. But then he came upon two fathers teaching their young sons how to hold a bat and swing at a baseball, and he teared up and thought, maybe this is the way. Maybe moments like these should be the focus. And I have to admit, even as a political journalist steeped in America’s traumas over many years, this pileup has me looking for escape. In addition to my usual retreat into mysteries and crime novels, I’m also trying to find upbeat topics to write about. And there are some, such as my belated recognition of Taylor Swift as a force for good, and a moment that crystallized the idea that Joe Biden is trying to build for a future he (and I) won’t be here to see.

The crises are always percolating and occasionally exploding into the foreground, of course. Not to be fatalistic, but it seems like each and every one of them—Israel-Hamas, Ukraine-Russia, the violence, threats and polarization of our politics, the latest mass shooting by someone who never should have had a gun much less an assault rifle, and Trump looming over it all—starkly illuminates the failings of our system. It is not, as many have said and other nations have shown in real time, what our Founders or anyone else would invent today. And yet we don’t change it, feel powerless to change it, structurally or even legislatively. And so there’s minority domination in many arenas, and a break-glass tool like impeachment—which should have definitively ended the Trump era of American politics—is now reduced to a partisan weapon of vengeance.

In terms of the Trump saga, we are finally in the chapter of courts, judges and juries, hoping they will hold him accountable when all else has failed. But there’s no guarantee there will be legal reckonings. Right now, the most definitive statement you can make about Trump is that his grip on the Republican Party has never been stronger. He’s crushing his GOP primary challengers by a combined average of nearly 46 percentage points. He’s raising money off his legal martyrdom. And he just installed his pick as House speaker. A Trump cutout, an architect and purveyor of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, is running the U.S. House.

My greatest fear is that 2023 and 2024 will show to the world that the United States cannot get its act together. That it is an unreliable ally, both in war and in the global economy. That it can’t be trusted to deliver without drama, angst and brinksmanship, if it delivers at all. That a lot of people in America and all over the world will be hurt by the inability of too many in one of our major political parties to understand the meaning of the words “urgency” and “compromise” and “greater good” and “get it done”

As far as hope, believe it or not, I found some in “The American Buffalo,” Ken Burns’ new documentary. It is at core a brutal tale of American cruelty, greed, racism, opportunism and plain stupidity, as you’d expect. Yet it is sprinkled with the occasional pang of guilt and, ultimately, the realization by flawed people that an enormous mistake had been made. It took near extinction to galvanize Americans and the U.S. government, but it happened, and the buffalo still roam. My hope is that our democracy can right itself before one minute to midnight.

Nate Powell is a graphic novelist and the first cartoonist to win the National Book Award. Powell has also won four Eisner Awards.His forthcoming graphic novel, Fall Through, will be released in February 2024, followed by a comic adaptation of James Loewen’s influential "Lies My Teacher Told Me" in June.

I’m currently able to stay informed and aware from day-to-day by making careful, consistent choices about how much media I consume and interact with. Most importantly, I’m almost entirely jettisoned from Twitter, which has been immensely helpful in staying better oriented and mentally healthy. My professional need to hype two upcoming books does require me to engage with social media regularly, but I feel I’ve been able to escape the poisonous cycles of perceived pressure to produce extra noise on these platforms. I listen and read, and try to stay more attuned to local, in-person events and actions. We’re going to look back in horror at the ways in which the last decade of social media rewired our minds to accept as normal a virtually impossible level of personal bandwidth as round-the-clock participants. We are their products, not their users.

Generally, I get the sense that many of us simply memory-holed most of the important and difficult learning experiences of the past 9 years or so. People choose to fall back into easy ruts (accepting false binaries; not following through with their own fact checking; retweeting and amplifying misinformation, fascists, and bad actors; forgetting what the pandemic taught us about the necessity of considering more vulnerable community members when we share public space, or even to err on the side of caution and compassion when we don’t know what someone else is experiencing).

However, I am encouraged both by the clear sense that most people are simply less rattled by the noise, and that people under 35 have grown to develop more resilient bullshit detectors. I do not hold a sense of doom or inevitability about our major crisis of democracy as we move into 2024—but its counterweight is that I know that these outcomes are truly up in the air, and acknowledging that we simply cannot read magical signs to determine democracy’s survival is crucial.

In reality, I think it’s always the middle of this saga—a rolling, evolving middle with constantly moving chapter markers. I don’t think we’ll reach something resembling an end point until Trump dies, and even then, it’s merely one end point of many which will distract lots of people from the strengthened legacies of consequence-free grifting, exploitation, and weakened societal and institutional defenses against billionaires and fascists.

What gives me the most hope is that people everywhere have established it’s very possible to stay focused on resisting fear, false divisions, and misinformation to protect what we have left—and that I’ve been able to kind of write off those whom I know will never develop the empathy and critical thinking skills necessary to suddenly see these crises for what they are, or that there is no final victory to be won. Protecting the unfulfilled promise of multiracial democracy must simply become an enlarged factor in how we each spend our lives in the coming decades.

I’m most filled with fear at the clear understanding that many white Americans across multiple demographic lines are absolutely uninterested in understanding the imminent, present dangers facing us all— in understanding that yes, our fates are all interconnected here—and the death-cult resignation of many who fall back on their fading lifespans, their illusory heaven, the lie that any of us may individually be exempt from the coming decades’ impact.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including "The Gunman and His Mother." His website is America, America.

This is a time of not only multiple crises, but also particular peril. This concerns the intensifying climate of violence and rise in hate crimes, as well as the expansion of voices on the left who are willing to abandon Joe Biden because of their resentment toward his commitment to Israel and its survival. The intensity of their pro-Palestinian—and in some cases, pro-Hamas—anger has led to their insistence that there is no way they will vote for him next year. This comes at a moment when Donald Trump is surrounded by networks of acolytes energetically working to institutionalize autocracy. Their goal: To expand his ability to pursue retribution without legal pushback if he were to regain the White House.

If the dangers facing democracy appeared to be the dominant issue that Democrats would coalesce around before, this most recent shift away from Biden is troubling. That said, I believe the anti-democratic effort to empower the disgraced ex-president with ultimate freedom and surround him with lawyers ready to manipulate the law and the Justice Department doesn’t depend on Trump’s election.

With him or without him, there’s a growing number of operatives on the right seeking to pursue this fascistic direction in any case. The structure, psyche and commitment is evolving to end democracy even if Trump keels over or ends up in the slammer. The ascendance to House speaker of Christian nationalist Mike Johnson—with his self-professed belief in “18th Century values”—only increases the likelihood that a GOP majority would help accelerate this downward spiral. Ironically, these dangers also represent the greatest opportunity for a positive outcome. The Republicans are not pretending to be other than what they are. They are proud of their extremist agenda, and they have made it crystal clear to anyone paying attention to what is at stake.

As I see it, Americans have a year to sort out what kind of country, what kind of society, they want. The 2024 election will determine whether they are ready to toss away the American experiment, usher in autocracy and government fueled by violence and bigotry—or they will choose for a government committed to making lives better.