Photo by Natilyn Hicks Photography, Unsplash
Photo by Natilyn Hicks Photography, Unsplash
What we face today is all very dystopian, but it's not a coup. It's what you get when Churchill’s worst form of government (except all the others) can result in the worst kind of people (instead of all the others) coming to power.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Winston Churchill, bless his cigar-and-Port-stricken heart, got it right when he opined in a speech before the House of Commons that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”
The problem we have in the United States right now is that our worst form of government (except for all the others) has given us a president who dreams of being one of the others: an autocrat who is right now taking steps to secure permanent rule over a country that didn’t even give him a majority of votes in the last election. See, that’s the problem with elections. You win sometimes, and you lose sometimes. When you win, you get to do the stuff you ran on as a candidate, but when you lose, the other guy gets to do his thing no matter how dastardly and undemocratic it is.
That’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing right now in the White House. We knew during the campaign when he denied that he knew anything about or had anything to do with Project 2025 that he was lying, and that the minute he got elected, he would start putting its totalitarian aims and proposals into action. We were free to slog through the 900 pages of Project 2025 to see what was coming, and some of us did. What we found were new pages from an old playbook.
The American right wing over the years has gone by various titles, from plain old conservatives to movement conservatives, to Tea Party conservatives, to today’s MAGA multitudes. They were not shy about their plans this time around. The right wing that showed up to put its stamp on Project 2025 was as bitter and resentful as the man they modeled themselves on. Remember all the stuff that was reported about Trump’s MAGA followers feeling that they had been left out and left behind and ignored before Trump came along? They weren’t half as resentful as the professional class of right wingers who had been nursing the festering sore of feeling like they had been locked out of the national conversation, not to mention the government itself, for the last four or five decades.
It wasn’t true of course, but like so many of Republican beliefs, it didn’t have to be. They had the Reagan revolution, Bush One and Bush Two, and Trump One when they could have used their votes and their power to take over the government and dominate the culture. Yeah, they whine that Reagan didn’t go far enough, that the Bush neocons weren’t “us,” that Trump’s first administration had been infiltrated by the establishment and was too shambolic to get anything done.
This time however, they were ready, and amazingly they put it all down in writing for everyone to see. If we didn’t read their screeds about DEI and abortion and immigration and cutting the federal government down to a size that could be “drowned in the bathtub,” to use the famous words of that paragon of right-wing strategizing of long ago, Grover Norquist, it’s on us, not them, because for once they were amazingly honest about their plans. The only thing new that Trump brought to the table after inauguration day was Elon Musk. His stamp was not on Project 2025. It didn’t have to be. He had spent nearly $300 million to put Trump in office. That bought him not only a place at the table, but as we saw earlier this week, a place in the Oval Office from which to hold forth, spouting his fact-free charges of corruption and waste and fraud that he said his little gang of computer coders had found in various departments of the government.
Trump ran on banning trans people from American life with lies about drag shows polluting the minds and morals of his delicate MAGA fans. Well, Trump sat there at her Resolute Desk like a blown-dry and pancake makeup-faced Queen Victoria as lie after lie spewed from Musk and mainstream media stenographers looked on. Only one of them asked a question that managed to squeeze an equivocated version of the truth out of Musk, getting him to admit that his charge that USAID had shipped 50 million dollar’s worth of condoms to Gaza was not true. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect,” Musk quipped with a shit eating grin, eliciting not a peep from the mainstream press.
Nothing being done by Trump and Musk is happening under cover of darkness. They’re doing everything right out in the open, even going so far as to put an exclamation point on the shutting down of USAID by having its name removed from its 14th St. headquarters in Washington. If every move Trump was making was a red flag, the nation’s capital would look like a parade by Mao’s Revolutionary Guard in Beijing’s Red Square.
One of the frustrating things about a democracy is that when the bad guys win, they get to do bad things. The media is currently in its phase of writing “hey, they didn’t vote for that” stories about how Trump’s tariffs and anti-immigration mania and other shoot-from-the-hip policies will kick back to hurt the MAGA faithful. Well, duh, Trump’s loyal MAGA minions don’t have memberships at Mar-a-Lago, fly to golf tournaments in Gulfstreams, or live behind hedges meticulously trimmed by H-2A “good” immigrants who have been specially exempted for friendly mega-donor oligarchs by Marco Rubio’s rent-a-favor State Department.
The racist Right has been waiting for this moment since Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964, calling certain of its provisions “clearly unconstitutional laws” that would “require for their effective execution the creation of a police state.” Goldwater rode that rhetorical racist bicycle to the Republican nomination for president on the first ballot of the Republican National Convention that year.
The racist right wing of the Republican Party lost to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but they came back with Nixon and his southern strategy in 1968, and they came back again with Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he declared he was running for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, memorialized forever in the Right’s racist dreamscape as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered, and their killers were set free by all white juries.
And now they’re back, with Donald Trump and the six vote majority he nailed down on the Supreme Court that gave him a monarch’s permanent and absolute immunity from prosecution for anything he does while in office. They cheated and broke precedent and stomped all over Senate norms to pack Trump’s Supreme Court during his first term, and now Trump is hoping that his legal poodles will do his bidding as he attempts to complete the Republican dream of disassembling the federal government we have known since the end of the Civil War.
Trump’s MAGA coalition, if you can call it that, has attached its varying and variable ideological hellscapes to a man on whose venality and abject absence of decency and morality they are counting.
The Christian nationalists who helped elect Trump hope that he will replace our secular system of government with a rapturous assemblage of religious fanatics who want to return prayer to schools and establish Christianity as our national religion.
Trump’s golfing-buddy oligarch class hopes that he will cut their taxes and turn loose the banks and markets so they can create the same kind of financial casino that helped them to maximize their profits right into the recession of 2007 and 2008.
The anti-abortion movement gave Trump their votes in hopes that he will resuscitate a lunatic law from the 1800s and use it to ban abortion nationwide.
The racist base of the Republican Party that proved its loyalty in 2016 and 2024 hopes that Trump will make good on his anti-DEI rhetoric to turn the clock back to de facto segregation and overt misogyny that can be used to deny jobs on the basis of sex and send women back to the kitchen and the birthing table.
That’s pretty much what Project 2025 is all about, and it sums up what Trump and the Republican Congress would like to accomplish with the help of Elon Musk and his little army of automaton coders who have been practicing their skills and honing their prejudice in online white supremacist forums such as those where Musk’s 25 year old “kid” made his so-called “mistakes” when he bragged about being a racist before racism was cool and announced that he would like to see an immigration policy that used principles of eugenics to help make it work.
There are more of us than there are of them. We proved that most recently in 2008 and 2012 when we put Barack Obama in the White House, and again in 2020 when we turned out for Joe Biden. But last November, not enough of us turned out to vote on Election Day.
What we face today is all very dystopian, but it’s not a coup. It’s what you get when Churchill’s worst form of government (except all the others) can result in the worst kind of people (instead of all the others) coming to power. We Democrats, dear readers, are among all the others, the good people who do not want to substitute Project 2025 for the Constitution.
We will have a chance to throw significant roadblocks in their way in 2026, and we’ll have another chance two years later to put a Democrat in the White House and put our government and our country back on an even keel. But the only way we can do it is with our votes. It’s either that or Churchill’s worst form of government will be replaced with one that would be unthinkable for the United States of America and for the world. We must not let it happen.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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