By Jessie Seigel / November 27, 2024
And so it begins in earnest. President-elect Donald Trump is daily putting forward his rogues gallery of proposed cabinet secretaries and department heads:
For Secretary of Defense--Pete Hegseth, right wing host on the Fox network, and apparent Christian Nationalist who has suggested a willingness to use the military against American citizens.
For Director of National Intelligence--Tulsi Gabbard, Putin propagandist and possible Russian agent.
For Deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser--Stephen Miller, the architect of family separations and caged children in Trump’s last administration.
For Attorney-General--Pam Bondi, former Florida Attorney-General, who not only used her office to promote Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, but has supported prosecution of the prosecutors who indicted Trump for his many alleged crimes.
Bondi is no better than Trump’s first pick, Matt Gaetz. His only qualification was his enthusiastic embrace of Trump’s plans for revenge prosecution of anyone and everyone who has crossed him. Unfortunately, Bondi's prosecutorial experience may make her more efficient in carrying out Trump's revenge than Gaetz might have been.
For Health and Human Services Secretary--Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conspiracist, anti-vaxxer, antisemite, and anti-Asian racist. Goodbye vaccines; hello measles, polio, covid, etc. And welcome, further slander of Jews, Asians, and probably other minority groups.
For the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator--Dr. Mehmet Oz, TV huckster of so-called cures, and a shill for privatizing Medicare.
For Secretary of Education--Linda McMahon, a former pro-wrestling executive who served as administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. She has been accused--when associated with pro-wrestling--of enabling sexual abuse of children. (At least three other Trump choices--Hegseth, Kennedy, and Elon Musk--have been accused of sexual misconduct. Apparently, that kind of deviance and misogyny is one qualification for a job in Trump-world.)
And these are not even a tenth of Trump’s nominees so far.
Furthermore, Trump is pressuring the incoming Republican controlled Congress to recess as soon as they come into the 2025 session so that he can make recess appointments of his nefarious nominees. Thus, he can avoid any of the congressional oversight called for by the U.S. Constitution.
In addition, Trump intends to purge the government of non-political civil servants and replace them with loyalists who will implement his every whim without question. This is partly to be accomplished by changing civil service positions to political positions from which the employee can be fired for any reason or no reason. Civil service procedures for termination won't apply. Another tactic will be to move the geographic location of civil service employees' jobs, forcing them to either pick up their life and families to move somewhere unpalatable--or quit.
In a March 2023 video on his campaign website, Trump said his administration would relocate tens of thousands of federal employees based in the Washington, D.C. area. According to Federal News Network, Trump said, “As many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out--and I mean immediately out--of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America.”
All of this points to a consolidation of power in the hands of one man and his lackeys.
Predictably, much of the media has wasted time discussing at length the Trump nominees' lack of qualifications to run the departments they are being nominated to lead. These commentators act as if the goal of the appointments is to run the government and argue that the nominees are incompetent to oversee complex agencies, to the country's detriment.
Whether this media myopia is congenital or deliberate, most commentators are doggedly adhering to the ridiculous misconception that running the government to the benefit of the country is Trump’s goal. And that he will fail because of whom he is choosing for the task.
But Trump has made it quite clear to any with more than 20/200 vision that running the government is not his goal. Destroying the government is the goal. Reconstructing the government as a fiefdom for exploitation by himself and his cronies is the goal. And all indications are that a Putin-style dictatorship is being used as the model. For that goal, Trump's choices are not only competent, but logical.
With Trump Republicans controlling all the federal branches of government (presidency, Congress, and a Supreme Court whose majority have already begun implementing authoritarian rule, everyone who cares about democracy needs to find ways to combat and obstruct the formidable autocratic wave coming at the nation.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently pointed out that such opposition is needed now--before Trump takes power. Unfortunately, she did not suggest specific details on how it might be done by average citizens.
Ranting on social media is only an outlet for one's angst and anger--emotionally valuable, but not societally effective. And though rallies are possibly useful to raise mass morale, the coming regime is not likely to be moved by it.
One possible way to affect votes of Republicans in Congress might be for masses of people to flood their Republican senators and representatives with calls or emails, texts, etc. opposing each reactionary act they propose or are ready to support. This could be especially effective with representatives, who have to be elected again in two years.
(Most immediately, it would be helpful for citizens in red states to urge their Republican senators not to relinquish the senate's power to confirm appointments.)
Understandably, democratic forces are exhausted after the hard push of the 2024 election and the overwhelming odds now arrayed against constitutional government. And organizing fellow citizens to call one’s representative on every reactionary policy he or she tries to implement requires constant tracking of such political policies—a form of awareness that, right now, may feel too crushing to pursue.
But, opposition to autocracy must be understood as a long-term project. Learning what kinds of responses have been effective for those living in other autocracies could help one to take heart and retrieve some of their energy for the days ahead.
A small start might be reading a sensible article by Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence. Hunter notes a number of ways to ground oneself. He writes, first, that you must trust yourself and stop to take what you need. For example, if tired, rest; if scared, "make some peace with your fears." He adds that you should find others that you trust. And take time to grieve; that is, to acknowledge what has been lost rather than remaining in a state of shock as much of the media seems to be doing.
Hunter urges that you must accept that you cannot do it all. He writes:
Under a Trump presidency, there are going to be so many issues that it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all. I am reminded of a colleague in Turkey who told me, "There’s always something bad happening every day. If we had to react to every bad thing, we’d never have time to eat."
Hunter also suggests that people must be free to discover their own path, and that one's pathway may not be clear right now--to give oneself time.
Most important--especially for organizations--whether businesses, non-profits, or the press, Hunter argues that one should not obey in advance; that is, do not self-censor as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times did in refusing to endorse a political candidate.
He notes the work of Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, stating: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Instead, Hunter advocates, perform opposition through non-cooperation--building towards mass non-cooperation--especially as against illegal orders.
Finally, be open to working with people whose policy views may be the opposite of yours (eg., like Liz Cheney), but who have the same concerns about democracy’s survival.
As I discover additional and perhaps more specifically effective ways to respond to an autocratic government, I hope to present that information here.
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