What Now?
TUCSON — With Thanksgiving over, Americans need to drop despair cold turkey and unite behind a single stage of grief. Anger. The others lead to acceptance, the final triumph of a creeping coup d'etat that plutocrats and ideologues began in the 1980s.
Voters have only two years to begin rescuing America, calmly but persuasively and without letup. After 2026, solid majorities in Congress and statehouses can start steering a ship of fools back toward sanity. Consider what is at stake.
An Islamist terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head just rallied fractious Syrians to end 53 years of indescribably cruel al-Assad family rule in a week-long blitz.
Abu Mohammed al-Golani promises democracy to Muslims of all sects, Christians, Jews and the rest. Syrians who fought him bitterly in a free-for-all uprising after the 2011 Arab Spring are now delirious with joy. Many hold out hope that he means it.
American diplomacy and sparing use of military options is crucial now to referee Middle East turmoil with a massive impact on global order. Donald Trump says it is not his problem. Leave it to Russia and China.
By 2028, Syria could end up being closer to democratic principles than the United States. Not likely. But even that possibility ought to snap awake Americans who are sleepwalking toward tyranny.
Trump envisions an amoral, hate-fueled autocracy that spurs on climate chaos, enflames conflicts and further separates rich from desperate. Legislators, generals, civil servants and journalists and educators could be locked away for doing their jobs.
He insults allies with punitive tariffs while courting despots who muzzle the press, stamp out human rights, encroach on neighbors and plunder dwindling resources as Earth's ecosystem collapses.
He hands power to big donors, corrupt relatives and incompetent sycophants who snivel at his feet. His crass money-spinning schemes flout the law — and human decency. Hardly a president, he is a p-word with a last syllable that rhymes with loot.
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This overview is the first of a series. After 60 years of watching the same mistakes recur, each time with more devastating impact on an imperiled planet, I don't want my generation to be switching off the lights on a reasonably good world.
The thread linking multiple global crises is an ignorant demagogue with the instincts of a crafty jackal, the sort of malleable tool the original coup-plotters hoped for at the outset.
Clinical psychiatrists say Trump is a perfect fit for what was termed malignant narcissism after the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. They pegged him early when it seemed a stretch to liken him to the Führer.
In malignant form, narcissists revel in humiliating others and wreaking havoc. Obviously, there are differences among them.
Hitler, a soldier and student of history, was obsessed with cleansing the world of untermensch sub-humans: Jews, Romani "gypsies," dark-hued people and other societal parasites.
Trump's aim is just to feed an insatiable ego. His bombast is thick with vows to punish, if not execute, "enemies" who stand up to him. He talks easily about shooting migrants, looters and protesters. We can only guess where his extremes might lead.
He began as a "liberal" with no god but himself. Over time, he saw Republicans, unlike Democrats, had party discipline — and money. Christian evangelicals would excuse any mortal sin if he thumped on a bible he did not read.
His "strong man" charisma, characteristic of his type, attracts enraptured followers. Trump's latest rallies evoke Hitler's. His big-lie drumbeat is straight out of Mein Kampf.
National security is not his main concern. He tapped Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence to sit atop the CIA and other agencies. She would oversee daily presidential briefings.
Gabbard has parroted Russian media propaganda. After al-Assad killed thousands with nerve agents and chlorine gas on Syrian villages, she raised eyebrows on a trip to Damascus. He was not to blame, she said; those were rebels' false-flag attacks.
Al-Assad fled to Moscow, where Putin can gather compromising details that he might use to put pressure on her. In any case, as with Trump's choice of Peter Hegseth as secretary of defense, America needs better.
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No puffed-up president can change the Constitution and Bill of Rights by simple decree. Deeply principled legislators sit in both houses. When sustained anger from constituents reaches a critical mass, even the faithless ones react.
Everyone knows a lot of people who know a lot of other people. Personal conversations laced with documented facts, persistent but polite, sway half-open minds. Citizens need to know why each vote counts, all the way down the ballot.
In noisy demonstrations these days, provocateurs spark clashes with police. But constant vigils in relays at legislators' home offices make an impact. So do smart questions at every public appearance.
Patient talks are crucial with young people who have the most at stake. In the 1980s, the Koch brothers first targeted public schools. That worked. Most kids learn little about civics and critical thinking while elite academies groom future acolytes.
Republicans gloat about an historic landslide. Hardly. Trump won Pennsylvania's 19 electors by 121,454 votes, and margins were narrow in most other battleground states.
One-third of 161 million eligible voters did not bother to show up. The challenge is convincing a fraction of them that democracy can't be a spectator sport.
Until three empty House seats in GOP districts are filled this Spring, the Republicans will have 217 seats to the Democrats' 215. Their Senate majority is too thin to ram through controversial laws. As voters see the cost of tariffs and the impact of an anti-immigrant jihad, lines will blur.
A lot of Republican lawmakers privately revile Trump but condone his porcine behavior to keep their place at the public trough. They are vulnerable to outrage from constituents they swear to represent yet instead shamelessly fleece.
No one can summarize Trump's depredations, but a few absurdities make the point.
Trump asked Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who earns billions from taxpayers, to cut the budget by $2 trillion: health care, schools, social security, welfare, the environment. Yet his first priorities include another $2 trillion tax cut for the rich.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, possibly the looniest lawmaker ever, is the House cost-cutting liaison. As a small-time Georgia gym operator, she had herself videoed in 2019 near the Capitol harassing a school massacre survivor. Her far-right extremism struck a chord.
She won a seat in 2020, but within weeks of taking it she was barred from committees for antisemitic conspiracies and earlier social media posts. In one, she suggested "a bullet in the head" for Nancy Pelosi and nooses for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Now she is on three key committees, besotted with power. After meeting with Elon Musk and his sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy, she explained to reporters America's new dichotomy: "We're going to have a naughty list and a nice list."
Joe Biden's cabinet has a net worth of $110 million. Trump's choices so far add up to $10 billion. Adding in Musk, that approaches $300 billion.
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After Harris goaded Trump in their first debate, he stuck to friendly venues. Once elected, he sat down with Kristen Welker on NBC's Meet the Press for a barrage of mangled reality that no amount of factchecking can begin to to set straight.
It is not simply "lies." Nearly every word he speaks savages truth. If corrected, he bulls on and doubles down. If an interviewer presses further, he declares, "You're wrong." The tactic is Goebbels squared. Constant repetition leads to confirmation.
Trump sees himself as faultless. Laws apply to everyone else. And he doesn't need a crime to demand punishment.
Coinciding felony convictions, indictments and civil suits worked in his favor. They defined a sex-offending, chiseling crook. From different jurisdictions and juries, they were hardly coordinated. Yet the sheer number allowed him to play the victim.
He told Welker he did nothing wrong on Jan. 6 so everyone on the House Select Committee should be jailed for falsely accusing him.
Much of America's media mainstream covers Trump as if he were a normal incoming president. That beggars belief. A bipartisan panel spent an incalculable amount of money and time to lay bare his unprecedented high crimes, and he emerged unscathed.
The first impeachment revealed Trump's treachery even though senators refused to convict. He withheld missiles to attempt extorting Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt on Biden as Russians amassed on Ukraine's borders.
The second, for inciting a murderous insurrection to overturn an election, was open and shut. We watched it in real time.
Just zero in on the Mar-a-Lago documents. A lone rural Florida judge, appointed by Trump, stalled until she rejected the case on dubious procedural grounds. Jack Smith, the tenacious special counsel, was benched. News media moved on.
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Documents left exposed in Trump's nest of political operatives and foreign spies included top-secret briefs restricted to America's closest allies. Some were plans to counter an invasion of America. Others named allies' secret agents and sources.
NATO partners and other major powers are likely to think hard before sharing intelligence during the next four years.
Some files revealed compromising details on prominent figures, useful for hard bargaining, like all those squirreled away by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in earlier days.
A smiling Emmanuel Macron welcomed Trump, his star guest, at the reopening of Notre Dame. He needs American support. Drama in the National Assembly might cut short his term, favoring Marine Le Pen's far-right juggernaut.
But he knows Trump's purloined papers contain details of his private life that he is loath to see exposed.
Biden's small pile of overlooked documents, immediately returned to the National Archives, is a parking ticket compared to Trump's hidden stash.
Jack Teixeira, an ex-National Guardsman, is doing 15 years for sharing classified documents to impress online buddies. Reality Winner, a National Security Agency translator, got five years and three months for leaking a report on Russian election meddling.
Trump, exonerated, declares himself the most persecuted president in history. And now he wants Kash Patel to rain fury on the "Biden crime family," among others he says are guilty of lese-majesté.
FBI directors, enjoined to act apolitically, are given 10-year terms to span multiple mandates. Trump fired James Comey for continuing to investigate his aides' apparent connivance with Russia. He named Christopher Wray, a Republican.
After much delay, subterfuge and subpoenas, the FBI eventually raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Patel included Wray in his published list of 60 enemies of the people marked for retribution.
In a now-viral video, he casually lays out plans to find grounds, criminal or civil, to prosecute politicians, public officials, journalists and others who crossed the capo he intends to serve. Hunter Biden is high on the list.
Andrew Weissman, formerly FBI general counsel, says Hunter's offenses while addicted to drugs would likely involve no jail time if his last name weren't Biden. He paid back taxes and penalties. The gun permit charge is minor for a first offender.
Joe Biden's other son died after serving in Iraq. He lost a wife and child in a car crash. Still, he said he would trust the courts and not pardon Hunter. When Patel declared, "We're coming after you," he changed his mind.
To no surprise, Republicans howled with hypocrisy. Trump had pardoned a laundry list of scoundrels. He says the Jan. 6 rioters who savaged Capitol police and tried to hang a vice president are patriotic heroes, held inhumanely as hostages.
With false equivalence, critics said Biden was no better, a liar who besmirched his place in history. And it wasn't only the Republicans.
That baffles me. After watching Biden for a long time, I know his failings and strengths. He is a decent man adept at finding common ground with a keen instinct for impending trouble.
He was part of the furniture as big money began distorting politics. Corporations and hedge funds muscled into news media. The internet spawned "influencers" and "personalities." Rightwing wackos reached tens of millions. Truth became alternative.
By 2016, America wanted change. Obama and Biden had reversed George W. Bush's economic collapse. Stock markets thrived. But Bush left behind quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq. His "war on terror" filled new terrorist ranks.
Voters chose a man they'd seen a lot on TV, a self-proclaimed genius business whiz adept at selling snake oil to rubes. Sensible Americans snickered at his boast that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it. Look at him now.
Biden came out of retirement after Trump condoned thugs in Charlottesville who chanted hatred against Jews and blacks. I expected him to sort out America for four years, then step aside for a fresh generation. But after 2020, Trump wouldn't go away.
In a Covid-wracked America, Biden was elected president. He managed near miracles despite a Republican wall. And yet. Watch this space for a hard look at the last four years, with a global view of what lies ahead.
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