The authoritarian tide is rising very quickly in America. Donald Trump and his agents have unleashed a torrent and are now “flooding the zone.” Five months into Trump’s return to power, the American people and their democracy are like someone standing on their toes as the water rises. The water is over their mouth and a few inches below their nose. As exhaustion sets in, they will lose their balance, their heads will fall under the water and then they will gag.
Do not believe those public voices and any others who say that these rising waters have stopped and that “the worst danger is behind us” and that “everything will be okay in the end” because of “the institutions” and “American Exceptionalism.” These hope-peddlers are telling themselves and the American people self-soothing fictions.
One of the most common scenarios for drowning is when an experienced swimmer overestimates their skill and does something foolish, such as swimming in a lake, ocean, or other body of water when there is an alert about riptides or other potential danger. They then find themselves in great trouble. A less skilled swimmer would have heeded the warnings and not risked their life.
But a person can drown in as little as an inch of water if they are lying face down in it.
When a person is drowning, they usually panic and lash out. They may become so disoriented and possessed by terror that they hit the person who is trying to save them. Sometimes the drowning person grabs onto their savior and pulls both of them down into the water and neither can escape.
These are all metaphors for the American people and their failing democracy in the Age of Trump. The American people and their leaders overestimated the strength and vibrancy of their democracy and civil society. In addition, they made poor choices in response to the clear, present and obvious dangers of what would happen if Trump — a man who announced he would be a dictator on “day one” — was put back in the White House. The American people and their leaders also had numerous opportunities to “drown-proof” their democracy at the ballot box, through the rule of law and addressing the deep societal problems that birthed Trumpism, MAGA, authoritarian populism and the larger antidemocracy movement. Again, they chose not to. Many alarm-sounders were ignored, marginalized, mocked, attacked and told they were exaggerating and engaging in hyperbole by the gatekeepers in the news media and political class. The alarm-sounders have been proven to be repeatedly and overwhelmingly correct.
The Republicans in Congress are deciding what version of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” they will inflict on the American people. This bill will further gut the social safety net and give trillions more dollars to the very richest corporations and individuals. Public health experts at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania estimate that the budget cuts and other policy changes in Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will kill at least 50,000 Americans each year. This is a very conservative estimate.
During a trip two weeks ago to Capitol Hill to whip up support for his “big beautiful bill,” Trump told reporters the following:
We’re going to make a couple of tweaks….I mean, we don’t want to benefit Democrat governors, although I would do that if it made it better, but they don’t know what they’re doing….We want to help all the states, but we have governors that are from the Democrat [sic] party, let’s say New York, Illinois, big ones, and let’s say Gavin ‘Newscum,’ who’s done a horrible job in California. We want to benefit Republicans. They are the ones that are going to make America great again….The Democrats are destroying our country.
Few, if any, American presidents have ever behaved this way. Donald Trump, as the country’s first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator, rejects the responsibilities and the very concept of public service. He is instead driven by corrupt power. He is an apparent megalomaniac who views the office of the presidency primarily as a way of punishing his enemies and rewarding himself and his friends, allies, supplicants and sycophants. Per his own words, Trump wants to purge and cleanse “the blood” of the United States of “the vermin,” i.e., those who do not support his authoritarian political project and MAGA personality cult.
Predictably, the American mainstream news media were largely (if not totally) silent on Trump’s threat to use government power and (the public’s money) to punish those Americans who disagree with him and that he therefore deems not to be “real (MAGA) Americans.”
For example, Donald
