The Trump blitzkrieg smashed into the speed sign in their juggernaut to conquer democracy. They are now in the village where we live which is on the other side of the hill.
Maureen Dowd is not Walter Cronkite, who on Feb. 27, 1968 appeared on television and delivered an editorial claiming that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate.” (Read article). He was the most trusted news anchor in America, if not the most trusted person in the United States. LBJ knew that when you lost Walter Chonkite, you basically lost support of the country.
Certainly not everyone reads The New York Times. For one thing it requires a subscription to so unless you go to the library. There are many people who never even heard of Maureen Dowd. She became a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine in 2014. In 1999, Dowd received a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. She has been a regular columnist for the Times since 1995.
Yesterday she wrote “Fail Ceasar,” a column well worth reading if you have subscription.
This is how she began her column:
“Remember, I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.”
It sounds like President Trump, to the world. But it was Caligula, to his grandmother.
At least America’s Emperor of Chaos has not made his horse a consul. Yet.
A horse might be better than some of the sketchy characters surrounding Trump.
After pillaging and gutting the U.S. government, the Western alliance and our relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump is thinking of himself as a king and cogitating on a third term. He basks in the magniloquent rhetoric of acolytes genuflecting to an instrument of divine providence.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, a group calling itself the “Third Term Project” erected a sign depicting Trump as Caesar. A wag on X wondered if they knew what happened to Caesar.
She concludes:
Many who had hoped to tune out Trump this time realize they don’t have that luxury. It’s far more dangerous now. There are frightening moments when our 236-year-old institutions don’t look up to the challenge. With flaccid Democrats and craven Republicans, King Donald can pretty much do whatever he wants to whomever he wants.
If you don’t have subscription you can read a summary of the column in RawStory in their article titled 'Far more dangerous': NY Times' Maureen Dowd shares terrifying realization.
If only Maureen Dowd was Walter Cronkite. If only the country had a Walter Cronkite. There is no single person with the ability to sway a large portion of the public to see the truth of what Trump is about to turn the country into.
To the contrary, many people in the media are still trying to minimze what he is doing. They try to cherry pick all the things that they think have been impediments to his turning the country into a dictatorship and they tell us that this means the blitzkrieg can be turned around. They won’t even call it a blitzkrieg, which means lightening war, even though it is an appropriate term because this is how the Nazis conquered Europe and parts of Russia. Their blitzkrieg could barely be slowed down, let alone stopped.
The optimists point to MAGA setbacks in court and public opinion polls showing an unprecedented low approval ratings for Trump and the things he is doing. They suggest that everyone contact their representatives in Congress. They advocate going to actual protests. Show Trump how many people are against him, but better hope no protests turn violent, or even lead to minor law breaking, since this will give Trump an excuse to declare martial law.
The Meidas Touch Network YouTube channel announced it has more viewers than Fox News a few days ago.
If you follow their news (see below) you might think we are winning the war against Trump and Trumpism:
Regarding the Trump & Co. rationale for many of their actions, I want to emphasize something I don’t think has been reported. I believe that the entire DOGE, anti-woke, and anti-DEI personnel purge is an attempt to rid agencies and departments of as many people as possible so they can be replaced by obedient foot soldiers. While some MAGA officials probably believe this is important, I am certain Trump, and possibly Musk, see ginning this up as being a means to an end. I also don’t see any strong belief with Trump that immigrants are really “poisoning the blood of the county.” Hitler might have this believed this about Jews, but I think this was a position heavily promoted by Trump to rally his troops into a fear fueled fever so they would support him.
In his Substack yesterday Robert Hubbell (Profile) wrote “Reflections on the news through the lens of hope.” The key word is “hope.” So many people, quite understandably, can’t cope with the levels of anxiety and despair that believing the country is about to turn to tryanny will lead to will cause. Just about every post in The Contrarian, the Substack started by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen, lays out ways to fight the good fight against Trump. For good measure, to keep morale up they have recipes and a pet of the week - gotta keep that sense of optimism.
This is part of what Norm Eisen wrote in “Spring Training-for democracy:”
But there are stumbles too. Pitchers don’t have their pitches down. Batters are rusty and out of sync. Teams have made major personnel changes since the championship parade last November—but the new rosters haven’t quite gelled yet.
The same is true of the patriotic opposition to Donald Trump throughout the first month of his administration. Across the country, Trump’s illegal actions are being stopped by the courts, they’re being protested in the streets and questioned at increasing volumes in town halls. For every illegal action, pro-democracy lawyers and organizations (some bipartisan) are working to file multiple lawsuits and have multiple demonstrations against it. The coalition of pro-democracy forces has won many fights—but not all of them.
Take Friday. The coalition had three important wins: a judge issued a preliminary injunction against Trump’s anti-DEI policies, another court blocked DOGE out of Treasury, and SCOTUS refused to interfere with a lower court order reinstating a wrongly fired agency head. There was a loss too: a judge denied a preliminary injunction in one of the cases to protect USAID. And there were two new major lawsuits: AP sued the Trump administration over being unfairly banned from press pool access, and NYC sued over $80 million in FEMA funds being withheld. (h/t Ryan Goodman.)
Just like my Dodgers and everyone’s teams in spring training, it feels like democracy is still gelling; still working to hit its stride. Team Democracy will not triumph in every contest, although, on the whole, I thought Friday was a good day and fairly representative. (I can’t resist noting that our team at State Democracy Defenders Fund is undefeated so far in the dozen-plus cases we have filed or worked on in the past month. Remember, by subscribing to The Contrarian, you are supporting those legal efforts, in addition to enabling our journalistic efforts.)
He is keeping that optimism flame alive!
I received the image above via email asking for donations. I’m supposed to believe that Trump and Musk are really shaking in their boots. It says it’s a miracle, IT’S A MIRACLE!”. I don’t believe in miracles. If a highly contagious lethal virus which only infected psychopaths became a pandemic, I might might change my mind about this.
Joyce Vance titles her Substack today “A little Morning happiness” and has three photos of her chickens. She prefaces her photo essay with “There has been too much news lately to take a night off, which means I’ve been hearing, increasingly, from some of you who want a few chicken pictures to interrupt the doomscrolling. So here you go.” I can appreciate the need to take a break to keep one from desending into a pit of anxiety and despair. She concludes: “Back to serious things: In case you missed it, last night’s piece on the Friday Night Massacre in the military is an important one and the Kash Patel piece provides some important context about the confirmation of prior FBI Directors that can be helpful in explaining why this confirmation was both wrong and a serious departure from how Directors are selected and confirmed.”
There are exceptions to those who are downplaying how Trump’s juggernaut is damn near unstoppable. One is Sabrina Haake who writes a Substack called The Haake Take. In her column “Dear President Zelenskyy” she concludes by predicting violence in our homeland:
As the world’s wealthiest men team up to impose maximum harm on the world by embracing Nazism and partnering with Putin, one of the world’s most lethal dictators, please take heart. It’s obvious violence is coming to the US, but America will sort itself out. We always do the right thing, as Churchill reportedly said, after other possibilities have been exhausted.
I close here in shared weariness in knowing there really are evil men in the world who will do anything for power and wealth. Also, in sympathy and apology, heartbroken for both our countries, but not defeated.
Read the most recent Haake Take :
Trump has just fired top generals. He knows he has to control the military to achieve his dictatorial goals.
Kash Patel has reassigned something like a thousand FBI agents from DC to offices around the country. These are senior agents who made their way to the DC office because they were the best of the best. No doubt they will be replaced by agents, people with guns and the power to break down doors and arrest people, with Trump loyalists. Some of them may be members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or J6 insurrectionists.
It is debatable whether members of the military swear an oath to not only obey the Constitution, but also to follow orders from the President. It could be argued that obeying the Constitution takes precedence over obeying the President when he issues an unconstitutional order. (More about this here.)
If a soldier defies a order because it is considered by them to be unconstitutional, I doubt the new JAG officers in the different branches will look kindly on this. Hegseth has fired not only top generals, but also the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force (reference).
Congress has been neutered. The Republican members are so desperate to hold onto their positions that they are willing to bend at the knee for Trump. Those up for reelection in two years think Trump, and Musk with his money, can make sure they lose a primary. They don’t want to admit that there might not even be a free election in two years. There might not be a functioning Congress.
If Trump has his way, within two years the three co-equal branches of government won’t exist with each one acting to restrain the other, and as intended by the Founders, keeping the country from becoming a monarchy.
We still don’t know what will happen if the Supreme Court issues a major ruling limiting Trump’s imperial power. My hunch is that he will defy the order and dare them to do anything about it. Of course, they can’t. Trump controls all the means to enforce federal law.
If Trump has his way the only law enfocement left in the country will be local police departments and state National Guard units. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could end up in a kind of civil war. When we go to our granddaughters indoor soccer games in the winter we drive by a large Oregon National Guard facility with lines of military vehicles outside. I’ve said to my partner that I could see a time when they were deployed to the Idaho border to protect our state from their National Guard which Trump and Hegseth ordered to take over Portland and other cities in the state because they are sanctuary cities. (Reference)
If only we were merely on the road to becoming a country like we were under English rule before the War for Independence. Compared to Trump, King George III, imperialist that he was, was a sweetheart.
On Friday I wrote “We’re on the road to tyranny” using the illustration which you see I modified for this Substack.
In just two days the actions from Trump & Co. led me to revise this image and so it will illustrate my title. It is meant to show a cloud of exhaust from the Trump tyranny blitzkrieg just having gone over the horizon. It is out of sight there, but it really has just begun to take over the village on the other side of the hill. The village is us.
As I finish writing this I have MSNBC on.
They are talking about how important it is to take everything Trump says and does seriously. They say we must not dismiss his words as hyperbole. Michael Steele said that we need “militant democracy.” I suggest that the last time militant democracy against a power as formidible as Trumpism was successful was in World War II.
