Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the barrage of events has been overwhelming. More than 1,500 January 6th insurrectionists pardoned. Tariffs threatened and withdrawn. Musing about invading allied nations. Illegal firings of apolitical civil servants. Planes falling out of the sky. Reality TV-style immigration raids. Sensitive computer systems that dispense trillions of dollars in payments hacked by the world’s richest man and his acolytes. And so much more. 

Amid the day-to-day onslaught of norm-busting power grabs, can we see the proverbial forest amid the trees?

To keep track of what’s going on, I organize the daily news into four categories: repealing the 20th century, controlling the security forces, pirates & their plunder and where is the opposition?

For starters, let’s step back and take the long view. The 20th century was the “American century” as Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, proclaimed in 1941. The United States became the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Its corporations spread around the globe, as did American culture. This was enabled by the power of big government in the form of the military and the intelligence agencies that provided the muscle that kept the world safe for American capital. 

It was also the U.S. government that guided the country out of the morass of the Great Depression in the 1930s and to victory over fascism in World War II. 

When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, hunger was widespread, and bank failures that left depositors penniless were a daily occurrence. Support for long-standing dogmas in favor of small government had collapsed. 

Public works programs were enacted. Millions of men had a weekly paycheck again. The Federal Deposit Insurance Company was created to ensure the solvency of banks. The Glass-Steagall Act was passed to separate commercial and investment banking so that banks couldn’t gamble with their depositors’ money. The Securities and Exchange Commission was created to police shady dealings in the stock market. Subsequent New Deal measures birthed Social Security and fueled the growth of labor unions. This in turn fueled consumer demand for the products that businesses were producing.

Roosevelt laid the groundwork for decades of robust economic growth whose benefits would be more widely shared than anytime in U.S. history. On his way to winning a landslide re-election in 1936, he told his supporters he welcomed the hatred of the “economic royalists” of his time — the Rockefellers, the DuPonts and the Mellons, among others.

After the war, it was big government that built interstate highways and sponsored home mortgage loans (at least for white people), making possible the postwar suburban boom. One real estate developer who made a fortune building government subsidized mid-20th-century affordable housing was Fred Trump, father of Donald. It was also big government that passed the GI Bill for millions of returning vets and created low-cost public universities that threw open the doors to a college education for children of the working class for the first time. 

Cold War military spending and the government-backed space race of the 1960s fueled the growth of the early computer industry and Silicon Valley. The internet, after all, evolved out of ARPANET, a Defense Department project to create a computer network that could survive nuclear war.  

More recently, a raft of government subsidies and contracts for Tesla and SpaceX helped make Elon Musk the richest man in the world. Which brings us to the present moment. Silicon Valley moguls and other modern-day economic royalists think they did it all themselves and want to dismantle the state that made their spectacular wealth possible.  

The right wing has never reconciled itself to the egalitarian tendencies embedded in the post-1933 New Deal state. And while conservatives have succeeded in weakening the parts of the federal government that serve the general public since the Reagan era, they haven’t been able to realize their dream of making the government so small that “it could be drowned in a bathtub,” as conservative anti-tax activist Grover Nordquist famously called for. Until now. 

“This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have,” Elon Musk told his followers on X on Feb. 3. 

Trump has always been ambiguous about which idealized era of the past he wants to lead the country back to. In 2016, there were a lot of nods to Boomer nostalgia for the 1950s, a time when post-war America dominated the global economy and its factories were humming. A high school graduate could get a full-time job in those factories and — thanks to union contracts — earn enough money to support a wife and kids, buy a home and retire with a nice pension. The white working class never had it so good before or since. Trump played to that. For Americans who didn’t welcome the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s that empowered Black people, Latinos, women, gays and other marginalized groups, the America of their youth was a “simpler time” that need to be restored. It was also a time when immigration was at an all-time low thanks to nativist laws passed in the 1920s. 

MAGA’s original, unrealized goal was to return to 1956. Regardless of all the futuristic allusions to cryptocurrency and manned flights to Mars, this time, the goal of Trump, Musk and friends is to return to 1896, a much more ominous destination. 

That was the year Trump’s hero, William McKinley, was elected president with the full support of the titans of industry. There still was no income tax, no minimum wage and little in the way of government regulation. Financial panics were a recurring problem. Labor unions were almost non-existent, and strikes were often violently suppressed. Twenty five percent of all children died before the age of five (compared to less than 1% today) due to poor sanitation and a lack of vaccines for deadly diseases like measles and diphtheria (looking at you, RFK Jr.). 

The federal government was too small and weak to challenge the abuses of the Gilded Age robber barons. It garnered most of its limited revenues from tariffs on imported goods. 

McKinley started a war against Spain, seizing its colonial possessions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam — a land grab Trump hopes to surpass by gaining control of Greenland, the Panama Canal and Gaza.  

1896 was also the year of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court ruling that upheld legal segregation and the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which saw starkly unequal outcomes in everything from public schools to public water fountains. Don’t be surprised if conservatives mount a legal challenge to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that guarantees equal access to public accommodations and the right to be served by private businesses. 

Women also had few legal rights in 1896 and were under the control of first their fathers, then their husbands. Abortion was illegal in all 50 states as was birth control, due to the 1873 Comstock Act, a broadly written “anti-obscenity” statute that congressional Republicans have made noises about reviving.                                                                   

Controlling the Security Forces 

Trump’s authoritarian tendencies were stymied during his first term by establishment Republicans who held key administration posts. Former Raytheon lobbyist-turned-Defense Secretary Mark Esper refused to send thousands of active-duty troops into cities that saw large George Floyd protests in June 2020. William Barr resigned as Attorney General in December 2020 when he realized Trump wasn’t going to stop whipping his followers into a violent frenzy with his stolen-election conspiracy theory. Before he left, Barr prevented the White House from making Trump sycophant Kash Patel deputy FBI Director, vowing it would only happen “over my dead body.”

This time, Trump has made former Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth defense secretary. Hegseth has vowed to purge “woke” generals who are not sufficiently pro-Trump. He has already directly involved the military in deporting hundreds of undocumented immigrants, and, if directed to do so, he would almost certainly follow Trump’s orders to use the military to crack down on civilian protesters. 

At the Justice Department, former corporate lobbyist and election denier Pam Bondi has been confirmed as attorney general, while Kash Patel has been nominated as FBI director. Patel wrote a 2023 children’ book lionizing “King Donald” and has previously vowed to target Trump’s political enemies.

Trump pardoned all 1,500-plus January 6th insurrectionists on the first day of his presidency. As The Indypendent goes to press, the Justice Department is demanding that the FBI provide a list of at least 6,000 current and former FBI agents and employees who participated in the investigation and prosecution of crimes and abuses of power by Donald Trump and by those acting at his behest. At the same time, the purge of the security services has been extended to the CIA, where roughly all 21,000 employees have been offered buyouts so they can be replaced with Trump loyalists. 

This all tracks with Trump’s return to the 19th century. In the early decades of the republic, all federal jobs turned over when a new president took office. The “spoils system” rewarded political loyalists but was a lousy way to run a country. When newly elected President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a disgruntled job seeker, public outcry led to the creation of an apolitical, merit-based civil service where only the top positions would be held by political appointees. Replacing the current workforce with modern-day spoilsmen is a recipe for disaster. 

Pirates & Their Plunder

In his first term, Donald Trump raked in millions of dollars from favor seekers who stayed at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., or who became members of the Mar-a-Lago Club at his estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Days before his inauguration, the wily old grifter showed he still had game and then some when he rolled out his “$Trump” meme coin (a cryptocurrency), which quickly soared to a market capitalization of more than $15 billion. His wife’s “$Melania” meme coin followed soon after and also raked in billions. As The Indy goes to press, $Trump has shed 75% of its value, and $Melania has lost 90%, to the chagrin of the Trump fans who bought into these ponzi schemes. 

Trump will have more chances to boost the value of his crypto assets. His White House cryptocurrency director, David Sacks, is a Silicon Valley billionaire who has promised to lightly regulate crypto. Trump has also floated the idea of establishing a $50 billion national bitcoin reserve, which would pump up the price of crypto assets. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s co-president Elon Musk, whose companies receive billions in government contracts, is up to his eyeballs in conflicts of interest.

Musk heads the fictitious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). With Trump’s blessing, Musk and his young tech bro acolytes have gained control of key government computer systems, including the personnel records of the government’s more than 2 million civilian employees and the Treasury Department’s payment system, which sends out $6 trillion in government payments each year. Musk has likely gained the social security numbers of millions of Americans. This conveniently follows on the heels of X signing a deal with Visa to offer real-time payments on the social media platform — moving it one step closer to becoming the “everything app” that Musk has long envisioned. 

There’s every indication that the second Trump administration to be an epic smash-and-grab for the president and his fellow oligarchs as they try to get their hands on everything that’s not nailed down. With regulation and government oversight out of fashion, we can also expect an unprecedented corporate crime wave.  

Signs of Opposition

“Do your job!” protesters chanted at a group of Democratic lawmakers who appeared at a Feb. 5 rally near Capitol Hill. 

No one has been less prepared for Trump’s second-term blitzkrieg than the hapless Democratic Party leaders who previously campaigned against him as an existential threat to American democracy — only to fall silent as he and Elon Musk make one brazen power grab after another. 

The pink pussy hats may have been cringe, but the Resistance’s mass protests from 2017 to 2020 blunted Trump’s political momentum in his first term, catalyzed the Democrats’ victory in 2018 and 2020, and helped give rise to the leftwing Squad led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Resistance’s mistake was its deference to, bordering on hero worship of, the same washed-up party leaders who led the Democrats to defeat in 2016 and again in 2024. 

Millions of rank-and-file Democrats sought reassurance in familiar figures like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, who appeared to offer a safe harbor amid the stormy seas stirred by the Trumpian tempest. As rank-and-file Democrats grasp that venerating outdated norms and institutions is a fool’s errand, the realization that their failed leaders have nothing to offer is sinking in. 

“I have been a loyal ‘normie Dem’ my whole life,” tweeted Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control group Moms Demand,  “but to watch them make millions off of stock trades, cozy up to people they admitted were fascists, trade obligation for access, and play internal politics while democracy is destroyed is a disappointment I don’t have words for.”

“All of us should challenge all of these people all the time,” former Capitol Hill reporter Meredith Shiner wrote in The New Republic. She announced she is forming an exploratory committee to run against longtime Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). “It costs nothing of us other than the mental energy and commitment to be a nuisance to politicians who could stand to be bothered by actual normal people, as opposed to the carousel of donors and consultants who’ve helped bring the Democratic Party to this particular nadir,” wrote Shiner. 

Liberalism is exhausted. It’s more likely to enable fascism than fight it. That millions of disillusioned Democrats are done with their leaders is a glimmer of hope in these dark times. If the left can overcome its tendency to stand apart from a fallen world, there is a remarkable organizing opportunity to be seized. We need way more people in the streets making their opposition visible. We need more labor and tenant unions confronting bosses and landlords. We need more mutual-aid groups collaborating with immigrants and other targeted people. And a whole generation of feckless, sold-out Democratic Party incumbents need to be kicked to the curb in next year’s congressional primaries.

Is it too late to stop Trump and the broligarchy? I couldn’t tell you. But two things are certain. One, if we don’t fight back, the bad guys will most certainly prevail. And two, only the left can supply the energy, the ideas and the determination to confront this rising tide of fascism. Will we step up and meet the moment?

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