The Plot Against America

Trump is crude and transparent in his threat to end American democracy as we know it. We have a year to make sure he fails.

For some time, I’ve been telling friends and colleagues that an electoral victory by Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election would be the de facto end of American democracy as we’ve known it since the end of the Civil War, when the legal habeas corpus was (more or less) reestablished in the United States. I’ve thought that Trump would preside over a massive right-wing power grab, the suspension of civil liberties, the rounding up of political enemies, the punishment of speech by the Federal government, a take over the courts, summary executions of criminal suspects, the mass expulsion of non-citizens, and the establishment of detention camps.

For starters.

Confirmation of my accuracy in prognostication has come not from other journalists, academics, pundits, politicos, liberals and newsletter scribes - but from Trump himself.

Speaking on Veterans Day, the former President - supported by the majority of the extremist Republican Party - said this: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

That speech came a few weeks after Trump decried immigration, saying “It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.”

Vermin.

The blood of our country.

We’ve heard these words before; for most us, in history class.

A week later, Trump told an interviewer he planned to use the Justice Department and courts to take down his opponents: “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”

And as the Washington Post reported, Trump’s MAGA lieutenants have been busily drawing up plans for “Project 2025” - a right wing network that is “prescreening the ideologies and loyalties of thousands of possible foot soldiers” to fill out the entire Federal government should Trump win the presidency. 

This shadowy group has “begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”

And two days ago, the New York Times reported that Trump is planning to build detention camps on a mass scale, used in the round-up and deportation of non-citizens and enemies of the MAGA state - while ending so-called “birthright” citizenship for babies born in the United States.

None of this is the product of political scare tactics, liberal fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorizing. This is what Trump and his brownshirts are saying publicly about what they plan to do. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told The Post that Trump was using the language of “Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.” 

She’s right. He’s telling every American what he plans to do. And I think often of Philip Roth’s brilliant and chilling alternative history of the United States in the 1940s. “There’s a plot afoot all right,” wrote Roth in the voice of one of his characters in The Plot Against America. “And I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear.”

The threat is open and clear. Our response should be as well - no handwringing, pearl clutching, or hiding away. None of this “I’m not political” malarkey. No time for third party tomfoolery or the latest vanity candidate. No sitting at home because of some imagined and narcissistic political purity, or a single issue that has you pissed off at Joe Biden. No screwing around.

And no panic either. This is eminently winnable.

Yes, I know: it’s always “the most important election of our lifetimes.” But this time, that’s true. There’s a year to go. Save liberal democracy.