Off-and-on since 2012, I have photographed and posted protest marches in New York City. Never have I seen a gathering this large. Curiously, I could find no on-line reference as to how many people marched in New York. However, Wikipedia called this “the largest one-day, nationwide display of public resistance against the second administration of President Donald Trump,” and it took place in over 1,400 locations in all 50 states. Among its organizers were MoveOn, Indivisible, Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, the Sierra Club, and the ACLU.
These first two photographs, taken from the New York Public Library while people were still assembling, provide some sense of crowd size. Demonstrators marched south from here, down 5th Avenue to Madison Square Park.
Crowd
Hands Off
The Hands Off organizers warned us: “They’re dismantling our country. They’re looting our government. And they think we’ll just watch. This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights—enabled by Congress every step of the way”…
… and it’s not only the Department of Education; the Hands Off warning continues, “they want to strip America for parts—shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid—all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.”
To be clear, the “they,” is not some vague referent to malevolent beings in the sky. It is, as the first quotation stated, Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies. To this, I would add, the frightened elected Republicans who enabled Trump and now find themselves threatened and cowed by their Hobson’s Choice.
Everything All At Once
In six simple words, this sign sums it up. So much has gone wrong, so fast.
In November, 2024, The Guardian Staff warned that abortion, immigration, the environment, gun laws and LGBTQ+ rights “are at stake with Trump and his allies back in power,” and the Staff goes on to enumerate eleven main threats, each with a link to a full article on that threat. Here are those threats:
“Idaho’s extreme abortion ban could go nationwide….Mass deportations could wreak havoc on immigrants….Trump could launch a ‘catastrophic’ rollback of LGBTQ+ rights….He will doom efforts to slow the climate disaster….Freedom of the press will be under threat….Sensible gun-safety policies could be revoked….US cities are at risk of military takeovers….Biden-era accomplishments like the Inflation Reduction Act would be repealed….Public lands would be opened up to oil and gas production….US protest movements could face serious crackdowns….He would bring instability to foreign policy.”
Chaos
Simply put, since Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, ours has become a country in chaos. In under 100 days, we have witnessed Pentagon backbiting, inexperienced loyalists filling every Cabinet position, ill-conceived trade wars, illegal deportations of migrants, a “mistaken” White House attack on Harvard University, our abandonment of Ukraine as an ally, a threat to annex Canada (our closest friend) as our 51st state, an illegal dismantling of the Internal Revenue Service, and massive funding cuts in every governmental agency in an effort to dismantle our civil service, to name just a few.
Stephen Collinson implies for CNN Politics that the chaos is intentional: “On one hand, exhausting crises on multiple fronts point to a potentially failed administration. But as Trump attempts to destroy governing structures at home and abroad, chaos is itself a marker of success.”
Chauncey De Vega, writing for Salon, is more specific about this chaos and its end-game: “Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America’s pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Vladimir Putin’s Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life.”
Trump’s Tariff War
On April 2, a day Donald Trump called “Liberation Day”, he announced a minimum 10% tariff on all US imports and higher tariffs on imports from 57 countries. This prompted retaliation from our trading partners and led to a stock market crash. Eleven days later, Abdallah Fayyad summed up the effects in a Vox article by saying, “Wall Street may be reeling, but it’s poor and working-class people who’ll be hurt by the Trump’s trade war.”
In an exhaustive analysis published two days before the Vox article, the Tax Foundation concluded that “The tariffs will reduce after-tax income by an average of 1.2 percent and amount to an average tax increase of $1,243 per US household in 2025. Our estimates of reductions in after-tax income may understate the harm to consumers by loss of choice as tariffs reach prohibitive rates.”
Besides this harm for consumers, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicts bad news for some producers: “The US sectors hit hardest would be agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.”
Democracy = We The People
What makes America great is democracy and its Democracy is defined as rule by the people.
Leon Bibb, the first African American primetime news anchor in Ohio, made the connection between Democracy, We the People, and Inclusivity in a 2020 statement celebrating July 4 on Cleveland’s station WKYC: “In 1776 when this nation was founded, ‘We The People’ did not include everyone. Racial minorities, women, and people without property could not vote. But through a series of constitutional amendments, ‘We The People’ has grown…Throughout generations, the Constitution has changed and has been strengthened. The ‘We The People’ of America have fought to make the constitution more inclusive and to strive toward a more perfect union. It takes work.”
The US Constitution is the foundational document of Democracy in the United States. Its Preamble begins with the words We the People. However, to slightly amend this sign, what Benjamin Franklin actually said on September 17, 1787 at the Constitutional Convention was “A republic, if you can keep it.” More on this later on in my post.
The Preamble: We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
We The People possess two special rights as citizens: to vote in elections and to run for office (whether local, state, or federal). If we are not “OK” with our government–and an inverted flag (as seen in the sign above) is understood as a code of dire distress–the First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees us the right to peacefully protest. Such protest–a part of our freedoms of speech and assembly–has been guaranteed to us ever since 1791 with the adoption of the first ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights.
As Leon Bibb’s WKYC statement notes (seen above), the definition of who constitutes We the People has expanded over the past two centuries to the benefit of our democracy. However, in 2010 the Supreme Court determined that corporations had a right to spend limitless amounts for or against candidates for public office in a case known as Citizens United vs FEC. Thus, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court gave corporations speech protections under the First Amendment, protections that had always been understood to be specifically directed toward individual self-expression.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that corporate spending on political advertising ought to be regulated as a business transaction. Corporations, after all are not We the People, they “are not actually members of it [our society].” As the Campaign Legal Center recently observed, Citizens United “has made it easier than ever for special interests like corporations and billionaires to funnel vast sums of money into our elections….drowning out the voices of everyday Americans.”
How can We the People compete when, as in the latest 2024 election, the top six donors (all who contributed only to the Republican Party) gave as follows: Elon Musk (Space X): $291,482,587; Timothy Mellon: $197,047,200; Miriam O. Adelson (Las Vegas Sands): $148,304,900; Richard & Elizabeth Uihlein (Uline Inc): $143,498,936; Kenneth C. Griffin (Citadel LLC): $108,402,284; Jeffrey S. and Janine Yass (Susquehanna International) $101,128,680?
People Power
In theory, the people have the power (of the vote) in our democracy, but if that basic power has been badly diluted by recent court decisions in favor of large corporations and a few billionaires, what power do they have, today?
One power is that people can run for office, corporations cannot. Another power is that they can protest (quite often directly against corporations), and as Harvard Professor Stephen Jones recently wrote, “peaceful protest promotes a sense of solidarity and citizen power through alliances among diverse social groups….[and] it is an educational process which combats passivity.”
America Welcomes All
This sign calls two things to my mind. One, America’s higher ideals, as embodied in Emma Lazarus’ poem of 1883 gracing our Statue of Liberty: …A mighty woman with a torch…Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome…cries she With silent lips ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me’…
The other, a reference to our historical attempts at social responsibility in the making of a welfare state. We don’t redistribute income amongst our citizens well, nor do we do it on the scale of the Europeans; but as Ryan Cooper, the managing editor of The American Prospect notes, our Social Security Administration, for the various faults of its benefits, sends out more than 52 million pension payments each month, “and the error rate is microscopic–something like 0.17 percent…That’s a foundation to build on.”
Our Immigrant Neighbors
Trump, and the Republican Party by a large margin, would have us believe that immigrants and refugees are a threat to our country. A majority of Americans (Democrats, Independents and others) “believe immigrants from other cultures have a mainly positive impact on American society.” In fact, according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “a majority of Americans believe immigrants are good for the country, oppose the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and want to offer these immigrants a pathway to gaining US citizenship.”
The Foreigner Among Us
This sign, using God’s words as found in Leviticus 19:34, calls for the full and open embrace of immigrants, or as the Old Testament Book refers to them, “the foreigner living among you.”
In doing so, it lays bare the hypocrisy of today’s Republican Party, given that 1) “most Republicans in every age group favor designating the U.S. a Christian nation” even though this flies in the face of the First Amendment of our Constitution, and that 2) when it comes to immigrants, “Republicans support a range of policies—including mass deportations and detention camps—that a majority of Americans oppose.”
Immigrant Rights
According to Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, immigrants “have the fundamental civil rights enshrined in the Constitution, including due process rights.” In other words, immigrants are accorded the five freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment as well as the protections to be found in the 5th and 14th Amendments.
Illegal Deportations
As of April 13, 2025, there have been more than 350 deportation flights this year, mainly to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. According to NBC News, ICE deported 11,000 migrants in February and more than 12,300 in March, and there are over 48,000 migrants in ICE detention as of mid-April.
Most of these people are not criminals and none were accorded their Fifth Amendment rights of due process. Many also were arrested in violation of their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and the right to assemble peacefully. Rümeysa Öztür, for example was one of 4 authors of this Op-Ed of March 26, 2024 to Tufts president Sunil Kumar regarding the issue of Palestinian genocide. Since when are we denied our personal opinions? And, if this Op-Ed were truly incendiary–which it was not–then all four authors would have been arrested; her arrest was selective and unconstitutional.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia graduate student, had been a critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. So, too, were a majority of Americans, according to a Gallup poll taken more than a year ago. He committed no crime other than holding an opinion that a minority found questionable.
And then, if mere words are not sufficient evidence for criminal punishment, might tattoos be more indictable? Neri Alvarado, a star baker in Lewisville, Texas, simply bore a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon dedicated to his autistic brother. For this “crime” he has now been disappeared in CECOT, the infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador. Also lost somewhere in CECOT is Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela. Jerce merely sported a tattoo of a crown on top of a soccer ball on his arm.
The meaning of tattoos is enigmatic, at best. First of all, they are personal, individual choices. Secondly, countering the ICE claim that certain tattoos are evidence of Tren de Agua gang affiliation, a sociologist who has studied violence in Venezuela for thirty years asserts that “Venezuelan gangs don’t identify themselves with tattoos.” What is actually happening is that ICE is using the tattoo as a way to justify an unconstitutional action that is actually about racism and ethnic cleansing.
Say Their Names
For those interested, an article in The Guardian by Joanna Walters provides specific information of some twenty victims of the Trump Administration and Republican-backed deportations.
Although Donald Trump dehumanizes immigrants most often, he also does so to Democrats and other political opponents. Possibly the most egregious example was his referring to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio as “eating the pets of the people that live there.” But then he also often refers to immigrants and opponents as vermin, human refuse, and people with poisoned blood. In an article titled “The Dehumanization Is the Point” in The Nation, author Sasha Abramsky enumerates what he refers to as the Musk-Trump administration’s “relentless efforts to dehumanize one group after another: immigrants, transgender Americans, DEI workers, Palestinians and their supporters, climate scientists, public health workers, and so on.”
Is dehumanization deadly, as this sign indicates? “Some of human history’s greatest atrocities—genocide, slavery, ethnic cleanings—are rooted in our ability to dehumanize people,” writer Dylan Walsh reminds us. And as sociologist Ronald Niezen cautions, “words that slander and strip people of their voices and humanity are often a first step toward discriminatory and violent policies. At its most extreme, speaking of people as dirty and polluting and saying they lack humanity makes it easier to kill them.”
Immigrants Made America
Of this woman’s four buttons, I focus on the upper left one on immigrants in America. Immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up about 27% of our civilian population. America has had anti-immigrant movements at least since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and most have connections to white supremacist movements.
Nevertheless, immigrants have truly been a force for good in America. One in every six tax dollars collected by our federal, state and local governments was paid by immigrant households. And, to cite just one example, undocumented immigrants in Georgia paid over $1 billion in taxes in 2022. In the same year, immigrants paid $194.5 billion to Social Security and $53.6 billion to Medicare, keeping these programs solvent even as they don’t benefit from them.
NOW
The National Organization of Women is our largest social welfare organization promoting gender equality, whether in social, political or economic life. Wikipedia provides as good an introduction to NOW as one can find anywhere.
War on Women
In a take-off on the 1983 single by singer Cyndi Lauper, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, this sign embraces the work of NOW. Its reference is the gender inequality that suppresses advancement of women and girls. Indivisible has listed thirty-one examples of what has generally been called the Republican War on Women in an article titled “Unmasking MAGA: Exploring the GOP’s War on Women This Women’s History Month.”
Beyond those 31 examples, the most recent “theatre of operation” in this “war” has to do with voter suppression of millions of women: see the article titled “House GOP tramples on women’s rights with passage of SAVE Act.”
War on Workers
The “War on Workers” is multi-pronged. For one, Elon Musk, “a vehemently anti-union billionaire…[has launched] an all-out war against the federal bureaucracy and workforce, and Trump and Musk have essentially treated the country’s 2 million-plus federal employees as if they were disposable.”
The staff of the AFSCME, the largest trade union of public employees in the United States, just put out a report identifying 100 ways that this new Trump Administration has hurt working people. This should be required reading for everyone.
Not only has the Trump Administration and its billionaire backers waged a war on working Americans; so, too, has the Republican Party. Author Jonathan P. Baird, provides a convenient list of the many ways that Republicans have attacked the working people of America, including the elimination of child labor protections in his article entitled “The Republican war on labor has never stopped.”
Disparaging Our Veterans
Nearly 6 in 10 military veterans voted for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Nevertheless, recently “Republicans launched an unprecedented assault on the Department of Veterans Affairs’s healthcare system which, in the words of veteran and member of Congress Chris Deluzio, “isn’t reform: it’s demolition and privatization.” Republicans also voted to end a mortgage-rescue program that has been the only thing enabling veterans to avoid foreclosure and keep their homes. Veterans need to stop voting for the Party that continually demeans them.
An even greater disparagement of our Veterans, however, comes from the very top: President Donald Trump. Some examples: in 2018, he refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, saying: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers;” on October 16, 2023, he said of our military officials: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies;” in 2017 he said: “You fucking generals. Why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?”; on December 4, 2020, in reference to the burial of US Army private Vanessa Guillén, he said, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!”; in August 2018, in reference to the lowering of flags to half-mast after war-hero and Senator John McCain’s death, he said “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser;” and, in reference to hosting disabled veterans at White House events, he said on September 30, 2019 “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
This is the President of the USA! This is the man who chose to play golf earlier this year instead of attending the repatriation of the bodies of four American soldiers who were killed in an accident in Lithuania. As Charles Wynder, an 84-year-old veteran, commented,”We veterans know he’s an idiot. He’s disrespectful to us, he looks down on us.”
LGBTQ Lives
Both Donald Trump and the Republican Party seek to marginalize and stigmatize LGBTQ+ people. For example, House Republicans embed anti-LGBTQ+ measures in nearly every bill under consideration, whenever possible. And, in March of this year, the Trump Administration canceled at least 68 grants intended to support LGBTQ+ health issues.
Racism Is Wrong
May it suffice to simply to provide the titles of two articles, one (in Vox) looking at the long history of Donald Trump’s racism and the other (by the Legal Defense Fund) on a fresh example of a racist executive order. The first, by German Lopez dates from August, 2020: “Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020.”
The second, from March 29, 2025, is titled “LDF Sounds Alarm on Trump Administration’s Attempt to Reinvigorate Pseudo-Scientific Racism and Erase Black People from American History.” In it, the President of the Legal Defense Fund states that Trump’s executive order “bears chilling parallels to the tactics of Nazi Germany, where history and cultural institutions were manipulated to serve the fascist goals of that regime and advance a narrative of racial superiority.”
Respect Our Allies
Even as Donald Trump makes outlandish threats to our allies and friends, among them Mexico, Canada, Panama, Greenland, Denmark, or Ukraine, possibly his most foolish action is his undermining of multilateralism, the abdication of U. S. leadership, and the denigration of the West that accompany his threat to abandon NATO and its seventy-five years of transatlantic security and cooperation. Giles Merritt, founder of the Brussels think tank, Friends of Europe, puts it this way: “Trump hasn’t left NATO, instead he’s trashed it….Donald Trump’s reversal of America’s post-World War II foreign policy to favour Vladimir Putin defies rational explanation.”
The big question that results from this Trump betrayal of our allies is How the United States Can Regain the World’s Trust?
Canada and Ukraine
Canadian Eduard Fischer exposes the foolishness of Trump’s attack: “Trump has declared an unprovoked economic war on my Country, Canada. He stated that his ultimate goal was for Canada to cede to annexation by the US….[but] this cherished 51st-state thing is total BS. The Republicans would never allow a bunch of northern liberals to have proportional representation in their Congress.”
Ukrainian Andriy Zagorodnyuk, after clarifying that “surrender was not an option…[because] everywhere Russia has prevailed, terror, lawlessness, and destruction have followed,” offers this convincing solution: “The United States has an opportunity to steer events in a much more positive direction—exerting pressure on Russia to end the war and to secure a fair settlement that protects Ukraine’s long-term security. A useful parallel is the experience of South Korea.”
The World Knows Better
If I Google this sign, I am led to WatchingAmerica.com, which compiles articles from around the world about the USA. Here are articles that WatchingAmerica compiled from the last two weeks of April: Cuba: Trump, Panama and the Canal; Nicaragua: Trump’s Trade War Will Not Make America ‘Great Again’; Canada: There’s a Terrifying Reason To Avoid Trump’s America; Colombia: The End of the Dollar’s Reign?; Japan: US Administration Losing Credibility 3 Months into Policy of Threats; India: Greenland: How To Handle America That Wants Everything; CHINA: White House Peddling Snake Oil as Medicine; Poland: Meloni in the White House. Has Trump Forgotten Poland?; FRANCE: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Game with the Federal Reserve; Saudi Arabia: Can Europe Still Rely on Washington’s Friendship?; Mauritius: Could Trump Be Leading the World into Recession?; South Africa: What Will Become of the Grass as the Elephants Fight on in the Tariff Wars Unleashed by Trump?; NIGERIA: Globalization Wars and the Last Man
Given how the Trump Administration has squandered our country’s credibility and ceded our position as a world leader, I suspect that there may be many fewer articles about America in the future. The world no longer respects us. From Colombia: who wants “a foreign policy that abandons historical alliances in favor of a transactional and unilateral logic”? From Australia: global finance “began abandoning US government bonds…an ominous sign that the world was losing faith in America.” From Hong Kong: “Trump’s embrace of autarky is an act of deliberate self-harm…akin to Brexit but on a global scale.” From Luxembourg: “The man in the White House is shooting himself in the right foot with his tariff policies; Europe’s response should kick the left foot out from under him.” From Egypt: The Trump tariffs are “reshaping Washington’s role on the global stage and creating a power vacuum that China and Russia are eager to fill.”
We Apologize
I am sure many people have seen, as have I, letters of apology written by Americans to social media followers, to people in other countries, and to newspapers around the globe.
History Cries for Us
I won’t predict how future historians will assess America’s actions of the next several years, but, if past is prologue, they can cite certain unsavory parallels from our own past history. Sam Popkin, a political science professor emeritus from UC San Diego, sees some parallels to Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), who demanded loyalty of his cabinet, replaced government workers with cronies, and ignored the Constitution.
Journalist and historian Adam Hochschild notes that “there are many ways today feels eerily similar to the Red Scare period of 1917 to 1921.”
Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University, is inclined to go back to pre-Woodrow Wilson, but, having interviewed Trump, he says the man knows nothing about earlier presidents in our history–Nixon was the only one that he liked. However, in the “selling of fear and paranoia,” Trump reminds Brinkley of historical figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University finds a parallel in Trump’s seeking of vengeance to Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. She also finds several connections to the 1890s and Trump, but says there is no historical precedent to his consolidation of power in the Executive branch.
These latter two historians can be heard on a video of March 20, 2025 by the Carnegie Endowment, “Assessing Trump’s Presidency…,” hosted by Aaron David Miller.
Our Future
Stewart Patrick, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, predicts “a dark vision of the future” under Trump’s America First policies. As he points out, largely due to U.S. actions, “the eight decades since World War II have witnessed the emergence and accretion of a thickening latticework of multilateral institutions, including international treaties, formal organizations, and informal frameworks, to manage global interdependence and provide governance over a mind-boggling array of spheres;” but, Patrick continues, “this is the world that Donald Trump seeks to destroy. His ambition is to replace the international rule of law with the law of the jungle.”
Listen to Science
In an open letter of late March, more than 1,900 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine alerted the country to the Trump administration attack on science: “We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.” The letter warned of a “wholesale assault on U.S. science, an effort that threatens the country’s health, economic development, national security and scientific preeminence.”
A cancer researcher and former director of the NIH said “No one has ever seen a [presidential] transition in which one of the most valuable parts of our government enterprise is being taken apart.”
Science Makes Us Great
From the very beginning, science has been a central component of our country. Our Constitution (Article I, Section 8) calls for the promotion of “the Progress of Science and useful Arts in a clause regarding Intellectual Property. Several of our founding fathers, among them Franklin and Jefferson, earned and demonstrated reputations as scientists; but only with the end of WWII did the United States became a leader in scientific discovery and technological innovation. This was due, on the one hand, to America’s special partnership between government, its universities and its industries; and, on the other hand, to the many immigrants who were lured here by our universities and our system. Among the better known of these immigrant scientists were Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Mario Molina, and Sergey Brin.
Today, however, given that “Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science” and the fact that immigration enforcement officers freely raid college campuses to arrest noncitizen students, we no longer benefit from another country’s “brain drain.” In fact, to just cite one example, a Rolling Stone article of April 24, 2025 is titled, “Scientists Are Fleeing the U.S. as Trump Cuts Funding.” To add insult to injury, other countries will now pick up the slack (as the USA used to do): “In France, lawmakers have introduced a bill to create a special status for ‘scientific refugees’.”
Breathe Free
The weakening of pollution safeguards under Donald Trump’s two administrations has been steady, if not egregious, and now he is also dismantling the steps taken by the Biden administration to curb pollution. For examples of some of this, see the Climate Action Campaign‘s recent essay, “Trump’s 100 Days 100 Harms Tracker.”
Warned
How and when were we warned? We were warned in April of 2023, when the Heritage Foundation published its ninth “Mandate for Leadership” series, titled Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project). This document dictates each and every Executive Order [EO] that Donald Trump has signed over the past 100 days. It embraces the unitary executive theory that gives the president total control of the executive branch of government. It proposes the dismantling of our government bureaucracy, the replacing of our democracy with an autocracy, and it would clearly threaten our civil liberties, the Constitutional separation of powers, the Constitutional separation of church and state, the rule of law, and much. much more.
Given that it is some 900 pages long, I recommend consulting Wikipedia for an accessible presentation of its many details. Project 2025 is the “playbook” for everything that Donald Trump, his cabinet, and Congressional Republicans are consulting as they destroy the democracy we have enjoyed for our entire lives.
DOGE
The iconography of this sign: Elon Musk received “The Chainsaw for Bureaucracy” (his words) from the right-wing populist president of Argentina, Javier Milei, at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland (February 20), waving it around as the emblem of his out-of-control dismantling of American government.
DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, is the Orwellian monster created by billionaire Elon Musk and established by a Donald Trump executive order of January 20, 2025.
Elon Musk is an unelected, un-vetted (by the Senate), non-governmental advisor to the President who, with a staff of young men with tech backgrounds and no government experience, has been allowed to access our government data systems in multiple federal agencies such as USAID, CFPB, HSS, SSA. The last of these listed, the Social Security Administration, affects every person in the country. Its data is extremely personal and–until now–kept confidential and highly protected by federal law.
Musk and the Trump administration claim that DOGE has discovered significant fraud, but no claim has held up under scrutiny. What DOGE is really doing as it gains “access to untold terrabytes of data” is providing the Trump administration with everything “the government knows about a given individual, whether a civil servant or an undocumented immigrant, in one easily searchable place.”
Elon Musk: Criminal
Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel of litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, concludes that Musk and DOGE have been carrying out “sweeping lawless power throughout the executive branch. And this is really not legally permissible…there’s just no legal authority for them to undertake these actions.”
What Musk and DOGE are doing is not only illegal. They are also bilking the government of millions of dollars. ProPublica, for example, found that “more than $39 million has been earmarked to DOGE in the Trump administration’s first month.” Moreover, three young, inexperienced DOGE staffers, “Lewin, Schutt and Cavanaugh were earning slightly more than $167,000, $195,200 and $120,500 per year, respectively.”
In a 2024 interview, Elon Musk said that he takes ketamine–“every other week or something like that”–for depression, saying that the drug “is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind.” Normally, ketamine is used in hospitals as a dissociative anesthetic.
It was evident that an unelected billionaire had been given free reign to dismantle our democracy and government by the beginning of February. Here are the first sentences of a Mother Jones article of February 3:
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants airplanes to fall out of the sky. But after Musk pushed out the head of the FAA and Donald Trump gutted the agency’s safety board, and Musk attempted to push air traffic controllers to quit, the worst domestic airline disaster since 2001 occurred.
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody in their right mind wants him and his edgelord flunkies rooting around Treasury Department databases that contain private Social Security and Medicare data for all US citizens.
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants him to use Treasury payment data to potentially gain an advantage over his competitors.
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk…”
Nonpartisan Watchdogs Are Essential
Inspectors General [IG] are our government watchdogs. Their task is to detect waste, fraud and abuse in their various agencies, which they do to great effect. For example, in 2019, they “saved Americans roughly $29.23 billion in inefficient or potentially fraudulent spending.”
Because the IGs had to investigate unethical and illegal conduct by at least eight of Donald Trump’s appointees in his first term for, the President fired IGs across seventeen federal agencies by the end of his first week in office this year. These firings, whether legal or not, were done without the required congressional notice, and now there will be little accountability or oversight in regard to the activities of our executive branch of government.
Stop the Cuts
Elon Musk and DOGE have cut at least 24,000 people so far from the federal workforce, and about 75,000 have accepted a Trump administration offer to resign (and receive pay until September 30).
In the words of Max Steir, president of the Partnership for Public Service, “It’s unquestionably clear that they are firing people willy-nilly and are disrupting government services without any understanding of the consequences….It’s sheer reckless behavior in the public sector because real people get hurt.”
Stop the Raids
During Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] arrested more than 66,000 undocumented immigrants around our country in raids on businesses, private residences and sidewalk/parking lot stakeouts. The agents often don’t have or don’t produce a judicial warrant, they often destroy private property unnecessarily, and, in one broadly-publicized incident, they destroyed the home of an innocent Oklahoma family, took all their valuable possessions, including cash, and disappeared.
ProPublica has reported that the enforcement agents apparently have arrest quotas and the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition note that fear and intimidation is a major goal of these raids, which include multiple agencies: ICE, FBI, ATF, DEA, DHS, and HSI. They are an egregious abuse of power and are “disrespectful to the very agents who are sworn to protect public safety.”
Some May Die
The iconography of this sign: The picture we see is of John Lithgow as the evil Lord Farquaad from the 2001 DreamWorks film, Shrek. Lord Farquaad is addressing his knights before a tournament, the winner of which must go on a quest: “Should the winner fail to return, the runner-up shall take his place, and so on and so forth… Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Many people have transferred the callous indifference embodied by these words to the words and actions of Elon Musk and elected Republicans. Mark Moulitsas, the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, wrote as follows on March 31, 2025: “I’ve had a challenging time trying to wrap my brain around Elon Musk’s plan to pay for a massive tax cut for himself with the deaths of those he apparently finds unworthy of food or medical care. Is he trying to break a mass murder record? Is this some kind of competition for worst human on the planet?”
Also, let’s not forget that, in a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan on February 28, Musk said: “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” In other words, by his mistaking a hard-wired brain function [empathy] for some sort of emotional weakness, Elon Musk rejects a major Foundation of Civilization.
Our elected Republicans, however, appear to share Musk’s antipathy to empathy–here is what Senator Chris Murphy tells us after Republicans voted down every Democratic amendment on the budget resolution for fiscal year 2025: “The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children….It sounds an awful lot like what Lord Farquaad said, ‘Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make’.”
The Trump administration wants to eliminate all government funded arts and culture agencies. On March 27, Trump released an EO (executive order) under the Orwellian name, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. According to the Legal Defense Fund, this EO “advances pseudo-scientific ideas on race.” Janai Nelson, president of the Legal Defense Fund, says this EO is a “direct attack on institutions designed to tell the truth about our nation’s history…[a] most jarring and dangerous attempts to erase the true history that shapes our nation…. [and] It bears chilling parallels to the tactics of Nazi Germany, where history and cultural institutions were manipulated to serve the fascist goals of that regime and advance a narrative of racial superiority.”
Author and race historian Ibram X. Kendi, calls this “a literal attack on Black America itself.”
Given that J. D. Vance has been put in charge of removing “improper ideology” from all areas of the Smithsonian Institution, I suspect that we will find, in his and in other Republican’s statements, parallels to Nazi Germany’s campaign against degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) and its promotion of a focus on the “blood and soil” of authentic Germany, of racial purity, of Militarism and of obedience.
Colombia Has Failed
The iconography of this sign: Student demonstrations and campus encampments in response to the Israeli military destruction of Gaza and in support of Gaza’s besieged Palestinian population, received national coverage in the spring of 2024. Because of this, Columbia was the first university to be targeted by the Trump administration this year, ostensibly for promoting antisemitism. Besides pulling $400 million in federal grants from Columbia, Trump officials demanded that the university put three departments (Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies) under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years, and more.
Columbia University just happened to be the first academic institution so threatened. But, by mid-March, the Trump administration challenged more than fifty universities over what it alleged is racial discrimination and demanded that they eliminate all DEI programs. Alan M. Garber, the president of Harvard University told his community on April 21 that “we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”
Following Harvard, over 200 universities now oppose the Trump administration’s educational policies, and this explains the sign. Any historian or student of history understands that anti-intellectualism is a defining trait of fascism and that divide and conquer is a major tactic of fascism and authoritarian rule. Columbia forgot its own teaching of history. Harvard and so many other universities did not allow themselves to be separated, divided. As Professor Dominique Baker of the University of Delaware writes: negotiating with Trump is “a fool’s errand….[but] there are still boards of institutions that believe that if they just give the administration something, it will leave them alone. Generally, I find that those people are not scholars of history who understand what happens when you capitulate or collaborate with authoritarian takeovers of countries.”
Killing Social Security
The Social Security Act [SSA] was signed by FDR in August of 1935, and regular monthly benefit payments began in January of 1940. It is an insurance program for the elderly, surviving spouses and a federal disability insurance program that serves some 73 million Americans. In June, 2024, the average monthly retirement benefit was $1,869.77. Disregard the lies of Elon Musk and many Republicans who say Social Security is a scam or a ponzi scheme; it is an extremely efficient system and, in the words of President Joe Biden, “a sacred promise” to 73 million Americans. Its payment accuracy is 99.7%. Its administrative costs are a mere 0.5%. And “it has successfully paid benefits for over 85 years.”
Sadly, conservatives and Republicans have “been trying to destroy Social Security since its inception,” for two reasons, according to Alex Lawson of Social Security Works. First: a privatized SS will enrich many insurers, and so, “a lot of vultures stand to benefit from privatization.” Second: conservatives “believe that individuals should be responsible for their own fates [and have] an ideological opposition to government social welfare programs.”
However, because 87% of Americans approve of and support SS, the conservative right knows it must first destroy the program so as to convince the public that SS is doomed to collapse; and this is what Trump, Musk and DOGE have set out to do. Martin O’Malley, a former SSA commissioner, clarifies this: They are trying to “kneecap its ability to serve the public. They have to do that, because 80 percent of Americans believe that Social Security should be strengthened and made better. So they can’t really rob it, until they wreck it and sour enough of the public against it.”
Senator Patty Murray, Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, puts it more directly: “Frank Bisignano [Trump’s pick to lead SSA] is all-in on Trump and Elon’s mission to break Social Security so they can privatize it.”
What Has Become of the GOP?
For various reasons, elected Republicans backed Donald Trump in 2016 and are now too intimidated by him to counter anything he says or does. In the words of former chief Republican Strategist, Stuart Stevens: “What happened within the Republican Party in 2016 was a repeat of the rise of national socialism in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany….the Republican establishment’s acceptance of Mr. Trump echoed the German establishment’s acceptance of Hitler.”
Amna Nawaz, PBS NewsHour anchor states: “I don’t think we have seen anything like this in American history, just a complete collapse of a party.” Economist Thomas Palley asserts that “the Republican Party struck a Faustian bargain whereby it traded integrity and decency for tax cuts and a corporate dominated economy.” David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, maintains that “the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections.” Timothy Noah, author and writer for the New Republic declares that “the Republican Party walked off the field. We have arrived at the end of GOP ideology.”
The title of an article by Robert Reich (one-time Republican and then Secretary of Labor under President Clinton) expresses what we all should feel: “The death of the Republican party is not a tragedy to be celebrated.”
But to the extent that titles are revealing, here are a few titles of books published just since 2016: Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections...(Lewis/2016); How the Right Lost Its Mind (Sykes/2017); American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War…(Alberta/2019); Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump (Rothkopf/2020); It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (Stevens/2020); Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists…(Christie/2021); Crackup: The Republican Implosion...(Popkin/2021); American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (Corn & Cohen/2022); The Republican Evolution: From Governing Party to Antigovernment Party, 1860–2020 (Janda/2022); The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Millbank/2022); Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party...(Peters/2022); The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy (Stevens/2023); Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past (Benen/2024); Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy (Cohen/2024); The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party (Tackett/2024); Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism (White/2024).
Ever since Donald Trump issued his first EO this January (and for that matter, even before) there has been much talk about a Constitutional Crisis and a flurry of examples of how the President is acting in ways that completely disregard our Constitution. In the words of Michael Waldman (constitutional lawyer and president of the Brennan Center for Justice), “Just weeks in, the Trump administration has violated rules, laws, and the Constitution….their [Trump and Musk] actions violate the law — either the Constitution, or statutes, or both.”
Rather than attempt to offer more examples of the obvious, I encourage you to read one article (actually a blog post) by a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, Kim Lane Scheppele. It’s title is “Trump’s Counter-Constitution ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’.” This is the best and most informative single piece I have read on the subject.
Rule of Law
The Rule of Law as defined by the World Justice Project “is a durable system of laws, institutions, norms, and community commitment that delivers four universal principles: accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice.” Under the Rule of Law, everyone, including government officials, is accountable and subject to it.
According to Representative Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), “The Trump Administration is breaking the law and undermining the Constitution every day by illegally stealing funds for the programs that help American families and businesses, firing career civil servants without cause, and dismantling agencies created by acts of Congress.” Another Congresswoman, Grace Meng (NY-06) agrees, and says that “Restoring law and order starts with respecting the Rule of Law itself and the sacredness of our Constitution. This Administration has failed to do so since day one.”
The Republican lawyer and jurist, John Michael Lutting states, outright, that “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America….[even as] the constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment.” Judge Luttig then warns that Donald Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, ‘No more.’”
THAT is why all these people are marching, are demonstrating, are saying HANDS OFF!
The Coup-o-meter tells us that “President Trump is working to disempower Congress and the federal courts, seize control of independent agencies, and stifle free speech.” It concludes by saying: “A coup is in progress, but has not been consolidated.”
The political scientist and economist C. J. Polychroniou warned us in February that “an actual neo-fascist coup is now underway. Trump and his Nazi buddy Elon Musk are trying to destroy civil society by dismantling the State.”
For a more nuanced understanding of coups and their various resolutions, I suggest the Alex Norris article in a February issue of Liberal Currents. “What we are seeing from the Trump administration,” he writes, “is usually called a ‘self-coup’ or autogolpe.”
No Kings
In several instances, Donald Trump has posted doctored images of him as a king, or claimed himself as king, and certainly in so many ways in this post we have examples of him acting as if he were a king operating without any checks or balances. To quote a life-long Republican and great jurist, Michael Luttig, “The 47th president seems to wish he were king—and he is willing to destroy what is precious about this country to get what he wants. The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king.”
Judge Luttig ended with these words: He [Trump] will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
The way We The People say NO MORE is to demonstrate on June 14, Flag Day, on which seventeen organizations are partnering to hold peaceful demonstrations all around the USA on what is being called NO KINGS DAY, a Nationwide Day of Defiance.
The iconography of this sign: 47, of course, alludes to Donald Trump, our 47th president. 86 means “throw out,” “eject,” “get rid of,” of “cancel.” It is a standard term taken from the restaurant business.
Not My President
Donald Trump, of course, is the president of every American. On the other hand, it was in reference to Donald Trump’s first election that “Not My Presidents Day” was celebrated on Presidents’ Day (the federal holiday held on Washington’s Birthday) on February 20, 2017 in dozens of cities throughout the USA.
What made Trump different, and what led people to say of him, “not my president,” was his rejection of political norms, the un-codified “practices Americans had come to expect from their leaders,” as stated by UNC history professor Benjamin Waterhouse. Presidents don’t belittle their opponents and call them names; Trump does. Presidents certainly don’t accuse the opposition of treason; Trump does. Presidents absolutely don’t attack women (over half of the population) and call them childish, demeaning names; Trump does.
And so we have Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Crooked Hillary…And among those he accused of treason we have Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats, news media (esp. New York Times), James B. Comey (FBI), Andrew McCabe (FBI), Adam B. Schiff (D-CA), or a Black Lives Matter leader…And among women of note we have Mika Brzezinski, “a neurotic and not very bright mess,” “crazy and very dumb,” “bleeding badly from a face lift;” Maxine Waters (D-CA), “extraordinarily low-I.Q.;” Omarosa Manigault Newman (his former aide), “wacky and deranged,” “a crazed. crying lowlife;” Megyn Kelly (journalist), “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever;” Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive US Senators, has a nasty mouth;” and of course there is “horseface” Stormy Daniels and “Kamala is mentally impaired” Harris.
Whose president talks like this? What president talks like this?
Lying
Everyone knows that Donald Trump lies, even those who serve or served him. In 2016, Ted Cruz (R-TX) said “The man is a pathological liar;” and Michael Cohen (his fixer and former lawyer) now calls him “a cheat, a liar, a fraud…” In January of 2021, the Washington Post published an article titled “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.”
But in the same month that the Post offered its running total of the president’s lies, CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale selected Trump’s 15 most notable lies. These range from his first example, a silly, innocent claim that it didn’t rain during his inaugural address (it did) and only afterward did it pour, to more consequential lies. One of these, an early 2020 “family of lies,” assured Americans that the Coronavirus was “equivalent to the flu,” “totally under control,” and “disappearing.” In the end, these lies contributed to more than 386,000 Americans dying from the virus. Another, “the most depressing lie: Trump won the election” was “ludicrous nonsense. But to millions of deluded Americans, it’s the truth. And it has now gotten people killed.”
It’s too early to tell what the consequences of Trump’s second term in office will be, but David Smith, the Guardian bureau chief in Washington, noted that “his first week in office brought a cascade of false and misleading claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his election defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection that followed.”
Best that we heed our own inner voice and adhere to the truth.
How Does Trump Hate the USA?
HATE, surely, has long been associated with Donald Trump. Who can forget his call for the execution of five innocent black and Latino boys who were accused of raping a white woman in Central park in 1989? In full page advertisements in New York newspapers, he wrote, above his signature, “I want to hate these muggers and murderers.” Much later, in response to his inflammatory rhetoric during and after his first campaign for president, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) made note of what many commentators called The Trump Effect: a surge in hate crimes across the United States. SSRN research found evidence that Donald Trump’s election “validated” his rhetoric “and fueled the hate crime surge.”
It’s ironic that today, seven years later, a new Trump Effect has been to turn political elections in many countries around the world away from conservative and autocratic candidates and towards liberal and center-left candidates.
But, back to the topic of HATE. Even a life-long Republican like Mitt Romney warned that Trump’s presidency would lead to “trickle-down racism.” But if Trump’s obvious promotion of hate is undeniable, how is that related to statements that Trump hates America (or hates the USA)? Last year, John Conway (director of strategy for Republican Voters Against Trump) stated “Donald Trump is somebody who fundamentally hates America. He says we’re garbage.”
Also last year, Will Marshall (Progressive Policy Institute president) wrote an article for The Hill titled “Trump’s slandering America as a chaotic hellscape only he can rule.” He concludes with these words: “If you don’t think Trump detests the nation he aspires to lead, you haven’t been listening.”
Indeed, you haven’t been listening–or reading–for the past five years when a major article in the New York Times by Republican David Brooks stated the obvious: “Trump’s vision is radically anti-American. The real American idea is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal.”
Fiddling at Golf
Here are a few article titles to set the stage for this sign: “While Trump slashes jobs, his golf trips are costing taxpayers millions,” The Guardian, March 17, 2025; “As stock market continues plummeting over tariffs, Trump spends the day at his golf course,” AP Politics, April 4, 2025; “Lawmaker Blasts Trump Billing Taxpayers $30M for His Golf Trips: ‘If We’re Gonna Talk About Efficiency…’,” People Magazine, April 9, 2025; “‘Completely out of touch’: golf and dinners for ‘king’ Trump as economy melts down,” The Guardian, April 12, 2025; “Trump’s golf habit has county at financial breaking point: ‘We are not being reimbursed’,“ Patriot News (PA), May 18, 2025.
Donald Trump likes to play golf. He also owns several golf courses, and when he plays on these, the government still pays all expenses. For example, a March, 2020 two-day stopover to play at his resort in Scotland cost the American taxpayer more than $1.1 million.
As David Smith (bureau chief of The Guardian) wrote in the above-cited article of April 12: Donald Trump’s “casual attitude as markets fall suggests man detached from anxieties of ordinary voters,” and this detachment provides the historical connection to Emperor Nero. There were no “fiddles” in 64 A.D., when 70% of Rome burned, leaving half its population homeless; but the historian, Tacitus, wrote of a rumor that Nero, from his villa in Antium, sang of this destruction as he watched. Nero exhibited a detachment similar to Trump’s, in Smith’s assessment.
Furthermore, associating Trump to Nero has relevance far beyond golfing and fiddling (or singing). Both used scapegoats to avoid responsibility: Nero blamed the Christians for the fire; Trump blamed Biden for the stock market slump following his tariffs. On top of that, both were inclined to take personal advantage of the misfortune of others: Nero build his Golden Palace and pleasure gardens on the land the fire razed; Trump, in response to the leveling of Gaza by the Israeli military, “has proposed expelling 2.1 million Palestinians from Gaza and transforming the enclave into a ‘Riviera’ that would be owned by the United States.”
Trump as Dictator
Most of us recall that, in December 2023 in Iowa, Donald Trump assured Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be dictator, “except for Day 1.” The AP quoted the familiar part of Trump’s answer as “No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.” However, besides closing the border and opening up leases for oil drilling, Donald Trump did not deny the truly heinous and dictatorial part of Hannity’s question. Hannity had asked: “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Trump responded: “Except for Day 1.”
That should have made the hair stand up on everyone’s head, had they heard, or understood, Hannity’s question.
Given Trump’s many actions over the past several months, among them the firing of hundreds of government workers, the pardoning of the January 6 Insurrectionists, the imposing of tariffs on most foreign countries, the removing of protections from transgender students, the illegal deporting of migrants, these all appear to be the actions of a dictator. Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) said as much on January 28: “Donald Trump is Making Good on his Promise to be a Dictator on Day One.” And a recent poll shows that a majority of Americans consider Donald Trump to be a “dangerous dictator.”
Two things have enabled Donald Trump to behave like a dictator. One, he willingly embraces a long-held push by conservative Republicans for the unitary executive theory which argues, speciously, that the president has total control over the operations of all federal agencies. Two is the Supreme Court decision in 2024, Trump v. United States, which grants presidents immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office.
Remembering the Purpose of WWII
As someone born just prior to the start of WWII and subsequently brought up and educated in the 1950s-early 1960s, I can’t imagine how any American would ever need to make signs like these. These two fathers, who stood up to Hitler and fought in Iwo Jima, evidently returned home to create families. But 407,319 didn’t return and another 671,278 returned wounded and maimed. Yet all of them, men and women, fought and sacrificed to preserve Democracy. All took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The success of their commitment against naziism, fascism and dictatorship placed America “at the summit of the world,” in the words of Winston Churchill.
I grew up, as did so many millions, having reaped the benefit of their gift and dedication: middle-class prosperity, a good education, an expansive pop-culture, the energy of rock-and-roll, the chrome, fins and horsepower of 1950s cars, the freedom of the open road, best characterized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (and I could go on, ad infinitum). This is the America that emerged from our victory against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.
We must never forget the freedoms we enjoy today, nor the freedoms we still must fight to achieve. To quote Frederick Douglass in his 1871 address at Arlington National Cemetery: “Dark and sad will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors….They died for their country.”
Putin’s Poodle
Lee Hockstader, Washington Post foreign affairs columnist, wrote a piece this February, titled: “Europe, appalled, watches as Trump becomes Putin’s poodle.” It’s an appellation often applied to Donald Trump as wannabe dictator. Of course, we all remember an earlier, similar term–from the final presidential debate of October 20, 2016–Hillary Clinton calling Trump “Putin’s Puppet.”
But one revealing analyses of the asymmetrical relationship between Trump and Putin can be found in the work of Andrey Babitskiy who writes, “Having spent most of my life watching Putin’s Russia take shape, I recognize familiar patterns in American politics today.” I recommend his recent article in Coda, “The Shadow Puppet: A Russian’s Warning about Trump.”
Trump As Fascist
Here is John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff during Donald Trump’s first term: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” Kelly then said of his former boss, “He’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators. He has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist, for sure.”
Many other historians and political analysts would agree. Among them, Timothy Snyder, John Ripton, Peter Bergen, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
The British journalist and writer, James O’Brien concurs and I transcribe from his YouTube video: “I think Donald Trump is a fascist. I think that the evidence is absolutely incontrovertible. I think its undeniable. I think the examples are legion.”
For a thorough analysis with examples of the ways that the present Trump administration imitates fascism, however, I recommend the article by senior politics writer for Rolling Stone, Tom Dickinson, “A Guide to Trump’s Fascist Presidency–From Ignoring Judge to Erasing History.”
But, possibly, the most shocking revelation is a YouTube video (6:54) that was recently put out as a New York Times Opinion piece titled, “We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S.” Its authors are three Yale professors, major academics: Jason Stanley (Professor of Philosophy), Marci Shore (Professor of History), Timothy Snyder (Professor of History). The American brain drain begins!!!
Resist
Robert Reich, U. C. Berkeley professor of public policy and former Secretary of Labor offers ten things one can do to resist. All are worthy and useful. However…
…Timothy Noah, “Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance,” The New Republic, March 27, 2025, gives us the most complete statement of actions and most amazing list of sources and resources I have ever seen. It contains too much for me either to list or to select. I encourage everyone to look through it. Effective resistance starts here.
Aucun Commentaire
Spectacular collection of signs, people, and explanations. I’ve forwarded to my friends, family, and colleagues.
Outstanding collection of photographs and historical data. Almost worthy of a
Ph. D..
Thanks, Mark:
I ended up reading probably over 100 articles as I sought relevant comments on each sign. Of those articles, Timothy Noah, “Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance,” The New Republic, March 27, 2025 is really useful for everyone wondering what she/he might do.
Tyko,
What incredible work you did!
Plus reading all those articles. If not in the hundred, here is one more:
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/trumps-attack-on-the-american-mind-1b0?r=1iuu9f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Congratulations, Tyko!
You created a masterful contemporary history of the unprecedented degradation of American ethics and mores as well as the threat to our constitutional rule of law. And your photographs are so very to the point, as well as beautiful.
Thank you very much.
PS: Tyko, did you know that before getting my MD at Columbia, I studied Government and American history as an undergraduate at Cornell and then got an MA and was ABD at NYU, was a Congressional Fellow and worked for Walter Mondale? I’ve been strongly anti-Trump for more than forty years since I learned that Trump was a client and acolyte of Roy Cohn.
Congratulations, Tyko!
This is a masterful work of contemporary history. You excellently documented Trump’s degradation of American ethics and mores as well as his onslaught to our constitutional rule of law. And your photographs are so very to the point as well as beautiful.
Thank you very much.
PS: I don’t think you know that before getting my MD at Columbia, I studied Government and American history at Cornell, got an MA and was an ABD in Political Science at NYU, was a Congressional Fellow and worked for Walter Mondale. I’ve been strongly anti-Trump for more than forty years since I learned he was a client and acolyte of Roy Cohn.