This is a message to political moderates who may think that dictatorships can be worked around and tolerated. It is also a message to advocates of democracy over autocracy to sharpen their message. How Trump has seized control of the GOP, the Supreme Court, the House, using the tools of fear and retribution, threatening loss of power position and income, is instructive. Calling this names like fascism may only inflame. Should Trump be called a wannabe dictator? Yes. That is fair. He has called himself one for a day.Trump is making inroads in convincing ordinary persons that dictatorships are a good thing for them. 74% of Republicans approve of Trump being a dictator for a day. Fools. Trump only needs one day to sign the executive orders already prepared by the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to get his dictatorship ball rolling. Democrats need to hit that BS head on and they have not. The message to those willing to ignore Trump's promise to be a dictator is you lose control of who governs you, and in a dictatorship (or an autocracy), your vote is meaningless, and you lose your ability to voice any dissent if you feel you are treated unfairly. To survive, you learn to keep your mouth shut and your head down. The rare birds are Navalany and Liz Cheney, willing to fall on their swords for advancing their beliefs, sounding alarms, and even crying from the ranks, "The emperor has no clothes." Those are lessons from those once in powerful positions.
Democrats need to get voters who still have the power through the ballot to imagine how it would be for ordinary people to be treated if that is how Trump gets power and runs the government. It is also a message for those with some power now seeking favors and help from a government, local, state, or national public policy issues, but the impact of living in a dictatorship as an ordinary person needs greater emphasis. However, to expand that view to the swing voters mulling choices over, and weighing the pros and cons in their own lives, I fear democracy v autocracy still sounds poli sci abstract and they do not grasp what it is like to be an ordinary person in a dictatorship. Independent thinkers have no place in a MAGA land. So imagine Trump running the country the same way he has taken over and controlled the GOP, the Supreme Court, and the House of Representatives while in exile at Mar-A-Lago.
How bad a dictatorship can be for ordinary citizens is rarely understood by those with no familiarity or personal experience except for Orwell's novels and dystopian movies. Few like me have had personal experiences with dictatorships or know those who have. It has touched my own family. One example comes to mind of what happened when my late husband, Dr. Mike Muftic, was a medical student in Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, and at that time led by dictator Comrade Josip Broz Tito. The Tito regime had been in power for nearly ten years. It was a communist regime allegedly dedicated to all people being economically equal, a revolt from the time of the King and privileged classes. Milovan Djilas, a comrade in arms and close friend of Comrade Tito, was considered to be the ideological guru of the regime and, at one time, Tito's successor. He was a dedicated believer in Marxist ideology in its purest form. The dictatorship of the proletariat to him meant that the workers were in charge, not the apparatchiks, not the bureaucrats. He had become appalled at fellow high government officials and overbearing government red tape administrators who were becoming the new privileged lords, chauffeured Mercedes-driven, with better housing, and vacationing at seaside resorts on the government's dime. Djilas wrote a book, "The New Class," to express his criticism. Mike arrived for the class at medical school as the communist party commissar in charge of keeping the faith by medical school students was praising Djilas' book and righteously criticizing the privileged class. In response, though, Comrade Tito was not pleased, saw it as a threat to his power since he relied on support by those he favored and to who he gave employment and perks, the new class, and put out the word. The next morning, the same communist party commissar was holding forth, repeating Tito's criticism and telling the crowd of students around him how terrible Djilas was. It was heresy, and this was and is the party line the students had to repeat Djilas was wrong. Failure to utter the party line could lead to loss of future desired hospital appointments, loss of choice professors, or worse. Djilas spent years in prison. To get ahead, you had to repeat the party line in public and in private because there were loyalists everywhere who would report you to their upstream handlers. Criticisms of government stupidity and incompetence were disguised in ethnic jokes, never faulted to the Boss, of course.. The one I heard often was this: Only a dumb ethnic like a (fill in the blank)would have 3 people screw in a light bulb, for example. (One to hold the bulb, one to hold the ladder, and one to turn the ladder to screw the bulb in) The only safe topic was sports. All media, TV, and print were government-controlled and repeated Tito's line, up to date. Any information to the contrary came from foreign short-wave radio, Voice of America, or US Armed Forces radio, which managed to avoid jamming. (China has become masterful in today's domestic cyber content control) .Dr. Mike, not yet 30 years old, defected from the Yugoslavian dictatorship of Tito, emigrated to the US, and eventually became a US citizen and even a Democratic National Committeeman. His greatest pleasure in living in a democracy was his ability to speak his mind. To him, that was the meaning of freedom.
That is how it works in a dictatorship and in even in MAGA/GOP land now. Trump has already seized control of the state, local, and national GOP structures. Treasured members are expected to be bobbleheads nodding only up and down in the affirmative and to repeat the party line of the day whether or not they agree. This past week, we saw it in action when the RNC attorney , Charlie Spies,who dared question whether the 2020 election was stolen, was purged. Sen. Tim Scott refused to answer the question if he would accept the 2024 results if Trump lost. Now imagine Trump wins in November and carries forward his plans to replace all advisors and staff, cabinet heads, and department heads with his bobbleheads who only nod up and down,"yes, Boss." The way for ordinary people to succeed yet object to what the government is doing is to keep their heads down and shut up. They just might not get the job promotion they seek or to influence a policy they deplore.
The view of the threatening Trump dictatorship still has meaning and relevance for those who feel the federal government touches their lives. They get it. Frustration with the Supreme Court, now in the hands of a supermajority of MAGA, is another example of how MAGA has taken over the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. Lower courts may rule one way but find themselves at a dead end in the MAGA Supreme Court. MAGA has also gotten control of the Government purse strings in the House, as the vote on Ukraine illustrated and the current attempt to oust the Speaker who is not MAGA enough. Now, Trump wants to control every aspect of the executive branch, including what he calls those who are not loyal to him, the civil servants of the"deep state". In so doing, he openly stated he would use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies and deny broadcast licenses to those he considers oppposition press. Harrassment, fear of prosecution of those who would otherwise be proven innocent in a court of law, is enough. What this means for all Americans is to shut up and keep your heads down if you have a beef about Trump's execution of his agenda. You have lost your voice; your vote is useless because the newly minted dictator controls both the message, the election process, and the execution of public policy.
Update:July 2024 moved to part of a July 16 3024 posting, too. Project 2025 is the vehicle that gives Trump the ability to be a dictator beginning on Day One: By executive order, he will try to replace the entire executive branch with the spoils system of those pledged loyalty to Trump, not to the constitution. He tried it when he was in office using schedule F, told it was illegal, and now, he can get a way with it thanks to his friends on the Supreme Court.If he commits a crime, trampling laws, ignoring them, the Supreme Court has given him immunity from prosecution for committing them during official acts (now already underway in overturning every jury trial that found Trump liable or guilty for acts he committed during his presidency). If he sees demonstrations, even peaceful ones, objecting to his policies, he will use violence to crack down on them, as he tried to do when he tried to force the military to sed in their active troops, summoned known violent militias to intimidate Congress on January 6, and called neo Nazis fine people who mimic Nazi Germany's violence in the 1930's.
An excellent bio ofy Djilas is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milovan_Djilas
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rnc-purges-election-lawyer-saying-154146265.html
A slanted Rasmussen poll claims the GOP is winning the battle for who would be better for democracy: Trump wins Democrats lose another argument: Who’s better for democracy? (msn.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdeuagPSVQc
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