Need for Anticipatory Strategies for Oncoming Trumpism
Image by Tim Gouw.
Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows:
The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new bosses, most of whom are ignorant about the agencies they head other than to want to dismantle or enfeeble them. Be proactive or you will be always playing defense.
Daring peaceful resisters in marches and rallies, beware of infiltrating provocateurs promoting violence. If you’re engaging in non-violent, civil disobedience, beware that Trump can’t wait to call you “terrorists” and use unbridled police power for arrests and prosecutions demanding long sentences.
Trump and the Trumpsters, with his militias in waiting, as on the border, will contrive a phony threat from what they will label domestic “terrorists” to pulverize or intimidate their opponents. Trump thrived on the MAGA extremists and will give them “red meat,” if only to keep them occupied and loyal. They will demand action based on Trump’s wild campaign rhetoric.
Being a convicted criminal himself, Trump will take federal cops off the corporate crime beat, reduce taxes on the wealthy and giant companies, ignore climate violence, add more bloat to the wasteful military budget, and increase pandemic threats with fake dismissals of looming perils. Don’t count on the business guys. They don’t like daily chaos, disruption and uncertainty that goes with Trump’s insatiable daily ego that must be fed constantly, but most CEOs won’t criticize Trump.
Trump fears the Israeli lobby and their genocidal leader Netanyahu. His first term proved that in spades. Now he’ll back whatever Netanyahu, the Israeli war criminal, does. Annexing the West Bank, demanding more billions from American taxpayers to continue the bombing, killing and pillaging in the Middle East region is just the tip of the iceberg.
Lastly, Trump will drive a level of White House dictatorial lawlessness never before seen. His rhetoric and record strengthen this prediction. Remember his July 2019 declaration “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.” He acted on that all the time. (See prior columns at nader.org and also read “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader).
The anticipatory strategies here must be diverse, covering all three branches of government, and vectored toward the GOP. The citizen groups may have to work weekends, alongside the labor unions hated by Trump.
Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party. Attached is a fable I wrote in 2022 that portrays how he might think about the Party of the Donkey. Given what happened up to and on November 5, 2024, it’s still useful to read today.
What Could Donald Trump Be Thinking About the Democratic Party?
By Ralph Nader
October 21, 2022
Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.
“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”
“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.
“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”
“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”
“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”
Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”
“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”
“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”
“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”
Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”
Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”
“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”
“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”
Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”
Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”
Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”
Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”
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