I used Perchance AI last night to make the above illustrations. As I was lying in bed before getting up I thought of the analogy of the Titantic and how its builders intended to build a luxury liner that was unsinkable. Then I though of the line about what the Founding Fathers had given the nation widely attributed to Ben Franklin: “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Krugman starts off slowly writing about Trump’s tarrifs, deportations, and the economy. Then he builds to what I planned to write about. He writes:
Unfortunately, one possible effect of the bad economic news may be to induce MAGA to put the real Project 2025 — the plot to destroy American democracy — on an accelerated schedule.
Or as I think of it, I don’t think we’re in Hungary anymore.
He goes on to explain how Viktor Orban took a gradualist approach to destroying democracy in Hungary. noting that the ruling party “had the luxury of time because until recently the party remained quite popular with the Hungarian public.”
Then he wrote:
It's now clear, by contrast, that Trump and MAGA don’t have the luxury of time. Trump’s approval has already cratered. He inherited an economy with low unemployment and subdued inflation, but is now presiding over a weakening job market and will soon face a burst of inflation, with nobody but himself to blame. He may manage to bully government statisticians into cooking the books and making the numbers look good, but that’s harder than it looks. And even if the official numbers say everything is great, nobody will believe it.
So if Trump and MAGA want to hold on to power, they’ll have to do so in the face of low public approval and poor economic performance.
What does “quickly and blatantly mean? Krugman concludes as follows:
Indeed, as CNN reported the other day, Republicans are trying in multiple ways to, in effect, rig the midterm elections. Their actions include a plan for an extreme, mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas that could cost Democrats multiple House seats; attempts to interfere in voting procedures, for example by banning states from accepting mail-in ballots after election day and forcing states to require proof of citizenship. Much of this is clearly unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
And what if these actions aren’t enough? Remember, Trump supporters, with his clear encouragement, already tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The important point is that right now Trump has immense power, thanks in large part to the cowardice of many of the institutions that should be holding him in check. But he’s also rapidly bleeding support, in large part because he’s completely failing to deliver on his economic promises.
That combination makes this an extremely dangerous moment.
These are Krugman's concluding sentences:
The oppostite of being soft is being hard. What could this look like less than Trump declaring martial law and using the armed forces to overthrow democracy?
If he tries to do this the only hope for saving democracy that I can see is that patriots in the military say a “hard no.” I will leave it to you to imagine how this woud play out.
It is instructive to compare Trump’s position, not just to Orban’s, but to Hitler’s in the late 1930’s. Orban took the slow route to conquest of just one country. Hitler, who already had an iron grip on Germany, mounted a successful juggernaut to conquer Europe.
Could Trump accomplish what Hitler did by mounting a blitzkrieg to take over not other free nations, but “just” the United States?
I had nothing to write about a few minutes ago, but then Ann’s sister, Nancy, sent her this and she showed it to me. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.
I had the same feeling when I saw online what, with my perverse sensibility, I thought was the best anti-Trump protest sign (click for footnote: 1
While many are critical none suggest that Biden or Obama were hellbent to utterly destroy democracy.
Whether in cartoons (some with words and others without words) protest signs, in articles, or on TV, the messages about what Trump is doing to wreak havoc on both democracy and what used to be considered the underpinnings of social order and common sense must be sent out across the nation in a way that the people who need to hear it pay attention before it is too late. It has to come as if it is the thundering word of God from sky.
Our rights to tell in any way we choose to do so what we sincerely believe is true are embodied in the First Amendment.
This is the relevant, the crucial part, related to my Substack today:
Freedom of Speech / Freedom of the Press
The most basic component of freedom of expression is the right to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech may be exercised in a direct (words) or a symbolic (actions) way. Freedom of speech is recognized as a human right under article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . The right to freedom of speech allows individuals to express themselves without government interference or regulation . The Supreme Court requires the government to provide substantial justification for interference with the right of free speech when it attempts to regulate the content of the speech. Generally, a person cannot be held liable , either criminally or civilly for anything written or spoken about a person or topic, so long as it is truthful or based on an honest opinion and such statements.
A less stringent test is applied for content-neutral legislation. The Supreme Court has also recognized that the government may prohibit some speech that may cause a breach of the peace or cause violence. For more unprotected and less protected categories of speech see advocacy of illegal action , fighting words , commercial speech , and obscenity . The right to free speech includes other mediums of expression that communicate a message. The level of protection speech receives also depends on the forum in which it takes place.
Despite the popular misunderstanding, the right to freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment is not very different from the right to freedom of speech. It allows an individual to express themselves through publication and dissemination. It is part of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression. It does not afford members of the media any special rights or privileges not afforded to individuals in general.
As long as we have a democracy this means we can get the message out that Trump is trying to undermine democracy. We can use whatever methods and means we have to educate, motivate, and inspire people to wake up from their “what me worry” sleepwalking through life and realize they must actually do sonething before the First Amendment, and in fact the entire Constitution, is rendered irrelevant.
Update:
My friend Sabrina Haake and I must have a cosmic connection since we wrote about similar topics today. Like I wrote yesterday (here), when it comes to a later stage of the round-up of Trump enemies the MAGA Gestapo will be knock at (or busting down) out doors. Read Sabrina’s Haake Take here.
She also references the First Amendment:
Social media vetting is viewpoint discrimination under the 1st A
When the government engages in viewpoint discrimination, it singles out a particular opinion, perspective or “viewpoint” for treatment that differs from how other viewpoints are treated. Viewpoint discrimination, where the government persecutes or otherwise punishes someone for expressing views it dislikes or disagrees with, is illegal.
In 1995 the Supreme Court explained: “When the government targets not subject matter but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”
You have to scroll down Stormy Daniels’ X page to find any posts about Trump. Mostly she promotes her shows there. I keep posting to her account hoping that she reposts something I write. This could get me many more followers.
Telnaes made the news when she quit as the editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post when Jeff Bezos spiked this cartoon showing him to be a Trump tool. That backfired big time on Bezos since prior to that only subscribers could see the cartoon and then it was all over the news (Google search here).
There are graphics showing that even in primarily Black or Hispanic communities Trump has made more gains than Democrats.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.
The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.
Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.
Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
Trump has managed to divided the country into as us against them, or as the “them” would put it, “them against us.”
Those reading this are members of the more highly educated and more affluent “us.” I think you more likely than not can read the NY Times article because you have a subscription. The other “us” would read the previous sentences and say “see, that’s what we mean, these people are a bunch of smug privileged snobs.”
We have to admit that the so-called party of the working class is no longer the Democratic Party. It is now the Trump Republican Party. For decades since the decidely upper-upper class FDR was president for three terms, Democrats won elections because the working class believed that the candidates from the professional class and upper class, even upper-upper class, would make their lives better. They believed that they really cared about them. Jimmy Carter pulled off being seen as being just a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia even though his peanut farm was between 2000 and 3000 acres.
The cruel irony of this is that these candidates really did care about people less affluent than them.
Then along came Donald J. Trump. While he was not only a member of the upper class, he was an in-your-face member of the upper-upper class.
He took his cruel Apprentice “you’re fired” persona and turned it into his brand. Millions of people ate it up. None of the people who got the “you’re fired” treatment were villains. In fact they were even horrible potential job candidates like many of the performers on The Gong Show who got the gong.
By way of comparison, Gong Show star and creator Chuck Barris (who once lied about being a CIA assassin) actually was the creator of the show while 13 time Emmy Award winner Mark Burnett deserves credit for the successful casting of Trump as a business genius on “The Apprentice.”
Trump isn’t an Einstein level genius like he thinks he is. He is a genius at some things like marketing and unabashed lying. In other areas he is as dumb as a post.
His most recent dumb as a post example is a demonstration of his segmented intelligence. This was in his comments about stealth aircraft. They were made at his weird trophy wife West Point commencement address (from below reference):
However, one avenue of free-associative speculation Trump meandered along while speaking about military investment seemed to confirm that one of his much-derided beliefs remains intact: the president seems to genuinely believe that so-called “stealth” fighter jets—military aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by radar—are actually invisible.
“We are buying you new airplanes, brand new beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump said, speaking to a proposed record increase in defense spending.
“I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sort of wondering.
“We shape a wing this way, they don’t see it. But the other way they see it? I’m not so sure, but that’s what they tell me!
Trump’s supporters don’t give a shit about any of this. While I doubt that if we could give them all IQ tests we would find that they aren’t what you could label “dumb” meaning having significantly below average scores. However if they answered honestly I think they would score fairly high on this gullibility test.
I took the test:
Trump sold himself as a man of the common man. He appealed not only to the gullibility of a large enough segment of the population to win, but hid his true intention to become a ruthlessly cruel dictator throughout the campaign. He made his bigotry clear, but he never said “vote for me and I will destroy democracy” for everyone including most of you in my adoring audience.
If enough people decide that this isn’t what they want their country to be there’s a chance there will be enough blowback to lead to an active resistance that will derail his blitzkrieg to Trumpify America. It took the Allies four years to undo what the Nazis did following their blitzkrieg to take over Europe. Alas, it may take this long for democracy loving Americans to undo what Trump is doing.
Addendum (nothing to do with the above):
Trump’s supporters don’t care that he is a grandiose narcissist who needs to hang pictures like this in the White House.
