WASHINGTON—Even before extremist Republican Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office on January 20, progressives warned of his fascistic tendencies and plans, often citing his platform, and highlighting what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “Trump’s playbook of dictators.”
But too few people, even on the left side of the electorate, listened. After all, those warnings have been sounded for months if not years. “Trump is following, point for point, the playbook of dictators, including Turkey’s Reycep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban,” Reich said in his latest podcast.
“This is not new. And I don’t know why there isn’t more reference to this being the dictator’s playbook. This is what Trump is doing.”
But that inattention, even from some of the left–much less the rest of the nation–may change. Because the latest analyses of Trump’s march towards dictatorship come in detail from two very important Senate Democrats known for thorough thinking and few rhetorical fireworks.
Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, a progressive who opposed the war in Iraq and U.S. backing of the Saudis in Yemen and who is the Senate’s prime proponent of effective gun control, detailed his analysis on the U.S. Senate floor of how Trump is constructing his march towards tyranny.
Neuter the press first, then universities, then lawyers and law firms, then other institutions that could resist—with the corporate community looking on and doing nothing until it too is co-opted.
Unfortunately, neither Murphy nor Michigan’s Slotkin, the other senator who discussed Trump’s dictatorial trend, mentioned the main victim and the main foe of Trump: Organized labor.
The result, Murphy said, is democracy in name only, with “fake elections” whose winners perpetuate themselves in power and their foes never have a realistic chance to triumph.
“If we don’t wake up and take action, the totality of our democracy will be gone,” he said in another speech.
The Murphy and Slotkin remarks are important for several reasons. One is their own gravitas, denoting the weight of words not to be taken lightly. A second is that they provide details and motives regarding Trump’s tyrannical plans.
“If he’s willing to use lethal force against our enemies abroad,” without even explaining his actions to Congress, declaring war, or consulting lawmakers, “what’s stopping him from using lethal force against ‘enemies’ here at home? That question should chill every American to the bone,” Slotkin said.
Another reason for fear of Trump is that he’s slid to a historic low point in public opinion and is liable to lash out in response—and to divert attention from his monarchical quest.
No other president in the century-long history of the Gallup Poll ever crashed to a 36% positive rating after only 10 months in the White House, with 60% negative. Trump was lower only once, at 34% approval after his 1,200-plus Trumpites invaded and pillaged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in their failed coup d’etat to keep him in the Oval Office.
“President Trump is ready to bring the full weight of the government against Americans he perceives as enemies. Why? Because he has one goal, making sure he and his ilk never have to give up power,” Slotkin summarized at the start of her address.
Trump’s forthcoming national security policy will be defined by “threats to the homeland,” not defined by the Pentagon or analysis from the U.S. intelligence community, Slotkin said.
“They are being determined by one man, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone. And he is showing the world just how willing he is to use force against his enemies”—his domestic “enemies.”
Off his actions since taking office, a prime Trump “enemy” is organized labor, particularly federal workers. He’s stripped contracts from 1.5 million of them and forced almost 200,000 to unwillingly retire and locked half of them out of their jobs for 43 days.
Connecticut’s Murphy detailed Trump’s construction of tyranny, block by block: Repression of free speech, depriving “enemies”—universities, law firms, and lawyers—of legitimacy and, first of all, press repression producing at times self-censorship by the mainstream media.
The building block Slotkin, the military and CIA veteran, added was when Trump “instructed his military brass to use cities as quote ‘training grounds.’ And many times he’s floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act so that military units can raid, detain, and arrest Americans.”
That sweeping 1807 law lets the president “deploy the U.S. military and federalize” state National Guard units “in specific circumstances, such as the suppression of civil disorder, of insurrection, and of armed rebellion,” a Wikipedia summary says.
Having worked for presidents of both parties, Slotkin advanced the idea that any president has the power and the broad responsibility to keep the U.S. safe from attack, and needs it. Some scholars and some peace activists dispute the “need.” Others dispute giving a president such breadth.
“I don’t say this lightly, but I think between the strikes in the Caribbean,”—which Trump, without evidence, claims is “a war” on narcotics carriers—“his efforts to identify domestic terrorists, and his deployment of force in American cities, that seems to be where we’re headed,” Slotkin said.
“As a CIA officer, the idea that intelligence officers could be asked to target Americans turns my stomach, and it would shift us into a modern-day surveillance state,” she said—not mentioning the CIA actually carried out surveillance of Indochina War foes, including lawmakers, 50 years ago.
“My concern is over Trump’s full reorientation towards the quote ‘enemy within.’ That reorientation has major implications for his use of force inside the United States.” It’ll be a war “on Americans in American streets and in American homes,” she added.
Slotkin described Trump’s “quiet executive order” to his Justice Department—which Trump also politicized, outside legal analysts state—”to create a list of quote ‘domestic terrorist organizations.’” Trump broadly defined the targets: Groups “accused of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, or hostility towards those who hold quote ‘traditional American views on family, religion, or morality.’
“And these groups don’t have to be violent to get themselves on the list.”
Slotkin also cited the violence by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on the streets of Chicago—against migrants, non-white people, and the media to prove her point. His ICE agents also ran rampant, aided by National Guard troops from “red states,” in Los Angeles and D.C. There are now more than 2,500 out-of-state National Guards in D.C.
Now, Trump wants to send ICE against Somalis in the Twin Cities, and all against peaceful communities who just happen to be the wrong skin color. That proves Slotkin’s point.
While Slotkin painted the broad brush of Trump’s motives and methods, Connecticut’s Murphy got into the details of how the right-wing Republican president is accomplishing those goals. Trump has set up a series of targets to neutralize and co-opt, Murphy told his colleagues. Slotkin cited several segments of those, also.
“Most of the time, there is not a singular moment when the executive dramatically seizes power,” as the Trumpites who invaded the U.S. Capitol almost five years ago tried to do, Murphy began. “Most of the time, there is no Reichstag fire,” the burning of the German capitol building, which the Nazis used as an excuse to grab total power there.
“Instead, democracies die when gradually, often quietly and methodically over time, structures that hold the executive accountable for corruption, for thievery, for wrongdoing, are dismantled.” Those are the institutions, Murphy said, that Trump is dismantling, degrading, or cowering into silent acquiescence.
“Citizens can no longer hold the executive accountable; the political opposition never has enough room to maneuver meaningfully. There are still elections. The executive doesn’t try to stuff the ballot box.” But “structures of accountability are either so degraded or so completely co-opted by the regime, the truth is just buried, and the opposition loses the basic tools it needs to win.“
The press is first, universities are second, and lawyers and law firms follow them, Murphy said. If that intimidation, repression, and resulting censorship and self-censorship don’t work, “Elections couldbe cancelled, or if they happen, he [Trump] could surround polling places with military and federal law enforcement to intimidate voters.
“He could also strangle the opposition and swing elections,” the senator said, “by labeling opposition groups, candidates, and elected officials as terrorists or criminals and going after the infrastructure that allows for competitive elections.”
Trump supporters control the election machinery in many “red states,” enacting laws and rules that would let Trump-packed bodies such as local elections boards torig the results either by falsifying vote counts or, before the balloting, making it tough for the opposition to vote at all.
Interestingly, neither senator named organized labor among the opposition institutions battling Trump’s maniacal march towards dictatorship, complete with fake elections where the same party—his—always wins. And neither mentioned the courts, especially the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, except as a battlefield for lawsuits. Trump named three of the six-justice High Court majority.
Yet unions and their leaders—especially AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher with a law degree, too—have been outspoken about the Trump threat to democracy. AFT has been particularly active in the crusade to stop Trump’s march to monarchy.
AFT threw itself wholesale into the planning and mobilization of millions of people for anti-Trump, pro-democracy marches, rallies, forums, and protests, even before the seven-million-person turnout for No Kings Day, when it took a co-lead role. It followed that with mobilizing voters for the November Democratic sweep in key races nationally.
“American families want a life they can afford—so they voted for decency over division, democracy over authoritarianism and, above all, an economy that works for everyone, not just the ultra-rich,” Weingarten said after the election results rolled in.
“At the heart of any democracy is the freedom to peacefully express opposition to injustice,” Shuler said in mid-October. But Trump’s charges against L.A. labor leader David Huerta “for simply observing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raid…is a gross abuse of power by an administration hell-bent on punishing its perceived enemies and attacking immigrants.”
At the end of her speech, Slotkin proposed a multi-part solution. One is a mass movement of voters to educate themselves and get out on the streets to protect democracy—something No Kings Day and earlier marches show they’ve been doing.
A second, said Slotkin, a veteran, is for veterans in particular to speak up and speak out against Trump’s crusade to destroy democracy. “If you want to get involved, DM (direct mail) me,” she urged. Veterans, she said, have the credibility to stand up to Trump, who did not serve and who routinely insults those who did. He calls them “losers.”
Slotkin also urged governors to stand strong for their states and their citizens, upholding their proper roles as laboratories of democracy and liberty. Governors and Attorneys General in “blue” states, including her home state of Michigan and especially Illinois, California, Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, and Maryland, are doing so. Citizens will be vital in that, too, she explained, by providing politicians with backbone with the support they need and lobbying for action against Trump.
Congress, too—especially its Republicans, whom Slotkin directly addressed—must grab back the power over the use of force, both foreign and domestic, it yielded to presidents even before Trump, Slotkin recommended. She said actions out in the open, not mutterings behind closed doors, matter.
Slotkin reminded her ex-colleagues in the armed forces they, too, swore an oath to defend the Constitution, and have the responsibility under that and the military legal code to refuse to obey illegal and unconstitutional orders from superior officers, up to and including the president. It may be difficult, she conceded. “It can be done.”
That was the point of a joint statement just days before, signed by Slotkin and five other military and CIA veterans serving in Congress. Trump blew up, denouncing them all as traitors and suggesting they be executed—without trial. His Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, opened a pre-court martial investigation of the one reservist of the group, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a Navy combat pilot.
“Here’s what Trump hasn’t planned for: The will of the American people,” Slotkin concluded. “Americans have an internal barometer for things that sound and smell authoritarian. I’ve seen this in Michigan, where even ardent Trump supporters don’t like what they’re seeing on their phones. That should give us hope. There’s still time to turn the tide.”
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