With 2025 fast approaching, there’s good reason to worry that a more authoritarian federal government is looming.
In three weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president, this time with nearly unchecked power bestowed by his judicial appointees and sympathizers. Not only did they make credible prosecutions against him disappear, those on the Supreme Court gave him just about carte blanche to do whatever he wants while in office.
Of course, many of us wonder who’ll actually control the executive branch. Trump has the title, but Elon Musk, his megadonor/unelected adviser, is already playing an outsize role.
Either way, the future White House occupants are raising all sorts of red flags, and all too many in Congress are either saluting or submitting.
In the House, where the GOP holds a tiny majority, Musk and Trump managed to blow up an expansive bipartisan bill to fund the government.
But they didn’t get everything they wanted. Some GOP House members said no to Trump’s demand to suspend or eliminate the debt limit, which would have removed an obstacle to his plan for more tax cuts for big business and the wealthy.
Our own MAGA Congressman Dan Meuser, a passionate Trump cheerleader, scolded his GOP colleagues for defying their “decider in chief” and “CEO.”
“Our role,” he told Fox Business host Stuart Varney, “is to be more of a supportive board of directors so we can implement what the American people voted for.”
That should send chills up the spine of any politician who still has one, and it should horrify any American who still believes in a system of checks and balances — or in elected officials who are more than a pair of narcissistic billionaires’ marionettes. Especially since this election was solidly purple, with Trump getting 49.8% of the popular vote, just 1.5 percentage points more than Kamala Harris.
Meuser’s statement sounds a lot like something out of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.”
In this 1935 novel, fascist Buzz Windrip appeals to a group called The League of Forgotten Men and is elected president despite, or maybe because of, his 15-point agenda.
He claims – falsely – that only one point is nonnegotiable: Congress must function solely as an adviser to the president and act only when he says so, while the Supreme Court would have no power to undo anything he enacts.
The book also made it into a column by Albany Times Union Editor at Large Jay Jochnowitz last month. There the issue was Trump’s call to make recess appointments of Cabinet and other nominees, some of whom are so clearly unfit that some Republican senators might balk at confirming them.
“Mark it down as Trump’s first attempt to pull a Windrip on the country and see if Congress will fold,” Jochnowitz wrote.
Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune said last month that he hopes his chamber won’t have to resort to that maneuver but noted that “all options are on the table.”
Other points in the Windrip plan sound like a wish list of the radical regressives among Trump’s followers:
- Keeping non-Christians out of public office and professions that include law, medicine and teaching.
- Confining people of color to positions as laborers or domestic servants.
- Forcing women out of most jobs except “peculiarly feminine” ones so they can return to their “incomparably sacred duties” as homemakers and mothers.
- Putting unions under the president’s control.
To be sure, Trump’s critics aren’t getting sent to concentration camps, a fate that befalls people who resist the Windrip regime. Still, the president-elect has a long history of threatening anyone who’s tried to hold him accountable, including members of the House select committee investigating his Jan. 6 insurrection, prosecutors, political rivals and media outlets.
He even sued the Des Moines Register for a poll that predicted he’d lose Iowa. OK, he won the red state, but hasn’t he heard of the First Amendment?
These and numerous other red flags unfurling in Washington and Mar-a-Lago are meant to exhaust and intimidate us into carrying white banners of surrender.
If we do, it will surely happen here.
Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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