Trump Pushes America Towards a Violent Abyss

The President Only Won Through Mass Deception

Each day, it becomes clearer that Donald Trump won the 2024 election under false pretenses. He soft-pedaled a sales pitch to the American people that hardly resembles the fanatical, hard right turn that is an early hallmark of his term.

While Trump never completely cloaked his radicalism, he defeated Kamala Harris by downplaying the roughest edges of his fundamentalist Christian-appeasing agenda. Most notably, when confronted with ties to the Heritage Foundation’s toxic Project 2025, candidate Trump pretended to be clueless. He feigned ignorance despite more than 140 former staff members working on this subversive scheme.

Yet, once firmly seated behind the Resolute Desk, the mendacious mask dropped, and the Orwellian Project 2025 replaced the U.S. Constitution as America’s guiding document.

A TIME analysis found that nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump has issued mirror or partially mirror proposals from Project 2025. Arguably the most powerful member of the Trump Administration is Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, who was confirmed as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, despite obstreperous opposition from Senate democrats.

All politicians fib, to some degree, to get elected. But Trump’s colossal misdirection is, perhaps, the greatest bait-and-switch of all time. He didn’t run a campaign, so much as a con, to bamboozle voters into thinking he was somewhat reasonable, when his surreptitious plans were far to the right of radical.

As a candidate, Trump vowed to lower grocery bills and achieve world peace. He pledged to lower egg prices, end the war in Gaza and create a negotiations breakthrough in Ukraine within 24 hours. Obviously, those fanciful plans are scrambled and duped MAGA voters have overpriced egg on their faces.

It’s now obvious that candidate Trump was a forked-tongue façade who told gullible Americans what they wanted to hear, so he could return to Washington and do what he wanted to do. The canyon of cognitive dissonance between Trump’s campaign promises and his perpetration of ill-considered and illegal actions has created an early crisis of legitimacy.

Trump and his apparatchiks are claiming a sweeping mandate to disfigure America in their broken image, yet even with massively dissembling to get elected, he only squeaked by with a 1.5% victory in the election. This narrow win should have humbled Trump, not emboldened him to arrogantly run roughshod over close to half the population.

Although Trump did win through chicanery, his shady victory entitles him to work with the GOP-majority in Congress to pass his backward agenda. What it does not give him the authority to do, under any circumstances, is declare himself de facto King and elevate the executive branch above the legislative and judiciary branches of government.

Apparently, his Vice President JD Vance fell asleep at Yale Law School and doesn’t understand how our system works. After the Trump Administration had a series of judicial setbacks for evading the law and trampling on the U.S. Constitution, Vance Tweeted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power."

Sorry, JD, but the primary role of judges is to limit power by deciding what actions are constitutional and which violate the law. By ignoring judicial rulings, the Trump Administration is creating a constitutional crisis that could drag our country into an apocalyptic abyss. Do they realize how close they are to unleashing mass chaos and catastrophic forces into our country? I suppose a more pertinent question is, do they care?

When one faction in a closely divided nation tries to dictate by decree, and turns to brute force to pacify the opposition, it often leads down a slippery slope associated with the most infamous regimes in history. We are closer to the brink than people realize.

Former chess champion and Russian dissident Gary Kasparov lived through a similar authoritarian power-grab with Putin’s democracy-strangling rise to power. He offered an ominous warning of what we can expect:

This will be dismissed as “hysteria” like many of my warnings about Trump & [Elon] Musk that are coming true. But this doesn’t end with fights over top-secret documents, budget cuts & unaccountable agents taking over. It ends with who has the guns when they won’t listen to the judges.

There are many steps between here and there, of course. But eventually they remove enough judges, refuse any access or challenges, and simply ignore the law and court orders the way they are ignoring Congress now. What then? Impeachment?

What Trump and Vance don’t understand is that the President and Vice President are constitutional officers, and their legitimacy is only valid within the context of a constitutional order. If the judiciary and legislative branches are no longer valid, because they arrogantly declare it’s so, then their authority is commensurately null and void because we say so. This game works both ways, whether the Trump regime likes it or not.

When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was criticized by Pope Pius XII for persecuting Christians, Stalin responded by saying, "How many [army] divisions has the pope got?” Trump’s goons are surely applying the same authoritarian logic to the courts, legislature and political opposition.

However, our military does not belong to Donald Trump and his authority over its deployment is bound by the rule of law. Service members should be reminded that when this dictatorial moment passes, they will be held fully accountable if they choose to follow a renegade president giving illegal orders, over defending the rights of citizens enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, even if the armed services stand down, Americans still must worry about Trump’s goons and thugs, 1,600 of whom were pardoned for their crimes committed on January 6, 2021. We also must contend with the new administration’s own version of DEI hires (Deranged, Extreme, Indoctrinated).

For example, a 25-year-old software engineer, Marko Elez, resigned from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after his white supremacist views were unearthed. Elez wrote, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity." In another post he said, “Normalize Indian hate.” After the supine Vice President Vance—who has an Indian wife—shamefully intervened, the aspiring Hitler-youth was reinstated to his position of recklessly gutting our government.

Meanwhile, Trump hired White Power devotee Darren Beattie to serve as acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The conservative ideologue wrote less than four months ago: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.”

Of course, nothing speaks to “competence” for a globe-trotting diplomat like bigoted musings that could have come straight from a street corner Ku Klux Klan recruitment pamphlet. The Trump administration clearly has their own version of affirmative action, which is the restoration of the Good Ole’ Boy Network. It’s a perverse system where white is always right and pale skin is more important than job skills.

What’s scary is we know the worst is yet to come. The administration is moving swiftly to consolidate power at the expense of democracy. It is busy working to purge government experts and replace them with extremists who are in the Project 2025 work recruitment database.

These middling apparatchiks are mostly inexperienced ideologues whose primary attribute is unflinching loyalty to Donald Trump. They are marauding through Washington, heedlessly dumping over apple carts without empathy and smashing programs that people depend on to survive.

For example, my non-profit organization, Truth Wins Out, released a terrifying memo this week revealing that the Trump administration was axing HIV-prevention drugs for vulnerable populations in more than 55 countries. This would lead to spikes in HIV that could potentially decimate LGBTQ people, sex workers and heterosexual woman who are coerced into having sex with unfaithful husbands. The death toll could reach hundreds of thousands and lead to a global outbreak of new HIV infections.

Despite the heartbreak and suffering this policy will cause, we get no more than sociopathic shrugs by Elon Musk, JD Vance, Donald Trump and their minions taking sharpened axes to vital, life-saving programs they know nothing about. It’s worth noting, however, that they are providing Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) medications for pregnant women. While Republicans posture and preen as pro-life, they only protect the lives of those having procreative sex. The rest can drop dead, as far as these religious zealots are concerned.

Their wanton cruelty extends to their right-wing base, who has no idea how badly they are getting screwed. Musk’s DOGE team closed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It’s now open season on all Americans, including Trump’s low information voters, who appear particularly susceptible to falling for scams. After all, they are in a cult.

Additionally, Trump signed an executive order stopping investigations and halting prosecutions of American corporations bribing foreign leaders under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. This is the epitome of The Swamp that Trump voters facetiously claimed wanted drained.

On a positive note, at least these suckers still have those silly red MAGA caps. So, when they end up fleeced they can beg, hat-in-hand, on filthy street corners for their next meal.

So, what is next for America, which is stuck on the out-of-control, teetering Trump train?

In the coming days, we can probably depend on some of the non-tainted courts to curtail Trump’s unquenchable thirst for absolute power. Once he defies the courts, and this is already happening, the future of America will depend on the power of the people. They will have to explode onto the streets with massive, disruptive protests. In some cases, they will have to bravely stand up to Trump’s unofficial army of MAGA hooligans.

Perhaps, Trump will back down if millions of Americans demonstrate in a way that he believes threatens his presidency. A scenario just as likely, however, is that Trump calls in the police and/or military to savagely attack protesters, under the false banner of “law and order”.

If this nightmare scenario occurs—and it is increasingly likely it will—all bets are off. We don’t know how this will end, but we do know America will never be the same. This is a terrifying and dangerous road, but it is one that Donald Trump seems determined to take us down. If we tragically enter this hellscape, either a democratic America or a despotic Trump regime will survive, but not both.

Last night, I saw a timely movie, “A Complete Unknown” about singer Bob Dylan, an oracle of the 1960’s, who reminds us of the power of protest. We must embody that unflinching spirit of liberation and begin furiously fighting for our future. We can’t bury our heads in the sand, because “The Times They Are A-Changin” and America’s democracy is “Blowing in the Wind”.