Economic Disaster for Working People Awaits If Trump Reelected
And if we take the former president at his word on targeting his political opponents with the DOJ and law enforcement, a spiraling economy more rigged for the very rich than it already is may be the least of our problems.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., play golf at Trump National Doral Miami golf club on October 27, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
(Photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
MAX B. SAWICKY
Jan 10, 2024
© 2023 In These Times
MAX B. SAWICKY is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He has worked at the Economic Policy Institute and the Government Accountability Office, and has written for numerous progressive outlets.
Full Bio >
And if we take the former president at his word on targeting his political opponents with the DOJ and law enforcement, a spiraling economy more rigged for the very rich than it already is may be the least of our problems.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., play golf at Trump National Doral Miami golf club on October 27, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
(Photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
MAX B. SAWICKY
Jan 10, 2024
In These Times
What could we have to look forward to, or dread, in economic policy if Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025?
The challenge here is separating whatever might germinate in his brain or that of his advisers and which long-standing priorities of the Republican Party remain. We saw the difference between 2017 and 2020. In important cases, Trump deferred to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the Republicans in Congress. He swallowed their prescriptions on judicial appointments, and he helped push through a bill to cut taxes, primarily benefiting the rich and corporations. But in other ways he left the reservation.
The most obvious deviation was his rhetoric about trade deficits, which I am convinced he could never define correctly. (In national income accounting, it’s the excess of imports over exports.) It may sound bad, though it isn’t necessarily.
In any case, we did get very real tariffs. The Trump rhetoric on trade was appealing to manufacturing workers clobbered by outsourcing. Even a progressive hero like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) ended up embracing Trump’s move to impose tariffs on steel. The Biden Administration itself has declined to reverse all of Trump’s tariffs from his first term.
Simply put, a tariff is a sales tax confined to imports. To say the Chinese “paid” the tariff is a non sequitur, like saying the supermarket pays the sales tax. That makes it more ridiculous for supporters of tariffs to complain about inflation. Like sales taxes, a tariff pushes up the gross prices that you as the consumer pay. The seller who collects the tax (the importer, or the supermarket) simply hands it over to the government.
The anti-China rhetoric has continued from the former president, even though we now have evidence of Trump’s businesses being on China’s payroll. A revival of the trade demagoguery under a President Trump 2.0 will impede trade and increase inflation. New tariffs will push prices up — not a great outcome for everyday working people.
Sign up for our weekend newsletter A weekly digest of our best coverage Email Address
Trump’s trade rhetoric does not sit well with historic Republican policies, nor with its current tribunes in the Koch network’s Club for Growth. But that is the old party. It’s a new day, and not a better one.
Another worrisome area is immigration. As supporters of employers, Republicans have tended to indulge immigration for the sake of recruiting cheap labor. Restricting immigration will make some employers unhappy. “Closing the border” could mean chaos, from the standpoint of routine commerce. The U.S. does quite a lot of business with Mexico.
But once again, it’s a new day. Racism-infected demonization of immigrants has become one of the GOP’s principal selling points. It may even have something to do with reported increases in Trump’s support from voters of color, especially men.
Another new thing will be promises to blow up the “administrative state.” I’m so old I remember President Ronald Reagan appointing Bill Bennett to be Secretary of Education. Bennett had promised to help terminate the Department of Education. Turned out he liked the job too much, and the DoE has endured.
Still, reports of Trump’s team organizing to flood the federal bureaucracy with toadies does not bode well for the enforcement of regulations. These characters may not work themselves out of jobs, but they are likely to lay down before business interests opposed to any sort of regulation in fields such as the environment, food safety, occupational health and safety, and worker rights, among many others.
One example where Trump might have done some good during his presidency but was thwarted by the Congress was in infrastructure. Trump thinks of himself as a builder, so he likes infrastructure. As in his New York real estate career, he thinks you can finance it with funny money. But his administration was too focused on other things to formulate a real plan, and the Koch-y Congress just blew it off.
A bit more obscure will be the fate of the humble U.S. Postal Service. Biden has apparently been too busy to dump Trump’s appointee, the toxic, corrupt Postmaster-General Louis DeJoy. Pressure to privatize the USPS will likely revive as Trump transforms its Board of Governors. The Federal Aviation Administration could face similar threats.
There remain many additional questions. What about Social Security and Medicare? We know the old Republican Party wanted to cut them down. Trump has danced around this. Obamacare would almost certainly be a goner, with Medicaid under dire threat. And we would likely also wave goodbye to Biden’s caps on certain prescription drugs (as meager as they may be).
We might see the future in the form of an expansion of Medicare Advantage, to the disadvantage of the rest of Medicare. This is a way of segregating beneficiaries by income, and letting the better-off and healthier suck resources out of the program for everybody else.
Reproductive rights is an issue that Republicans have figured out requires some caution. The right-wing extremists in Congress don’t care, but Trump is smarter than that. Reforms could come more in the fashion of death by a thousand cuts, rather than one sweeping, national ban. As a result, those seeking abortions in red states will likely have to travel for care. The Feds will not restrain the red states, who, after all, have achieved national political supremacy without the need for voters’ approval.
Chaos makes for less investor and consumer confidence. That could impede economic growth.
Otherwise, I would expect an erratic path for policy, which is what we observed in the first Trump term, except for continuous cruelty directed at immigrants, people of color, LGBTQI persons and women.
The potential for chaos renders predictions about the economy even less certain than usual. The impact of presidents on inflation, economic growth, and unemployment is typically exaggerated, depending on who is talking, and whether credit or blame is due.
Chaos makes for less investor and consumer confidence. That could impede economic growth. A big influence is always the Federal Reserve, which is outside a president’s fingertip control. Efforts to shrink the deficit will reduce employment, but I would be surprised by any heroics in this department from any Congress.
In staking out their own economic platform ahead of this year’s election, Democrats can point to some helpful industrial policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, but these are not easy to explain, and Democrats are generally not very good at explaining anyway. There are constructive, progressive trade policies which have been pursued that support well-paying manufacturing jobs, but these aren’t easy to explain either.
In general, The Democrats have a lot to crow about with regard to the economy, which should help them in the coming elections, yet the role of the Biden administration’s policies shouldn’t be oversold. Progress in recent years is unambiguous, but progressives had plenty to say about the inadequacies of the U.S. economy in 2016 at the end of Obama’s second term. Medicare was not for all. Unemployment insurance was a mess. Inequality was very much with us. Gun ownership was out of control. The MAGA horde was gearing up. You can make your own list.
Today, structural inequities persist, the housing market is in trouble and we still haven’t built back better. These are all good cases for Biden and the Democrats to run on a clear plan of supporting working people and creating a more fair economy in the coming elections.
Presently all signs point to a good year for the economy, and bequeathing this to Trump at the end of 2024 will help him, just as Obama’s record when he left office helped boost Trump in 2017 and after. Yet trade war theatrics, domestic spending cuts, and saber-rattling, or worse, with respect to Iran would also likely dampen economic outcomes in 2025 and the years ahead, if the former president comes back into power.
If the most dire predictions of a second Trump term with regard to using the Department of Justice and law enforcement to target his political opponents are borne out, economic policy could end up being among the least of our worries.
What could we have to look forward to, or dread, in economic policy if Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025?
The challenge here is separating whatever might germinate in his brain or that of his advisers and which long-standing priorities of the Republican Party remain. We saw the difference between 2017 and 2020. In important cases, Trump deferred to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the Republicans in Congress. He swallowed their prescriptions on judicial appointments, and he helped push through a bill to cut taxes, primarily benefiting the rich and corporations. But in other ways he left the reservation.
The most obvious deviation was his rhetoric about trade deficits, which I am convinced he could never define correctly. (In national income accounting, it’s the excess of imports over exports.) It may sound bad, though it isn’t necessarily.
In any case, we did get very real tariffs. The Trump rhetoric on trade was appealing to manufacturing workers clobbered by outsourcing. Even a progressive hero like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) ended up embracing Trump’s move to impose tariffs on steel. The Biden Administration itself has declined to reverse all of Trump’s tariffs from his first term.
Simply put, a tariff is a sales tax confined to imports. To say the Chinese “paid” the tariff is a non sequitur, like saying the supermarket pays the sales tax. That makes it more ridiculous for supporters of tariffs to complain about inflation. Like sales taxes, a tariff pushes up the gross prices that you as the consumer pay. The seller who collects the tax (the importer, or the supermarket) simply hands it over to the government.
The anti-China rhetoric has continued from the former president, even though we now have evidence of Trump’s businesses being on China’s payroll. A revival of the trade demagoguery under a President Trump 2.0 will impede trade and increase inflation. New tariffs will push prices up — not a great outcome for everyday working people.
Sign up for our weekend newsletter A weekly digest of our best coverage Email Address
Trump’s trade rhetoric does not sit well with historic Republican policies, nor with its current tribunes in the Koch network’s Club for Growth. But that is the old party. It’s a new day, and not a better one.
Another worrisome area is immigration. As supporters of employers, Republicans have tended to indulge immigration for the sake of recruiting cheap labor. Restricting immigration will make some employers unhappy. “Closing the border” could mean chaos, from the standpoint of routine commerce. The U.S. does quite a lot of business with Mexico.
But once again, it’s a new day. Racism-infected demonization of immigrants has become one of the GOP’s principal selling points. It may even have something to do with reported increases in Trump’s support from voters of color, especially men.
Another new thing will be promises to blow up the “administrative state.” I’m so old I remember President Ronald Reagan appointing Bill Bennett to be Secretary of Education. Bennett had promised to help terminate the Department of Education. Turned out he liked the job too much, and the DoE has endured.
Still, reports of Trump’s team organizing to flood the federal bureaucracy with toadies does not bode well for the enforcement of regulations. These characters may not work themselves out of jobs, but they are likely to lay down before business interests opposed to any sort of regulation in fields such as the environment, food safety, occupational health and safety, and worker rights, among many others.
One example where Trump might have done some good during his presidency but was thwarted by the Congress was in infrastructure. Trump thinks of himself as a builder, so he likes infrastructure. As in his New York real estate career, he thinks you can finance it with funny money. But his administration was too focused on other things to formulate a real plan, and the Koch-y Congress just blew it off.
A bit more obscure will be the fate of the humble U.S. Postal Service. Biden has apparently been too busy to dump Trump’s appointee, the toxic, corrupt Postmaster-General Louis DeJoy. Pressure to privatize the USPS will likely revive as Trump transforms its Board of Governors. The Federal Aviation Administration could face similar threats.
There remain many additional questions. What about Social Security and Medicare? We know the old Republican Party wanted to cut them down. Trump has danced around this. Obamacare would almost certainly be a goner, with Medicaid under dire threat. And we would likely also wave goodbye to Biden’s caps on certain prescription drugs (as meager as they may be).
We might see the future in the form of an expansion of Medicare Advantage, to the disadvantage of the rest of Medicare. This is a way of segregating beneficiaries by income, and letting the better-off and healthier suck resources out of the program for everybody else.
Reproductive rights is an issue that Republicans have figured out requires some caution. The right-wing extremists in Congress don’t care, but Trump is smarter than that. Reforms could come more in the fashion of death by a thousand cuts, rather than one sweeping, national ban. As a result, those seeking abortions in red states will likely have to travel for care. The Feds will not restrain the red states, who, after all, have achieved national political supremacy without the need for voters’ approval.
Chaos makes for less investor and consumer confidence. That could impede economic growth.
Otherwise, I would expect an erratic path for policy, which is what we observed in the first Trump term, except for continuous cruelty directed at immigrants, people of color, LGBTQI persons and women.
The potential for chaos renders predictions about the economy even less certain than usual. The impact of presidents on inflation, economic growth, and unemployment is typically exaggerated, depending on who is talking, and whether credit or blame is due.
Chaos makes for less investor and consumer confidence. That could impede economic growth. A big influence is always the Federal Reserve, which is outside a president’s fingertip control. Efforts to shrink the deficit will reduce employment, but I would be surprised by any heroics in this department from any Congress.
In staking out their own economic platform ahead of this year’s election, Democrats can point to some helpful industrial policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, but these are not easy to explain, and Democrats are generally not very good at explaining anyway. There are constructive, progressive trade policies which have been pursued that support well-paying manufacturing jobs, but these aren’t easy to explain either.
In general, The Democrats have a lot to crow about with regard to the economy, which should help them in the coming elections, yet the role of the Biden administration’s policies shouldn’t be oversold. Progress in recent years is unambiguous, but progressives had plenty to say about the inadequacies of the U.S. economy in 2016 at the end of Obama’s second term. Medicare was not for all. Unemployment insurance was a mess. Inequality was very much with us. Gun ownership was out of control. The MAGA horde was gearing up. You can make your own list.
Today, structural inequities persist, the housing market is in trouble and we still haven’t built back better. These are all good cases for Biden and the Democrats to run on a clear plan of supporting working people and creating a more fair economy in the coming elections.
Presently all signs point to a good year for the economy, and bequeathing this to Trump at the end of 2024 will help him, just as Obama’s record when he left office helped boost Trump in 2017 and after. Yet trade war theatrics, domestic spending cuts, and saber-rattling, or worse, with respect to Iran would also likely dampen economic outcomes in 2025 and the years ahead, if the former president comes back into power.
If the most dire predictions of a second Trump term with regard to using the Department of Justice and law enforcement to target his political opponents are borne out, economic policy could end up being among the least of our worries.
© 2023 In These Times
MAX B. SAWICKY is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He has worked at the Economic Policy Institute and the Government Accountability Office, and has written for numerous progressive outlets.
Full Bio >
"This would be a good time for people to start paying attention," said one watchdog group.
A man protests before former U.S. President Donald Trump's motorcade departs the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse on January 9, 2024 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
COMMON DREAMS
Jan 09, 2024
A panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit appeared skeptical on Tuesday as former President Donald Trump's legal team argued that he is immune from criminal charges related to trying to overturn his 2020 electoral loss.
Trump wasn't required to attend oral arguments before the three judges in D.C. but the Republican front-runner to face Democratic President Joe Biden in the November election left the campaign trail to do so, and spoke to reporters after the hearing.
Even though U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland chose Jack Smith as a special counsel for Trump-related federal probes after the Republican announced his 2024 campaign, and Biden has vowed not to interfere or influence the process in any way, the ex-president still claims the cases against him are politically motivated.
"I think they feel this is the way they're going to try and win," Trump said Tuesday, warning of "bedlam in the country."
Jan 09, 2024
A panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit appeared skeptical on Tuesday as former President Donald Trump's legal team argued that he is immune from criminal charges related to trying to overturn his 2020 electoral loss.
Trump wasn't required to attend oral arguments before the three judges in D.C. but the Republican front-runner to face Democratic President Joe Biden in the November election left the campaign trail to do so, and spoke to reporters after the hearing.
Even though U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland chose Jack Smith as a special counsel for Trump-related federal probes after the Republican announced his 2024 campaign, and Biden has vowed not to interfere or influence the process in any way, the ex-president still claims the cases against him are politically motivated.
"I think they feel this is the way they're going to try and win," Trump said Tuesday, warning of "bedlam in the country."
Echoing some remarks on social media Monday, when he threatened to weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice against Biden if elected, Trump called efforts to prosecute him "an opening of Pandora's box."
Trump also repeatedly claimed that presidents "have absolute immunity" and, while leaving the press conference, declined to address a reporter's question about whether he would tell his supporters "no violence."
Those remarks came after Trump was uncharacteristically quiet in the courtroom, where Smith was joined by aides including James Pearce.
"Never before has there been allegations that a sitting president has, with private individuals and using the levers of power, sought to fundamentally subvert the democratic republic and the electoral system."
When U.S. Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of former Republican President George H.W. Bush, raised the concern that a ruling in the immunity battle could open the "floodgates" for probes against ex-presidents, Pearce said that he did not expect "a sea change of vindictive tit-for-tat prosecutions in the future," according toThe Associated Press.
"Never before has there been allegations that a sitting president has, with private individuals and using the levers of power, sought to fundamentally subvert the democratic republic and the electoral system," the prosecutor added. "And frankly, if that kind of fact pattern arises again, I think it would be awfully scary if there weren't some sort of mechanism by which to reach that criminally."
Henderson also notably said of Trump during the hearing, "I think it's paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law."
The panel's other two members are Biden appointees: Judges Michelle Childs and Florence Pan.
At one point, Pan asked Trump's attorney, John Sauer: "Could a president order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? That's an official act, an order to SEAL Team 6."
Sauer responded, "He would have to be and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution."
The judge continued, "But if he weren't, there would be no criminal prosecution, no criminal liability for that?"
While the attorney attempted to respond with claims about "what the founders were concerned about," the judge interrupted:
Pan: "I asked you a 'yes' or 'no' question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?"
Sauer: "If he were impeached and convicted first..."
Pan: "So your answer is 'no'?"
Sauer: "My answer is: qualified yes. There is a political process that would have to occur under our Constitution, which would require impeachment and conviction by the Senate."
After Trump's "Big Lie" culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol while Congress was trying to certify the 2020 election results, the Republican was impeached a historic second time but then acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate.
In addition to facing charges related to 2020 election interference in one of the two federal cases led by Smith, Trump has been indicted in a similar case in Georgia. His legal team on Monday sought the dismissal of that case, also claiming presidential immunity.
Along with the four criminal cases, Trump is engaged in legal battles over whether inciting an insurrection constitutionally disqualifies him from holding office again. Still, among GOP candidates, he continues to lead in the polls by big margins, which his lawyer highlighted in court.
As Politico reported Tuesday:
While most of Sauer's arguments seemed aimed at the judges, his presentation was also peppered with political fodder directed at audiences outside the courtroom.
He described Trump as President Joe Biden's "number one political opponent" and "greatest political threat." In one hypothetical, Sauer said denying immunity to Trump would make it possible for Biden to be prosecuted in federal court in Texas after leaving office for failing to secure the border with Mexico.
During his rebuttal argument near the end of the hearing, Sauer declared that Trump was "leading in every poll." That's a point Trump also emphasized at a post-hearing press conference at a nearby hotel.
After speaking with reporters, Trump headed for his plane and sent an email to supporters, writing: "Now that I've boarded Trump Force One, I want to give you an update on my day in court... While I will keep fighting in court to win this rigged case against me, I care more about winning the battle in the court of public opinion. And I am confident that WE are winning that war."
Tuesday's hearing came after U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—an appointee of former President Barack Obama who is set to preside over the trial scheduled for March—rejected Trump's immunity claim last month, writing that "whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy... that position does not confer a lifelong 'get-out-of-jail-free' pass."
Law Dork's Chris Geidner noted Tuesday that "the panel is expected to reach its decision in short order, given the expedited timeline on which they took the appeal. Sauer, however, asked that the mandate—which would send the case back to Chutkan—be stayed if the court rules against Trump so that Trump can seek further review, both from the full D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court."
The Supreme Court—which last month declined Smith's request that it skip the appellate court and swiftly weigh in on the immunity fight—has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees and Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was part of the scheme to obstruct certification of the 2020 election results.
Trump and His Political Allies: Fascists and Bullies All
Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
Donald Trump, writes Hartmann as set a tone that has trickled down other Republicans and his army of supporters: "truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun."
(Image: AI-generated / StableDiffusion)
THOM HARTMANN
Jan 11, 2024
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THOM HARTMANN is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >
Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
Donald Trump, writes Hartmann as set a tone that has trickled down other Republicans and his army of supporters: "truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun."
(Image: AI-generated / StableDiffusion)
THOM HARTMANN
Jan 11, 2024
Common Dreams
Trump dreams of revenge. It’s what fascists do.
Because fascism trickles down from fascist leadership, it’s what Trump’s cult members are dreaming of, too. As are his toady lawyers.
Yesterday, for example, Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became president again he could order Seal Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it. Judge Florence Pan asked:
“You’re saying a president could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?”
Trump’s lawyer answered that a sitting president could only be held criminally liable for those crimes the judge listed — which is making me wonder if Jack Smith has proof that he was selling pardons and military secrets — if Congress had first impeached him.
In other words, yes, Trump may have sold those missing top-secret documents to Putin, probably sold all those last-day pardons for $2 million each as Rudy Giuliani said, and could even order the assassination of somebody he didn’t like in the future.
And nobody could do a thing about it, according to Trump and his lawyers, because Republicans in the Senate had failed to convict him.
This open embrace of lawlessness should tell us everything we need to know about not just Trump but the GOP that’s backing him up and hasn’t expressed any second thoughts about his leadership of the party or his bizarre “vengeance” campaign for reelection.
We’ve seen the early glimpses of Trump’s murderous soul for years.
When the George Floyd protests erupted in Washington, DC, thousands of Black people were heading for the White House: Trump, his wife, and his son all fled the building for the president’s underground bunker. Word leaked to the press within hours, and Trump was both embarrassed and furious, demanding the execution of the leaker.
That’s right: the execution of the person who told the press that he was hiding from the protesters.
When he organized his bible photo-opportunity at the church across the street from Lafayette Square, he’d demanded that General Mark Milley have the troops affix bayonets to their rifles and carry live ammunition, presumably to shoot protestors. Milley refused, but apparently went along with Trump’s desire to clear the area with tear gas.
The next time, Trump will make sure his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is somebody willing to repeat Nixon’s Kent State slaughter. Somebody he can more easily bully.
On January 6th, Trump tried to bully Mike Pence into making him dictator-for-life. When that failed, he tried to get Pence murdered. Now, he’s at it again, trying to crank up his well-armed followers to bully or even take out President Biden.
Earlier this week, Trump posted to his Nazi-infested failing social media:
“Joe would be ripe for Indictment. If I don’t get immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity.” He added, “By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box.”
He’s told us he wants to build concentration camps for “millions” of people, including his political “enemies,” and will “root out” those he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
That would be you and me. We shouldn’t worry about Putin or Kim or China attacking the US, Trump tells us, because Democrats are the real threat to America:
“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
From Trump separating mothers from their children and trafficking those kids into “Christian” adoption services that have now vanished (along with about 1,000 missing youngsters), to his followers swatting Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith (among others), the bullying fascist mindset has been growing like a cancer in America.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an infamous bully who once chased then-17-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg down the street screaming epithets at him, bullied her pooch Kevin McCarthy into threatening New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a congressional investigation if he didn’t back off from prosecuting her role model, Donald Trump.
Following up, Gym Jordan, notorious for his bullying any witness who appears before his committees or brings up his alleged coverup history, has now been joined by James Comer (accused of abusing a girlfriend and then getting her an abortion), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil in demanding Bragg give their committees all the information he’s gathered on Donald Trump’s crimes relating to his paying off porn star Stormy Daniels.
For his part, Bragg is having none of it, pushing back with a statement saying through a spokesman:
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law.”
Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
On Tuesday, we learned that House Republicans under MAGA Mike Johnson are hoping to try to impeach Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. And they want to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for his willingness to testify at an open hearing rather than their closed-door bullying charade.
Bullying flows from the top down in everything from gangs to businesses to political parties.
Humans invent political systems, and we base our inventions on our observations of human behavior. It thus makes perfect sense that when Benito Mussolini invented fascism in its modern form, he was simply patterning it after a behavior he knew well because he’d exhibited it his entire life: bullying.
This understanding parallels the rise of fascism as the political system now most vigorously embraced by the GOP, from rigging courts and elections to using naked threats of violence and even the killing of five police officers to try to stop the peaceful transfer of the presidency from Trump to Biden on January 6th.
As the late Madeline Albright wrote in her book Fascism: A Warning:
“Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was ‘bully.’”
If we don’t take on bullies — particularly fascist bullies — they keep going further and further until either they win or we fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough.
Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only contain or defeat them. Which is what FDR, Churchill, and Stalin ended up having to do, at the cost of tens of millions of lives.
From that experience, Europe learned a lesson about dealing with fascist bullies, which is why the governments of the continent are largely united in their support of Ukraine against the murderous bullying of Russia’s fascist leader.
Bullies never stop. And, most importantly, every time they win, they set their sights on the next conquest. Giving in to their demands only creates a newer and more elaborate set of demands.
We have so many of these bullies polluting our political waters today that it’s nearly impossible to get anything done that benefits anybody except the morbidly rich bullies themselves and their friends.
As lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy writes for Psychology Today:
“Bullies don’t negotiate; they make demands, they make threats, and they fight for them. They generally lack the modern skills of win-win... So don’t think of their demands as a form of true negotiation. It’s more like warfare. And you don’t want to give in to that.”
Right now, America is suffering from an epidemic of political bullying.
Billionaires started bullying us in the 1980s at the suggestion of Lewis Powell’s infamous memo, demanding that the top 74% income tax rate be collapsed to 25%; Reagan enthusiastically gave in (as did a few Democrats) and now the billionaires — who are paying 3% income tax rates (not a typo) — just used their political muscle to eliminate funding to the IRS as part of their “negotiation” around the debt ceiling.
The morbidly rich funders of the GOP got their way this week, when Chuck Schumer gave in to Republican bullying and said he was good with stripping $10 billion out of the IRS budget, making it much harder for that agency to catch billionaire tax cheats.
Trump, like all fascist bullies, delights in the bullying behaviors his cult followers emulate. He even went so far as to tell a convention of police officers:
“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’
"When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]. … I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK?’”
He gets pleasure stripping power away from others while causing fear and pain in his enemies’ lives, and the more successfully he can bully high-profile people the more he puffs up with pleasure.
This is a crisis for America now because presidents tend to establish both the tone, tenor, and fashions of the day.
John Kennedy, for example, established an optimistic and forward-looking tone for our country, while Jimmy Carter made it fashionable to be a thoughtful, compassionate Christian and an energy geek. Bill Clinton turned us all into policy wonks, and George W. Bush transformed himself from an AWOL draft-dodging drunk into a warrior. Barack Obama established a tone of thoughtful, elegant inclusion and diversity, celebrated around the world.
Tragically, what Donald Trump showed us is that when the President of the United States is a bully, being a bully becomes cool. And it persists so long as he holds a national platform.
Political bullies, from the soft-spoken Mitch McConnell to the outrageous Gym Jordan, all surfed the wave of Trump’s bullying style. Right wing media has become filled with outrage-puffed bullies, each reveling in being more brutal, oafish, and outrageously fascistic than the last.
Over the past few years, Trump followers delighted in bullying store owners and people in public spaces by refusing to wear masks. Now they’re bullying trans people, pregnant women, public school teachers, librarians, and drag queens. Bullies, being cowards deep down inside, always pick on those they see as the least able to defend themselves.
Bullying is contagious, which makes the GOP’s fascist bullying a whole-of-society crisis.
Multiple studies showed, in the months after Trump was elected, an increase in school bullying. White “Karens” (female and male) around the country found new validation in their attempts to bully people of color, including children. And Trump’s bullying use of the phrase “China virus” led to a huge spike in attacks on Asian Americans.
Trump set the tone for all these bullies: truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun. As Glenn Altschuler wrote for The Hill:
“And like all bullies, Trump traffics in personal insults and group stereotypes. He began calling immigrants ‘rapists,’ complained about ‘shithole countries,’ mocked a reporter with disabilities, said the Speaker of the House has ‘mental problems,’ said four American congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ to the ‘crime-infested places from which they came.’
“He’s peddled the racist idea that immigration is an ‘invasion,’ and retweeted the claim that ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’ He responded to the #MeToo movement by declaring, ‘It’s a very scary time for young men in America.’ He spread a phony conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a congressional aide, in 2001.”
Remember Mitch McConnell bragging, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’” Classic bullying.
The people whose bullying tendencies drew them to guns and violence have joined the bullies in the GOP as well, with the ultimate bullying event being their assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6th.
Convicted foreign agent, bully, and Trump toady Mike Flynn, who suggested that a wholesale slaughter of minority Americans a la Myanmar “should happen” here, upped the ante by saying, when presented with a new AR15, “Maybe I'll find someone in Washington, D.C.” Spoken like a lifelong bully.
Our world is in flames, as climate scientists have been warning us would happen for at least five decades, but fossil-fuel billionaires here and abroad continue to bully civilized nations into a suicide pact. Just let them get richer and richer selling their poisons, they say…until everything collapses.
Psychologist Shawn T. Smith, author of Surviving Aggressive People, notes that bullies almost always back down when they’re confronted. Bullies, he notes, are both lazy and cowards; preying on people who fight back is too much trouble and risk.
“[B]ullies and predators,” Smith writes, “…test, …prod, and…scan for vulnerability. When they do, responding quickly is more important than responding perfectly.”
The vast majority of Americans don’t want the world these GOP bullies are trying to impose on us.
Most Americans, for example, would like to have the same kind of healthcare and educational system that Canadians, Europeans, Australians, Japanese, and South Koreans have. Everybody covered, not a single medical bankruptcy, and undergraduate student debt largely nonexistent. They’d like good union jobs, a stable environment, quality public transportation, and top-notch primary schools.
So, why don’t we have what Europe got in the 1940s and Canada got in the 1960s? Because wealthy bullies who don’t want to pay their taxes buy off Republicans who, themselves, are willing to bully the American people and the press.
We have “Jan. 6th” bullies, anti-mask bullies, anti-vax bullies, an entire health insurance industry that bullies us, bank bullies who rip us off, Wall Street bullies stealing everything that’s not nailed down, anti-abortion bullies threatening women, and religious bullies threatening our courts.
And we can’t just “stop talking about Trump”: we must confront this.
It’s like we’re having dinner at an outdoor garden party, and somebody notices a poisonous snake slithering around under the table. Would it be wise to simply refuse to talk about it? Would it even be possible?
Pushing back hard is imperative, otherwise we lose.
It’s way past time for average Americans to fight back: we’ve been bullied enough. Democrats and average Americans must follow Alvin Bragg’s example: stand up and put a stop to it.
Trump dreams of revenge. It’s what fascists do.
Because fascism trickles down from fascist leadership, it’s what Trump’s cult members are dreaming of, too. As are his toady lawyers.
Yesterday, for example, Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became president again he could order Seal Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it. Judge Florence Pan asked:
“You’re saying a president could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?”
Trump’s lawyer answered that a sitting president could only be held criminally liable for those crimes the judge listed — which is making me wonder if Jack Smith has proof that he was selling pardons and military secrets — if Congress had first impeached him.
In other words, yes, Trump may have sold those missing top-secret documents to Putin, probably sold all those last-day pardons for $2 million each as Rudy Giuliani said, and could even order the assassination of somebody he didn’t like in the future.
And nobody could do a thing about it, according to Trump and his lawyers, because Republicans in the Senate had failed to convict him.
This open embrace of lawlessness should tell us everything we need to know about not just Trump but the GOP that’s backing him up and hasn’t expressed any second thoughts about his leadership of the party or his bizarre “vengeance” campaign for reelection.
We’ve seen the early glimpses of Trump’s murderous soul for years.
When the George Floyd protests erupted in Washington, DC, thousands of Black people were heading for the White House: Trump, his wife, and his son all fled the building for the president’s underground bunker. Word leaked to the press within hours, and Trump was both embarrassed and furious, demanding the execution of the leaker.
That’s right: the execution of the person who told the press that he was hiding from the protesters.
When he organized his bible photo-opportunity at the church across the street from Lafayette Square, he’d demanded that General Mark Milley have the troops affix bayonets to their rifles and carry live ammunition, presumably to shoot protestors. Milley refused, but apparently went along with Trump’s desire to clear the area with tear gas.
The next time, Trump will make sure his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is somebody willing to repeat Nixon’s Kent State slaughter. Somebody he can more easily bully.
On January 6th, Trump tried to bully Mike Pence into making him dictator-for-life. When that failed, he tried to get Pence murdered. Now, he’s at it again, trying to crank up his well-armed followers to bully or even take out President Biden.
Earlier this week, Trump posted to his Nazi-infested failing social media:
“Joe would be ripe for Indictment. If I don’t get immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity.” He added, “By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box.”
He’s told us he wants to build concentration camps for “millions” of people, including his political “enemies,” and will “root out” those he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
That would be you and me. We shouldn’t worry about Putin or Kim or China attacking the US, Trump tells us, because Democrats are the real threat to America:
“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
From Trump separating mothers from their children and trafficking those kids into “Christian” adoption services that have now vanished (along with about 1,000 missing youngsters), to his followers swatting Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith (among others), the bullying fascist mindset has been growing like a cancer in America.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an infamous bully who once chased then-17-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg down the street screaming epithets at him, bullied her pooch Kevin McCarthy into threatening New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a congressional investigation if he didn’t back off from prosecuting her role model, Donald Trump.
Following up, Gym Jordan, notorious for his bullying any witness who appears before his committees or brings up his alleged coverup history, has now been joined by James Comer (accused of abusing a girlfriend and then getting her an abortion), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil in demanding Bragg give their committees all the information he’s gathered on Donald Trump’s crimes relating to his paying off porn star Stormy Daniels.
For his part, Bragg is having none of it, pushing back with a statement saying through a spokesman:
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law.”
Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.
On Tuesday, we learned that House Republicans under MAGA Mike Johnson are hoping to try to impeach Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. And they want to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for his willingness to testify at an open hearing rather than their closed-door bullying charade.
Bullying flows from the top down in everything from gangs to businesses to political parties.
Humans invent political systems, and we base our inventions on our observations of human behavior. It thus makes perfect sense that when Benito Mussolini invented fascism in its modern form, he was simply patterning it after a behavior he knew well because he’d exhibited it his entire life: bullying.
This understanding parallels the rise of fascism as the political system now most vigorously embraced by the GOP, from rigging courts and elections to using naked threats of violence and even the killing of five police officers to try to stop the peaceful transfer of the presidency from Trump to Biden on January 6th.
As the late Madeline Albright wrote in her book Fascism: A Warning:
“Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was ‘bully.’”
If we don’t take on bullies — particularly fascist bullies — they keep going further and further until either they win or we fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough.
Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only contain or defeat them. Which is what FDR, Churchill, and Stalin ended up having to do, at the cost of tens of millions of lives.
From that experience, Europe learned a lesson about dealing with fascist bullies, which is why the governments of the continent are largely united in their support of Ukraine against the murderous bullying of Russia’s fascist leader.
Bullies never stop. And, most importantly, every time they win, they set their sights on the next conquest. Giving in to their demands only creates a newer and more elaborate set of demands.
We have so many of these bullies polluting our political waters today that it’s nearly impossible to get anything done that benefits anybody except the morbidly rich bullies themselves and their friends.
As lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy writes for Psychology Today:
“Bullies don’t negotiate; they make demands, they make threats, and they fight for them. They generally lack the modern skills of win-win... So don’t think of their demands as a form of true negotiation. It’s more like warfare. And you don’t want to give in to that.”
Right now, America is suffering from an epidemic of political bullying.
Billionaires started bullying us in the 1980s at the suggestion of Lewis Powell’s infamous memo, demanding that the top 74% income tax rate be collapsed to 25%; Reagan enthusiastically gave in (as did a few Democrats) and now the billionaires — who are paying 3% income tax rates (not a typo) — just used their political muscle to eliminate funding to the IRS as part of their “negotiation” around the debt ceiling.
The morbidly rich funders of the GOP got their way this week, when Chuck Schumer gave in to Republican bullying and said he was good with stripping $10 billion out of the IRS budget, making it much harder for that agency to catch billionaire tax cheats.
Trump, like all fascist bullies, delights in the bullying behaviors his cult followers emulate. He even went so far as to tell a convention of police officers:
“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’
"When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]. … I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK?’”
He gets pleasure stripping power away from others while causing fear and pain in his enemies’ lives, and the more successfully he can bully high-profile people the more he puffs up with pleasure.
This is a crisis for America now because presidents tend to establish both the tone, tenor, and fashions of the day.
John Kennedy, for example, established an optimistic and forward-looking tone for our country, while Jimmy Carter made it fashionable to be a thoughtful, compassionate Christian and an energy geek. Bill Clinton turned us all into policy wonks, and George W. Bush transformed himself from an AWOL draft-dodging drunk into a warrior. Barack Obama established a tone of thoughtful, elegant inclusion and diversity, celebrated around the world.
Tragically, what Donald Trump showed us is that when the President of the United States is a bully, being a bully becomes cool. And it persists so long as he holds a national platform.
Political bullies, from the soft-spoken Mitch McConnell to the outrageous Gym Jordan, all surfed the wave of Trump’s bullying style. Right wing media has become filled with outrage-puffed bullies, each reveling in being more brutal, oafish, and outrageously fascistic than the last.
Over the past few years, Trump followers delighted in bullying store owners and people in public spaces by refusing to wear masks. Now they’re bullying trans people, pregnant women, public school teachers, librarians, and drag queens. Bullies, being cowards deep down inside, always pick on those they see as the least able to defend themselves.
Bullying is contagious, which makes the GOP’s fascist bullying a whole-of-society crisis.
Multiple studies showed, in the months after Trump was elected, an increase in school bullying. White “Karens” (female and male) around the country found new validation in their attempts to bully people of color, including children. And Trump’s bullying use of the phrase “China virus” led to a huge spike in attacks on Asian Americans.
Trump set the tone for all these bullies: truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun. As Glenn Altschuler wrote for The Hill:
“And like all bullies, Trump traffics in personal insults and group stereotypes. He began calling immigrants ‘rapists,’ complained about ‘shithole countries,’ mocked a reporter with disabilities, said the Speaker of the House has ‘mental problems,’ said four American congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ to the ‘crime-infested places from which they came.’
“He’s peddled the racist idea that immigration is an ‘invasion,’ and retweeted the claim that ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’ He responded to the #MeToo movement by declaring, ‘It’s a very scary time for young men in America.’ He spread a phony conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a congressional aide, in 2001.”
Remember Mitch McConnell bragging, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’” Classic bullying.
The people whose bullying tendencies drew them to guns and violence have joined the bullies in the GOP as well, with the ultimate bullying event being their assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6th.
Convicted foreign agent, bully, and Trump toady Mike Flynn, who suggested that a wholesale slaughter of minority Americans a la Myanmar “should happen” here, upped the ante by saying, when presented with a new AR15, “Maybe I'll find someone in Washington, D.C.” Spoken like a lifelong bully.
Our world is in flames, as climate scientists have been warning us would happen for at least five decades, but fossil-fuel billionaires here and abroad continue to bully civilized nations into a suicide pact. Just let them get richer and richer selling their poisons, they say…until everything collapses.
Psychologist Shawn T. Smith, author of Surviving Aggressive People, notes that bullies almost always back down when they’re confronted. Bullies, he notes, are both lazy and cowards; preying on people who fight back is too much trouble and risk.
“[B]ullies and predators,” Smith writes, “…test, …prod, and…scan for vulnerability. When they do, responding quickly is more important than responding perfectly.”
The vast majority of Americans don’t want the world these GOP bullies are trying to impose on us.
Most Americans, for example, would like to have the same kind of healthcare and educational system that Canadians, Europeans, Australians, Japanese, and South Koreans have. Everybody covered, not a single medical bankruptcy, and undergraduate student debt largely nonexistent. They’d like good union jobs, a stable environment, quality public transportation, and top-notch primary schools.
So, why don’t we have what Europe got in the 1940s and Canada got in the 1960s? Because wealthy bullies who don’t want to pay their taxes buy off Republicans who, themselves, are willing to bully the American people and the press.
We have “Jan. 6th” bullies, anti-mask bullies, anti-vax bullies, an entire health insurance industry that bullies us, bank bullies who rip us off, Wall Street bullies stealing everything that’s not nailed down, anti-abortion bullies threatening women, and religious bullies threatening our courts.
And we can’t just “stop talking about Trump”: we must confront this.
It’s like we’re having dinner at an outdoor garden party, and somebody notices a poisonous snake slithering around under the table. Would it be wise to simply refuse to talk about it? Would it even be possible?
Pushing back hard is imperative, otherwise we lose.
It’s way past time for average Americans to fight back: we’ve been bullied enough. Democrats and average Americans must follow Alvin Bragg’s example: stand up and put a stop to it.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
THOM HARTMANN is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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