The blueprint for the fascist takeover of the U.S. government is here.
The blueprint for the fascist takeover of the U.S. government is here.
Trump and his cronies are planning what they'll do in 2025. It's nothing less than the end of American democracy, and voting won't stop it.
Although disgraced, demonstrably insane and in poor physical health, defeated U.S. President Donald Trump and the movement he leads is still extremely dangerous. He and the radical Republican Party he commands are quite openly plotting what they’ll do if when they return to power in January 2025, which is likely to happen because of the election procedures Republicans have been hijacking at the state level since last Election Day, and also because of the dispensation, which I believe will be granted next year, by the equally radical Supreme Court of the Republican plan to have state legislatures rig electoral votes regardless of popular votes. Trump’s plan eerily resembles how Adolf Hitler restructured the German state after his ascent to the chancellorship in January 1933. And I’m not exaggerating. This is the endgame for American democracy, and it’s coming, as of this writing, 30 months from now. And voting for Democrats won’t stop it, or even slow it down.
(By the way, if some troll out there is tempted to comment that “it’s disrespectful to compare this to Nazism,” don’t even start. I’m Jewish—I know what I’m talking about).
I suggest you read this article, reported by political journalist Jonathan Swan of the website Axios, which was published yesterday (July 22, 2022) and will be followed by more. Swan has been collecting information from numerous sources within the Trump camp and the Republican Party. They aren’t preparing for an election in 2024, but rather, they seem to be taking its result for granted (which is itself alarming) and planning what they will do once returned to power. This is what would have happened if the Trump-fomented coup of January 6, 2021 had been successful in scotching the election results. Only the Trump 2025 plan, being prepared with the luxury of time and deliberation, is much more broad-ranging. I’ll be quoting a few key pieces of Swan’s article here, but I really do think you should read it for yourself.
The main thrust is that Trump and the fascists propose to basically decapitate the federal administrative government and load it up with MAGA trolls. There are upwards of 50,000 federal employees at various levels of the government, and most of them are insulated from being replaced when a new administration comes in, which is why a lot of civil servants have long careers serving under various Presidents. That will end on January 20, 2025, when Trump reinstates an executive order—which he put in place just before the 2020 election and which was immediately rescinded by Biden—that reclassifies key employees in a new category, “Schedule F.” I know this sounds like boring administrative office stuff. It isn’t. Trump will fire tens of thousands of civil servants in all departments of government and appoint fascist MAGA nuts in their place. Here’s how Swan describes it, in his carefully circumscribed journalist language:
Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.
The thousands of people Trump will appoint—there are already, at this moment, various conservative organizations building lists of personnel—will be incompetent at their jobs, which Trump doesn’t care about, but will definitely be hard-core MAGA heads and Trump sycophants, which he does. They will predominantly be delusional right-wingers who believe the 2020 election was stolen, which is Trump’s litmus test for loyalty. Many of them will be lawyers, placed in key general counsel positions. Their job will be to tell Trump that anything he wants to do is legal. Anyone who has any inclination to do otherwise won’t make the list. Swan puts it this way:
America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office.
But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.
Miller has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.
In other words, in Trump’s post-2025 America, legal procedures will no longer exist at the federal level, because no one who believes in legal procedures will be in charge anymore. Due process? Won’t exist. Equal protection? Forgotten. Trial by jury? A thing of the past. It won’t matter that these things are in the Constitution; no government attorney at the federal level will bring any challenge, or allow any proceeding, that would affirm them. And this would be before the radical U.S. Supreme Court issues a ruling, probably inevitable, effectively endorsing Dick Cheney’s old “unitary executive” theory from the Iraq War era, which would insulate the executive branch from any oversight by either the legislative or judicial branches.
What happens then? Well, Adolf Hitler technically had a parliament in Germany, called the Reichstag, which existed throughout the entirety of the Nazi era. It had no effective power and served mainly as a room full of Nazi stooges to cheer and sieg-heil the Führer when he went there to give speeches. This is what Congress will become: an audience for his rallies. Imagine 535 Congressmen and Senators, all wearing red hats and chanting “Lock her up!” in unison.
As a historian, and looking at the example of Nazi Germany in 1933, this is the section of Swan’s article that terrified me the most deeply.
Sources close to the former president said that he will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.
When Hitler first came to power, many people in German society believed that he could never gain control over the German Army, the Wehrmacht, which was an insular organization whose leadership had both an aristocratic class character—the “Junker generals”—and a high degree of integrity. German military men from 1871 to 1933 believed they were serving the German nation, not the head of the German nation. Hitler quickly changed that by requiring officers to take an oath of loyalty to him personally, rather than to the German state.
This is exactly what Trump is going to do. Once the “woke generals” are purged, their replacements will not, as has been customary in the U.S. military since the dawn of the republic, swear allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. They will be required to swear allegiance to the President of the United States, meaning Donald Trump. This will, as it did Hitler in the 1930s, give Trump control of a military apparatus that he can deploy in any way he likes—such as gunning down protesters in Portland or Washington, D.C., as he already desperately wanted to do during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. And with the Justice Department also purged and stocked with MAGA sycophants, the legal protections that prohibit using military force on American citizens will be nullified.
We have now been told exactly what’s going to happen, and we’ve been handed the blueprint for how American freedom, at all levels, will be abruptly terminated. This happened before, in Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933, and in 2025 it will be the turn of the United States. Exactly as Upton Sinclair warned in the 1930s, fascism in America will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Voting, by the way, will make no difference. Shouting “Blue Wave in 2022!” or donating money to Democratic candidates is as useless against this onslaught as pointing a window fan into a hurricane. Unless it’s for Trump and fascism, in which case it will very much be counted, your vote doesn’t count at all and neither does mine.
That said, I don’t expect blue America to lay down for this. Which means this radical Trump 2025 agenda is the trigger for civil war. If when the 2024 election is stolen by Republicans through one or a combination of the many means they’re right now setting up to do exactly that—such as have state legislatures reject the result of popular votes and declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump—there will undoubtedly be a wave of civil unrest and tanks in the streets. The Republicans can probably spin this to their advantage too. They’ll declare a state of insurrection under laws going back to the early 19th century, suspend all Constitutional guarantees in affected areas (as Lincoln did during the first Civil War), and then the battle will begin. The whole nation will be consumed by violence.
Three weeks ago I wrote about how America doesn’t have much time left. Now, I think, we know exactly how the end is going to come, and when. I’m more certain of it than ever. In any event, wishful thinking is not a strategy. I can’t tell you what to do to prepare for these events. I’m just reporting what I think, and am very sure, is coming.
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