Heavy Lies the Crown

Thoughts on the Coming Dictatorship

Two days after starring in the most cataclysmic political television event in my lifetime, President Biden and his wife, children and grandchildren gathered at Camp David for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. To their credit, this Nero-fiddles-while-Rome-burns activity was planned before the disaster of the Thursday night debate.  

But besides posing for the pre-eminent celebrity photographer, the family reportedly urged the President to “keep fighting.” Wife Jill and embattled son Hunter were said to be especially keen on forging ahead, with the grandchildren reportedly offering to pitch in on that thing the kids do, you know, social media. 

A few days later, the Trumpist Supreme Court gave its MAGA master kingly immunity. Almost immediately, Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan put Trump’s sentencing for 34 felony convictions on ice because the high court ruling could be construed to consider it an “official act” to pay off a porn star to influence an election, and then falsify business records to hide the transaction.

Does the American experiment end not with a bang but with an airbrushed whimper? 

For the moment it seems so.

The conservative movement’s leaders systematically put all these pieces together over not years, but decades. Their greatest achievement before the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling was winning the Citizens United dark money case in 2010. That ruling made money privileged speech and set the stage for the compromised, corrupt high court we have now. All three of their recent rulings - the Trump immunity call, removing federal agency power to police corporations, and a case that gives J6 rioters a big break - help lay the groundwork for elements of Project 2025. 

Unable to win enough elections to force their Christo-fascist agenda down the throats of secular, progressive America, they took aim at the judiciary. Besides seizing the high court, over a period of decades, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society coddled and nurtured a legion of weirdo righty fanatics like dead-eye Handmaid’s Tale misogynist nightmare Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, or inexperienced hacks, like Florida’s Aileen Cannon, never approved by the American Bar Association, now wielding enormous power with lifetime sinecures. 

It didn’t have to be this way. 

At every turn, elected progressives and centrists in Washington were either asleep at the wheel or too fractured and compromised to mount serious sustained resistance. When Biden beat Trump in 2020, the Democrats had their last chance to kick back, hard. For two years, they held the House, the Senate and the White House. Sure, it was tenuous, a small majority, but on the day he took office, Biden could have thrown down the gauntlet, played rough, like MAGA would and like Trump will. 

Democrats could have put MAGA on the defensive, packing the Supreme Court with progressives and making Puerto Rico and DC states. There would have been howls of outrage and a rush to the courts. But so what? The other side’s audacity is unmatched. 

The leaders of the American right never let up, they leveraged every bit of access and power and every dollar. Meanwhile Democratic Party leaders always pretended it was business as usual. As Democrats in Washington frittered away their power, MAGA Republicans took it back. 

How is it that Democrats have left it to AOC - a two-term House progressive and right wing punching bag - to introduce articles of impeachment against the compromised MAGA Christofascist Samuel Alito and his corrupt fellow traveler Clarence Thomas? Every Democrat in the House and Senate should have been talking about that corruption on the floor, introducing bills and demanding hearings daily for months. Defund the court! 

Democrats have often behaved timorously and cynically, while the passive and ignored American public gawped helplessly at what the de facto minority party managed to accomplish. Now, the convicted GOP candidate has kingly powers and the Democrats are still dithering about whether their obviously impaired candidate is the best man for the job of running against him. 

For too long, as I wrote last week, Democrats have refused to engage with what their base, and potential untapped progressive voters really want. Case in point again: In the 72 hours after the debate disaster, a top polling outfit that the party relies on, Open Labs, ran surveys, first reported by Puck. The dismal numbers confirmed every political strategist’s instinct. Swing state voters said two to one that Biden should drop out. Forty percent of Biden’s 2020 voters said he should drop out. The share of voters who said the previous week’s news made them “more favorable” toward Biden dropped to “an all time low.” 

There’s a lot of resignation. One of my favorite writers expressed that point of view well in this week’s Corsair. Others, like former Republican Steve Schmidt, and most of the New York Times political op-ed staff, are begging Biden to step back for the good of the nation. Ugly fights are breaking out on social media and in comment threads between people who predict a Biden-led disaster in November, and Biden supporters who prefer the known to the unknown.

For the moment, though, the Supreme Court has given the Biden White House a chance at a do-over. Would it not be an “official act” to pack the court and declare Puerto Rico and DC states before the election? While Biden is exercising his new kingly powers, why not combine Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho and Montana into a single state (to be called Wyo-tana-kota-ho, as I suggested here) to inject some fairness into an electoral college and Senate that privileges the politics of whites in states with more cows than people?

Are we really going to bobble our last chance to stop the United States from becoming a dictatorship because we’re afraid of the chaos of giving Americans a real choice in the coming election? 

Let’s think about what’s at stake, and how our lives will change if King Trump is elected. 

The metamorphosis will be gradual for many, but swift for dissenters, migrants, and publishers. The first step will be legally sanctioned menace.  We already have record numbers of threats against elected officials, but political violence will become even more common when Trump pardons the Proud Boys, and puts the J6 rioters back on the streets, since another Supreme Court ruling last week absolved them of a critical charge. 

Yesterday, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s largest conservative think tank, issued a cryptic threat while subbing in on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast since “our friend Steve” was headed to his long overdue, richly deserved prison term. 

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said Roberts. Roberts, enabled by millions in no-tax billionaire dark money disbursed by Leonard Leo, is a performative fascist who drives around Washington in a Y'all Qaeda coal roller and wears cowboy boots. He hangs out with Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban. 

Besides implied or actual violence, dissenters will be legally subject to all manner of yet unknown abuses by the executive branch. Never Trumpers like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt will be harassed into cowed silence by the threat of audits, if not actually indicted and jailed.

One can imagine that, over time, we will grow accustomed to things like that and to other predictable Project 2025 uglies. Those of us in cities or near factories that employ the undocumented, will get used to seeing immigrants without papers disappeared. Camera crews might follow them, might even get close to the concertina wire rimming concentration camps in Arizona and Texas, but we will never see what’s going on inside. 

Our children, knowing no better, will submit to forced prayer in most public schools. Eventually we will all get used to the Ten Commandments on school doors and maybe courthouses, police stations … just as we have got used to open carrying gun nuts in our stores and on our streets. 

We will eventually stop noticing the mass removal of books from school and public libraries. 

Whistleblowers will stop talking to investigative journalists whose work will be classified as a crime against the state. Publishers and broadcasters who try to expose the kleptocrats and grifters that Trump will usher back into power will be silenced. If journalists manage to get stories, publishers, already cowed by the threat of private litigation terrorism, will be even more reluctant to disseminate anything that might encourage “official acts” of revenge.

In many states across America, people will get over the shock of hearing about women miscarrying alone, without medical care, instructed to pass a dead fetus before doctors will touch them.

Other than that, how bad can it really be? We will still be able to buy guns, gas and groceries, shop at Walmart and Dollar General, and load up on ammo with which to hunt and “protect our families.” 

No doubt our descendants will continue to celebrate an increasingly archaic word -  “liberty” - divorced from whatever meaning it ever had, with fireworks and cheap beer as we will tomorrow. But on this last Fourth of July before what looks like the end of the American experiment, let’s recall what Tom Paine said about independence –  long before the religious right and their corporate masters reduced the word to an empty slogan:  Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.