“If you convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t know you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” -President Lyndon B. Johnson

Throughout the past 9 years, Donald Trump made clear his intentions to reverse the engines on the airship that is the United States. He has already caused deep gashes in the nation’s tarmac, and his reelection gives many of us painful and debilitating whiplash. 

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He has engulfed this airship of politics in the smoke and flames of his lies, bigotry, and social divisions, resulting in the meltdown of common decency.

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We must now prepare our country again for his arrival at the Oval Office in 2025. To do so, we need to return ourselves to the fully upright and arms-locked position, keeping our values and one another tightly fastened together. Though political analysts forecast unusually heavy turbulence, our aircraft of state has a stellar record of withstanding even the most unstable social and political atmospheric conditions.

Though the landing may be hard and bumpy and we may emerge a bit battered and weathered, we will remain in good working order, ready for another flight – that is, if and only if we join and remain in coalition now and throughout the journey ahead.

Threatened to the core

In arduous times, I have come to know from personal experience that I must do my individual work and my personal processing, whether that be grieving, raging, emoting, or reflecting. It is difficult, if not impossible, for me to give my utmost until I refuel, refresh, and recover on an emotional and physical level. That’s my process.

I believe that we need to work and fight even harder to connect with people from across all demographics with like minds and ideas to bring sanity back to our country.

Coalitions, however, are often very difficult. As described by Black feminist activist and writer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, “I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.”

Even in an effective coalition, we also must expect that the near future will be very rough for progressives and moderates. But I’m certain we will push the pendulum back toward the left if we stand together for the long haul. It won’t come overnight. I’ve learned from experience that the primary cause of “burnout” is having unrealistic expectations.

Only time will tell whether Trump’s actions and politics follow his campaign behavior and rhetoric.

During his first term, Trump surrounded himself with some career political and military advisors who were able to set up guardrails, keeping him from swerving too deeply off course.

Now with his decision to surround himself with right-wing sycophants and with his threats to “be a dictator on day one,” to “suspend the Constitution,” to punish his “enemies from within,” to deport millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, and to protect women “whether they like it or not,” Trump’s first term has given him the training on how to manipulate the system to bend to his twisted desires. Now with his training wheels off and the guardrails torn down, his Project 2025 is now cleared for takeoff.  

I have learned many lessons in my studies of fascism and of genocides. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotypes and scapegoating entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations often refuse to intervene.

On a micro level, this is also apparent in episodes of schoolyard bullying. Everyone, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, plays a key role.

Working within his divide-and-conquer scapegoating tactics, as tyrants do, Trump has a long track record of defining Mexicans – and later most Latin Americans – as “rapists,” “drug and human traffickers,” and “gang members” who engage in high rates of crime on the U.S. side of the border. He has defined African nations as “sh*thole countries” and lodged insults at several Black female journalists. The list, of course, goes on.

During the past year, the Republican Party spent approximately $215 million in anti-trans TV ads, some of which they broadcast during National Football League games, targeting trans people as a national threat to girls’ and women’s sports teams and claiming trans inmates consume taxpayer funds to undergo gender affirmation procedures. These ads, however, failed to mention that these procedures became mandated by law during Trump’s first term in office.

American strongman

“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is deeply alarmed at the hateful rhetoric at a conference of white nationalists held on November 19 [2016] at the Ronald Reagan Building just blocks from the Museum… The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words. The Museum calls on all American citizens, our religious and civic leaders, and the leadership of all branches of the government to confront racist thinking and divisive hateful speech…”

These words from a press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, refer to a white nationalist conference headlined by neo-Nazi, Richard Spencer, who greeted attendees with a tribute to President-elect Trump by shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail victory!” from the stage before all in attendance gestured in a traditional Nazi straight-arm salute.

Once identifying as a Democrat, Trump has transformed himself, at the very least, into the mouthpiece of the far-right-wing patriarchal Christian white nationalist segment of the Republican Party.

In political terms, a “strongman” is one who leads by force within an overarching authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial regime. Sometimes the formal head of state, sometimes another political or military leader, the strongman exerts influence and control over the government more than traditional laws or constitutional mandates sanction.

Strongmen situate themselves within positions along the political spectrum, usually toward the extremes on the right and the left. Some strongmen include Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolf Hitler of Germany, Juan Perón of Argentina, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Francois Duvalier of Haiti, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Manuel Noriega of Panama, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the philosophy and practice of “fascism.” While also deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early 20th-century Europe in response to liberalism and Marxism on the left.

Umberto Eco, who grew up under the fascist Mussolini regime, enumerates the characteristics of what he calls “Ur-Fascism,” or “Eternal Fascism,” in 14 “typical” features. He stressed, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

Believe the threats

But I have heard many people say, well, we survived Trump’s first term, and we will survive this term also. No, many people needlessly did not survive because of Trump’s denial and refusal to alert and mobilize the nation earlier to the dangers of the Covid-19 virus under his “watch.”

Maybe we should ask the legions of people who remain skeptical and in denial of the realities of the Covid-19 pandemic: those who assert that it was a “hoax,” something contrived by the media to take down their hero, Donald Trump, those who claimed that wearing a mask and socially isolating deprived them of their “liberty” and their First Amendment right of “freedom of association.”

We should have taken a representative sample of these deniers to visit near-filled Covid-19 emergency rooms to see what patients were experiencing: people whose noses and throats were stuffed with plastic tubing, those attached to ventilators, people whose organ systems shut down, the dead who succumbed to the virus.

In the clinics, they would have also seen the looks of stress and grief on the faces of the heroic healthcare workers who were functioning in previously unimaginable conditions and were bearing the brunt of essential lifesaving duties as the deniers stood among them.

They should have been made to attend memorial services for the victims of this partly preventable pandemic and witnessed the effects the losses had on friends and family.

And some pregnant women did not survive Trump’s state abortion bans instigated by his nomination of three far-right Supreme Court “justices” who, along with three other conservative members of the bench, refused to conserve the 50-year precedent of safe and legal reproductive healthcare.

The experiment we know as the United States of America has somehow endured for nearly 250 years. But who knows how many people will survive the next four years? Who knows whether the social institutions of our nation will survive? Will we continue on our path toward becoming “a more perfect union,” or will we devolve into tyranny?

Wherever we go and whatever we become is in the power of “We the People.” In the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin at another critical moment in our history, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Consider the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”

This is not mere hyperbole.

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