Trump is determined to become America's first dictator
By Thom Hartmann,
Even though the number of
dying Trump followers increases daily, his coup rolls on. 
By Bill Bramhall
Now, in the Trump
shadow-universe he’s created a shadow-government for his shadow-fans. It’s not
as wacky an idea as it seems and suggests Trump’s solidifying his control over
the GOP going toward 2022 and 2024.
Last November, on election
day, I suggested on my radio program that if the Biden ticket
were to lose (something we did not expect, but after 2016 who knows what can
happen) they should set up a “shadow government” to be a visible and ongoing
opposition and alternative to Trump’s second term.
Apparently, somebody on Team
Trump was listening. Or they copped the idea from the same place I did —
the UK, Canada
and Australia, all countries where the party out of power
assembles a “shadow government” with a “shadow cabinet” that regularly informs
voters of how and why they’d run the government differently were they in power.
Trump’s last Chief
of Staff, former Tea Party Congressman Mark Meadows, appeared on a fringe
rightwing TV internet show and repeatedly referred to Trump’s “Cabinet.”
“We met with several of our
Cabinet members tonight,” Meadows said. “We actually had a follow-up ... meeting
with some of our Cabinet members.”
Referring to Trump as “the
president,” just as Trump does himself in the daily fundraising emails I receive from him,
Meadows added, Trump is “a president who is fully engaged, highly focused and
remaining on task.”
In other words, the coup
rolls on.
Voltaire’s old quote, that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can
make you commit atrocities,” is playing out right in front of our eyes.
People are dying for Trump, getting into fights with hospital staff as they’re about to be intubated, insisting that Trump was right when he said that Democrats’ reaction to the growing pandemic was just their latest “hoax.”
Jim Jones, as I noted in an earlier op-ed, was a piker by today’s standards:
he only convinced 913 people to commit suicide. Trump has convinced
millions to expose themselves to a deadly virus, and at least 400,000 who didn’t need to die are now no
longer with us.
Across America mini-Jim
Jones’ like Pastor Greg Locke are rising up to preach the gospel
that vaccines and masks are the work of the devil and getting sick or dying for
Trump is a sure path to heaven.
Meanwhile, the coup rolls
on.
Florida, although not alone
among Red states and counties in encouraging death and disease, is apparently
leading the nation both in megalomaniac preachers and Covid deaths.
Ron DeSantis, who won his election
by only 32,463 votes (after his party purged more than 7 percent — over one million — of Florida’s voters from the rolls in the
preceding 2 years) has now overseen the death of over 39,000 people in his state alone.
And now DeSantis, apparently
trying to live up to his moniker of “DeathSantis,” has issued an executive order forbidding Florida public schools from
requiring schoolchildren to wear masks. Voltaire had nothing on this guy,
and he’s #2 behind Trump in the race for the 2024 GOP
presidential nomination.
But no matter how many they
kill, the coup rolls on.
It also turns out sedition
and treason are pretty profitable. Bizarre scam notwithstanding, Trump,
DeSantis and the entire Trump contingent in Congress are making big bucks off
saying that avoiding Covid is for pansies and that Trump actually won an election
he lost by 7 million votes in 2020.
Trump is sitting on over $100 million from his grift just in the 6 months
since he lost the election, and DeSantis has raised over $44 million. Marjorie Traitor Greene raked in over $3 million in the first three months of this year
while she did virtually nothing in Congress (having lost all her committee
assignments for lying to voters) while other “Trumpy” Republicans are rolling
in the dough as well.
As they drain their
followers of cash, the coup rolls on.
But no part of the Trump
scam is as troubling as is its potential to ultimately end democracy in this
country (and, eventually, around the world).
A recent CBS News poll found that about half of all
registered Republican voters thought rigging elections for their own party was
a better idea than promoting ideas that would win elections.
“Almost half of Republicans
admit they’re ready to ditch democracy” read the ominous headline in The
Washington Post.
The rightwing billionaire
oligarchs’ best bet for eliminating democracy and keeping their regulations and
taxes low is to make sure Trump’s coup rolls on.
While “shadow” governments
in the other three big English-speaking countries are all designed to simply
inform voters about the differences between the parties and how the
out-of-power party would govern given current circumstances, Trump’s shadow
Cabinet is part of his ongoing coup attempt.
He began his coup attempt
the day after he lost the election, when he publicly repudiated the election
results and began harassing the Department of Justice and multiple Secretaries
of State and election officials to declare that Biden only won because of
“fraud.”
All he needed, he told them,
was for the DOJ to declare official doubts about the outcome and he and his “R
congressmen” would take care of the rest.
“Just say the election was
corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump told then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Rosen and the DOJ didn’t go
along, so Trump simply switched strategy from coercion to an outright murder
attempt on Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi as his coup rolled on.
The high point of his coup
was on January 6th when he encouraged his followers to attack the Capitol to
“stop the steal,” and refused to mobilize the DC National Guard until long after his terrorists
had left the building. (Unlike every other state, the DC National Guard can only be activated by
the President because DC has no governor.)
Making sure the coup never
ends but keeps rolling on is probably Trump’s best chance to avoid going to
jail for crimes ranging from rape to bank fraud, sedition and treason. Running
for office gives him both some political and legal immunities and access to
more cash, so he’s going to persist and amp up the volume of his efforts.
But Trump’s neofascist coup
is no longer limited to himself and his fellow DC insiders.
State after state is being
taken over from the ground up by Trump supporters who want to end multiracial
democracy in America and turns us back into a white-supremacist
ethnostate.
From Oregon to Florida and
all across states in between, local school boards are being seized by anti-American supporters
of the former reality TV star.
The world watches with
horror and our actual president, Joe Biden, finds himself, along with Democrats
in Congress, frustrated at every turn by Trump’s loyalists and a few Democratic
senators who are taking money from the same billionaires who fund the GOP and
empower Trump.
Meanwhile, the coup rolls
on.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.