Former president Donald Trump has yet to win a return to the White House, yet he's already caused damage around the country, author Sasha Abramsky told Salon's Amanda Marcotte in a far-reaching interview published Tuesday.
That's because many of Trump's disciples have been elected to local government around the country, and have been executing his ideas at that level — often with catastrophic consequences for locals' day-to-day life.
One of the key examples of this is in Shasta County, California, a rural inland area of the Pacific Northwest home to the city of Redding — where Trump supporters linked with QAnon and local secessionist militias took over, throwing out more moderate Republicans.
"Over the last few months, it's gotten better, but for years the vacuum was filled by the hard-right," said Abramsky. "The right gained control over the border county supervisors, they gained control over local school boards and they pushed this increasingly fringe agenda. They fired the public health officer. They fired the people who were in charge of county health services."
The upshot is that, "They reshaped government in the MAGA image, and it caused chaos. It caused budgeting dysfunction. It caused tremendous upheavals in the provision of services."
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The good news though, Abramsky told Marcotte, is that these MAGA takeovers haven't always been allowed to happen — in the similar rural community of Clallam County, Washington, residents saw it coming and fought back before their local government was upended.
Residents there, "Set up what they called the Sequim Good Government League," said Abramsky, noting that it was a bipartisan effort. "They fielded candidates who took on local figures who had embraced QAnon, including the mayor. They explained to the public just how dangerous this kind of ideology was."
The result was that in just two cycles, "They basically recaptured all of those spots in city government, on the council, and on school boards."
The new leaders were a mix of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, noted Abramsky — but what united them was that "they agreed about the necessity of restoring local democracy. That worked very effectively."
The key takeaway, said Abramsky, is that whether residents catch on early as in Clallam or find out the hard way in Shasta, "when people pay attention, most Americans just do not want to go down this road. It's ugly and it's dysfunctional and it promises nothing but chaos and upheaval."
