by Elwood Watson
Donald Trump kept telling us he’d be a threat to democracy if re-elected president. Now he’s showing us.
Several months ago on his Truth Social website, Trump threatened to “expel” and “cast out” government workers who oppose his radical views, describing them as a “sick political class” that hates the country. The 2024 election, he wrote, “is our final battle.”
He is wasting no time acting on his promise.
Trump, who has endured his own accusations of sexual harassment and election interference, appears to have no qualms concerning the backgrounds of his Cabinet selections and has not indicated any intention to reconsider his current picks, apart from Matt Gaetz dropping out. Trump has dug in his heels and remained steadfast in his decisions as is his modus operandi providing his candidates unambiguous support, praising them as the sort of individuals who will implement the radical sort of change he desires.
The allegations against some of Trump’s picks makes the real consequences of past failed political nominees seem quaint.
Douglas H. Ginsburg, a Harvard law professor, had to withdraw his name from consideration as President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 1987 once it was revealed he had used marijuana as a college student during the 1960s and sporadically throughout the 1970s as a faculty member at Harvard Law School.
A few years later, the first two attorney general nominees of President Bill Clinton, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, were disqualified from consideration due to their employing of undocumented immigrants.
More than a quarter of a century later, former South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, who President Barack Obama nominated in 2008 to be health secretary, withdrew his himself from consideration once it was discovered he never paid income taxes on the use of a car he used while being employed by a financial consulting firm. More recently, in another high-profile incident, in 2021, Neera Tanden, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, withdrew after it was determined that she wouldn’t be able to garner the votes required due to previous social media posts critical of senators.
Compare those allegations to Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and Fox News personality whom Trump nominated for defense secretary. Hegseth reached a settlement to avoid a lawsuit by a woman who accused him of sexual assault at a conservative conference in California in 2017.
The checkered pasts of the president elect’s nominees have elicited little outrage among one of his most loyal constituencies: white evangelicals. Trump is astute at the fact that these communities, particularly the older members, harbor beliefs deeply etched in the right-wing anti-communism of the Cold War era. Differing political ideologies – communism, socialism, and Marxism – were seen as not only anti-American, but also anti-Christian. Trump’s solid support from white evangelicals reveals how much they embrace his desire to abolish democracy and reconstruct a xenophobic, white ethnostate in their own image. Anyone heard of Project 2025?
For the past several years since Trump was elected, leaders of and subscribers to this political segment of American politics have engaged in the most destructive rhetoric publicly expressed by paranoid citizens since the days of the early McCarthy era. During the height of the Black power era, even President Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was able to successfully garner the support of the region by manipulating racist whites fearful and resentful of the civil rights movement, did not seem so overtly hostile in its aims.
The fact minorities have managed to secure Supreme Court seats and live in the White House has driven a number of these “Leave it to Beaver” fans mad with paranoia. In the idolized post-World War II suburbia they pine for, non-white people were absent from the top echelons of power in the U.S.
Trump’s acidic rhetoric is seen as a license by his followers to demean and disregard others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything his MAGA base admires about America. It signals to his supporters that disregarding basic human restraint and destroying your perceived enemies “by any means necessary” is permissible.
While there are some conservatives who have denounced the tactics of their more extreme brethren, they seem to be isolated voices in the wilderness rather than taken seriously among Republicans as rational voices of reason.
The current Republican Party has become so rapacious in its blind thirst for power, its members seem determined to attack and nullify any movements not conducive to their dystopian agenda. We have already witnessed the party engage in this sort of undemocratic activity with voter suppression and the duplicative election laws they have enacted.
The acrimonious rhetoric of the far right betrays the undeniable truth they are terrified and aware their stronghold on the current state of affairs will erode if they are unable to manipulate the laws and future elections. Thus, they are attempting to establish a form of minority rule.
If democracy is to survive, they must be prohibited from carrying out their nefarious efforts.
Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.
also an author and public speaker.
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