Journalist and former editor of the Stars and Stripes for three decades, D. Earl Stephens, has recently opined in a guest essay for Raw Story that “The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.”
Stephens has accused mass media news institutions of committing journalistic malpractice for not “monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote while doing nothing for three hours except to root for the attack’s success.”
To this criminologist, as the custodian of the democratic republic, the Fourth Estate seems derelict in its duty for not correctly framing the genuine issues that confront or threaten American freedom and constitutional democracy.
Should Trump win the fall presidential election, perhaps the most dangerous of these maneuvers will have to do with the forthcoming transformation of the U.S. Department of Justice from an independent and self-directing law enforcement system to one that would become part of a proxy “police state.” A law enforcement system whose absolute discretion of power would become exclusively dependent on a de facto dictator with presidential immunity from any crimes, harms, injuries, or violence that he may inflict or unleash on the people of the United States.
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Chapter Seventeen of Project 2025 outlines other changes that would accompany the former relations between the office of the presidency and the Department of Justice.
A non-exhaustive listening of these changes includes:
In tandem with these changes in the federal and state relations of the administration of justice, Trump plans on using the military to enforce domestic law violations involving, for example, criminal gangs, protesting demonstrators and securing the borders by using detention camps — all characteristic of illiberal democracies such as today’s Hungary or authoritarian regimes like contemporary China or North Korea going back to the 1950s.
Trump also plans to “target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists.”
Let’s not forget that at least a “dozen times Trump pushed to prosecute his perceived enemies,” including Hillary Clinton, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and Joe Biden.
Presently, Trump continues to bang “the drums of hate” and to follow “the roadmap created for him by” the MAGA 2025 Manifesto. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief is also “backstopped by a radical, bought-off Supreme Court, and bolstered by known election deniers.” Relying on the twisted Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, Trump is now saying that “he had ‘every right’ to interfere in the 2020 election.” During a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired on Tuesday of this week, he also admitted that he did lose the election “by a whisker.”
At this point, Trump is undoubtedly winning this legal battle. It has even been more effective than the tactics of delay, delay, and delay. Then again, with the sentencing for his criminal conviction of 34 felonies in the election interference case being postponed from September 18 to after the election on November 26, the former president has been quite successful at “beating the law” concerning all four of his criminal indictments.
As David Rhode in Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy has written, during Trump’s presidency, he “intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants.”
If this were not enough, the would-be dictator is promising “retribution to anybody who dares get in his way” and, if elected again, clemency for his all-American patriotic “hostages” who have been “unfairly” convicted of crimes for their First Amendment activities at the Capitol on January 6.
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Lest anyone forget, as I have elaborated in great detail in Criminology on Trump, while in office, the president’s practices of granting pardons and awarding clemencies were quite different from those of other presidents, going back as far as the 25th, William McKinley.
For example, Trump did not use the usual vetting process and sold pardons at $50,000 each — often for much more. We learned earlier this week that two of those individuals Trump released from prison were known to be wife abusers, including one who was also a drug dealer as well as a cop killer.
Accordingly, on September 5, at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, a fundraiser for the January 6 riot defendants was held. Tickets at the “J6 Awards Gala” ranged from $1500 per person to $50,000 for a table of twelve.
At a bare minimum, retired journalist Stephens wants to know, “Why haven’t Democracy Desks been set up in these broken newsrooms staffed with journalists who do nothing but monitor the Republicans’ movements as they ruthlessly defend an attack on America and go about annihilating truth, justice, and our right to even vote?”
Instead of Democracy Desks, the mass media is busy spinning their wheels trying to decide what facts to check and what lies to share. Meanwhile, during Trump’s incoherent speeches, they ignore his “word salad” discourse and the abnormal things that Trump says, like his responding to a reporter’s question about inflation when he pointed out that people are not eating bacon because of the use of wind power. In other words, what about the lack of coverage of Trump’s “alarming cognitive decline.”
These media companies are also wasting time repeatedly contrasting two narratives on the aftermath of the 2020 election as well as the January 6 attack on the Capitol as though there are competing interpretations of what transpired back then rather than reporting only on the one factual version.
Where the mainstream media has been at its worst and has failed the American people the most is for the economy. Mainly because the comparative data has consistently shown that the Democratic Party outperforms the Republican Party in general and between Bidenomics and Trumpian economics in particular. Yet most people in the U.S., regardless of political party, falsely believe otherwise. As an educator, I sincerely blame this societal-wide ignorance on the mainstream media.
Each of these commissions or omissions favors Trump and is the antithesis of “objective” or “balanced” journalism. They are nonetheless rationalized away under the banner of objective and balanced journalism. These journalistic inadequacies are also excused because, after nearly a decade, the mainstream media still can’t figure out how to cover Trump. Here’s a clue: why not simply tell the truth?
Similarly, Stephens and many other media critics would like to know how these mainstream news platforms can continue to normalize the illegal and bizarre behavior of Trump and his morally bankrupt political party. After all, at this very moment in time, his MAGA minions are doing everything they can think of to destroy American Democracy as we know it.
Stephens accurately points out that Trump is the “literal definition of a terrorist and/or an authoritarian strongman — a thug. He bows to murderous fascists like Putin and openly revels in their success.” Yet, the mass media currently seems indifferent or oblivious to these facts, not as if they previously paid enough attention to them.
While it has occurred to many in the news media that Trump is a wannabe authoritarian strongman, few think of him as a gangster or as a thug, let alone as a domestic terrorist, even though he is armed with plenty of MAGA backup. Nor has the mass media discussed the various types of violence that are likely to occur should Trump win or lose in November.
Between now and then, as Trump most likely continues to slip in the polls to Kamala Harris, he will undoubtedly become more desperate. In response, he will spend even less time discussing the campaign issues except when he is forced to respond to journalistic queries. For example, “Will he or won’t he” vote for the six-week abortion ban in Florida. Meanwhile, these same journalists seldom point out that, in the first place, this terrible choice about abortion bans was only made possible because of Trump’s three appointed justices to the Supreme Court.
Trump has already been spending most of his time and energy doubling down on demonizing immigrants as well as his political and legal adversaries, which – except for his sycophantic supporters – may not be enough to run on and win the election. Besides, these absurd statements are becoming so stale and boring.
In the wake of “his attacks on immigrants becoming increasingly delusional” and as his fake data and claims about hordes of rapists and murders invading the Southern border are amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media, such dangerous rhetoric is only increasing the number of discriminatory and hate crimes committed against those who may or may not be Latin American immigrants.
This stirring of violence serves as a distraction for the likely far-right MAGA violence that looms shortly. Mass, as well as social media, law enforcement, Homeland Security and the Democratic Party should all be mindful of and foreshadowing the dangers of this potential violence. Rather than continuing to ignore the signs online and off or sticking their proverbial heads in the sand because they would prefer not to go to such dark and ominous places. Then again, this may very well be the fricken case because they are experiencing cognitive resistance to and/or the unconscious denial of these sordid types of activities.
More concretely, the absence or lack of focus on the likely violence is related to the fact that “mainstream American political journalists have always been shockingly indifferent to right-wing violence emerging in our midst,” says David Neiwert, “America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism.”
From the Ruby Ridge standoff to the Waco siege and massacre of 76 Branch Davidians to the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in the 1990s to the Unite the Right weekend rally in August 2017 by white supremacists protesting the taking down of a Robert E. Lee monument who during their marches chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi-associated phrases at counter-protesters in Charlottesville, South Carolina, to the MAGA rioters assaulting the Capitol in January 2021.
For different but related reasons, both law enforcement and FBI personnel have also downplayed right-wing violence when compared to their concern with both real and imagined left-wing violence attributed to groups or organizations such as the ACLU, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Antifa, the Animal Liberation Front, or Black Lives Matter.
In both 2020 and 2024, journalists and law enforcement have not been paying enough attention to online right-wing chatter, such as the rhetoric on Telegram about how the outcome of this election will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.” Or to on the ground real Republican assaults on the First Amendment, including the banning of books and ethnic school curricula, affirmative action, equity, and diversity.
Otherwise, the forces of law and order should not be once again underprepared and unable to respond quickly in anticipation of the different types of violence that ensued after Trump’s 2020 electoral loss to Joe Biden, leading up to and culminating with the failed coup d’état on the day of election certification, Jan. 6, 2021.
Looking forward, two scenarios of MAGA violence will likely occur after the 2024 presidential election: one if Trump wins and one if Trump loses. In the latter outcome, there will also be possibilities for fixing what ails our constitutional democracy.
Scenarios of Violence After Trump Wins
If Trump wins in November, we can anticipate two types of violent-related activities occurring not long after the de facto installation of a dictator as the 47th President of the United States in January 2025.
The first has to do with the peaceful protests that are likely to occur, not unlike the 2017 women’s marches across the country in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and to Trump’s election campaign and history of sexism toward women. The other has to do with the immigration front and the accelerated arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Whether Trump invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807 in both scenarios, he will deploy the military nationwide to address these domestic conflicts.
In either case, armed with AR-15s will be the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other militias like the Minutemen, who will be augmenting the Trumpian government as “citizen cops.” They will be busy rounding up and turning over protestors or immigrants to agencies of law enforcement or the Border Patrol for processing.
Concerning immigrants, recall that this was precisely what was done for several years in Arizona during Trump’s first administration. Now, these noncommissioned “bounty hunters” will, in all likelihood, spread out nationwide. In hopes — who knows — that Trump might award them the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Scenarios of Violence After Trump Loses
Here, we will see a repeat of what occurred after Trump lost in 2020. States will again be besieged and contested as they were in several swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. These same MAGA-type fraudsters, joined by their election-denying associates, will show up at ballot-counting centers as well as state capitols to create enough chaos and disorder to prevent the votes from being certified in a timely fashion and then, where possible, shift election certification over to Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The goal is ultimately to force the election outcome to be determined by the current Republican-MAGA-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and/or by the MAGA-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.
And should Harris still prevail despite this Republican election interference, then extremist expert Neiwert thinks that “we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities” as well as high-profile liberal figures. Neiwert also believes that these MAGA warriors will be leaning “heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda” and against anyone supporting the “demonic liberal agenda.”
At the same time, should the Democrats also retain control of the U.S. Senate and take back the U.S. House – a long shot – then possibilities would exist for accomplishing an array of necessary legislative, judicial, and constitutional reforms.
For example, Democrats would be in a position to abolish the Senate's antidemocratic filibuster rules or pass the No Kings Act to counteract the “unconstitutional” Trump v. U.S. decision by the MAGA Supreme Court that erroneously granted presidents criminal immunity.
With the Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, they would be able to try to pull off a very difficult trifecta. I am referring to the long overdue abolishing of the undemocratic Electoral College that unfortunately still requires the daunting task of amending the U.S. Constitution.
Unless a new or a second U.S. Constitution is written to replace the original one as called for by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law.
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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.
