His language and behavior have trashed the values invoked by words such as honesty, decency and dignity. He never let up on the insults, name-calling, blatant lies, and childish boasting that were staples of his 2016 primary and presidential campaigns.
I wanted to believe that a defeat in the upcoming 2020 presidential election would flush Trumpism from the national community. But I underestimated how deeply he had burrowed into the collective unconscious of his MAGA cult with help from the lavish and indulgent attention of mainstream media-- especially FOX.
During his first term, he had gotten his followers to fear and hate an army of migrants coming from "shithole" countries to steal their jobs and degrade their neighborhoods. In 2015, he said "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." His repeated messages created a racist obsession with border security that energized Trump supporters both in 2020 and 2024.
He also lured working-class voters who felt victimized by an unfair economic system into seeing him as their champion against an overpaid bureaucracy controlled by a self-serving 'deep state'. MAGA became a resentful anti-government movement with a strong sense of victimhood. Trump is a triumphant demagogue who got his adoring supporters to disbelieve their lying eyes and overlook his luxurious lifestyle and obvious position in a wealthy elite. Choosing Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, as an executive co-president is likely to damage Trump's deceptive image as the people's savior.
In the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders tried to appeal to voters who were living from one inadequate paycheck to another, telling them their distress was a symptom of extreme U.S. plutocracy. As Bernie reminded them on June 26, 2019: "The wealthiest three families now own more wealth than the bottom half of the country." However, the Democratic Party establishment was unwilling to denounce Trump as a servant of the plutocratic elite because their principal donors belonged to that same elite. Instead, they turned against Sanders and rallied around 'safe' candidate Joe Biden, who told an audience of wealthy financiers on June 18, 2019,
"Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I've found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who's made money." He ended with this reassurance: "No one's standard of living will change. Nothing would fundamentally change."
Biden and his party kept his promise. Nothing fundamentally changed over the next four years. As the 2024 election approached, Democratic consultants recommended stronger messaging about the benefits of Bidenomics to lift what they saw as unwarranted pessimism of the working class. As a result, Democrats faced a 2024 election season in a state of denial about the growing economic distress of their base, including a broken healthcare system with the unfortunate tag of Obamacare. The Democratic Party was living a lie.
Two important studies (9/14/2020 and 2/17/2025) by Rand economists bookend the four years of the Biden administration and expose the massive and growing income inequality being experienced by ordinary Americans. There are helpful summaries by Paul Constant of the first Rand paper (Business Insider, 9/18/20) and of both Rand papers in a March 4, 2025 report by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The argument in the second Rand paper begins with the fact that "For three decades following the Second World War, incomes for workers across the income distribution grew at the same pace as the broader economy. This changed in the late 1970s, when earnings growth began disproportionately flowing to those with the highest incomes leading to four decades of rising inequality."
The gross national income (GNI) is the total amount of money earned by a nation's people and businesses in a year. It is the total dollar value of the nation's products and services. This GNI is distributed in the form of greater or lesser income to different groups of participants in the economy (e.g. employees, managers and investors). If economic (GNI) growth benefits everyone (like a rising tide lifting all boats) then the earnings of lower, middle and upper-income groups should rise proportionally (in constant inflation-adjusted dollars).
- The Rand papers tell us that this fair proportionality prevailed in the first 30 years after WWII. But, from 1975 to 2023 the share of the GNI going to the bottom 90% shrank from about 67% to below 46%. The Rand economists conclude that "if we had the [fairer] income distribution from 1975, the majority of workers (the bottom 90 percent by income) would have made an additional $3.9 trillion dollars in 2023." As Bernie Sanders points out, "$3.9 trillion would be enough to give every full-time worker in the bottom 90% a raise of $32,000. For perspective, $3.9 trillion is equivalent to 14% of the entire US economy."
Cumulatively, the gap between what workers from 1975 to 2023 earned and what they would have earned with the pre-1975 income distribution "amounts to $79 trillion (in 2023 dollars)". As Paul Constant wrote in Business Insider:
"That huge gap in income inequality doesn't look so much like a law of nature as it does a massive heist....Thanks to the proliferation of trickle-down policies like tax cuts, wage suppression, and stock-market deregulation, 90% of all Americans are demonstrably worse off financially than they were 45 years ago."
To appreciate the harm our predatory healthcare system [AKA Obamacare] is doing to us, let's begin with the per capita cost of healthcare (including both individual and collective expenses). Developed countries with universal healthcare, as reported by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), spend about half as much as we do. In 2021, the U.S. spent $12,138 per person on healthcare, compared to Italy ($4038), UK ($5387), Canada ($5905), France ($6115), and Germany--the most expensive--($7383). If the U.S., with a population of 334 million, is annually spending around $6000 per capita more than comparable nations, then it is wasting $2 trillion per year. I say "wasting" because there is no good reason for our healthcare to cost twice as much as that of comparable nations. The grim truth is that our medical system is grotesquely wasteful despite our collective delusion of economic superiority.
Even with our $2 trillion national overpayment, we are far from having universal healthcare. In 2020, 31.6 million (9.7%) people of all ages were uninsured. The uninsured can easily get into serious medical debt from unavoidable hospitalization and costly medical procedures. This may result in lawsuits from hospitals and providers, as well as loss of credit and even bankruptcy. According to The Commonwealth Fund, "Twenty-nine percent of people with employer coverage and 44 percent of those with coverage purchased through the individual market and marketplaces were underinsured" (i.e. unable to access some of their healthcare without financial hardship). This problem is often due to high deductibles and co-pays and can lead people to neglect symptoms, to not take prescribed medications, and not keep follow-up appointments with their doctors.
Despite losing in 2020, Trump had received 10.2 million more votes than in his 2016 victory--a warning sign that his hold on the MAGA faithful had grown stronger since 2016. He proclaimed to his still faithful cult that the election had been rigged, and started a four-year re-election campaign with a violent insurrection.
On Dec. 19, 2020, Trump tweeted to his enraged supporters: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" On January 6, 2021, at a "Save America" rally on the Ellipse near the White House, Trump gave a speech to his invited mob, repeating his claims about a stolen election. He warned them: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." In response, thousands of his audience, some armed, walked to the Capitol, and breached police perimeters. They wanted to stop a joint session of Congress from certifying that Biden had won a majority of electoral votes.
Some 2,000-2,500 of the protestors broke into the Capitol Building, many engaging in vandalism, looting and violence against police. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has released a video vividly depicting the brutal beating of police officers by rioters. Aquilino Gonell was one of those defenders. Four years later, he wrote an essay in the New York Times titled "For Many of Us, Jan. 6 Never Ended." In it, he recounts how Michael Fanone, one of the 174 police officers injured that day,
was beaten, burned and electrically shocked. He suffered a heart attack, concussion and traumatic brain injury that caused him to also leave his position at the Metropolitan Police. While physically recovering, he's been the target of constant harassment from Trump supporters.
Like Fanone, Gonell has been attacked by Trump supporters for testifying to the House Committee: "I was vilified and called 'a traitor', as Mr. Trump and some of his fellow Republicans called the riot a "day of love" and a 'peaceful protest' by 'warriors'." As Trumpists saw it, the police defending the Capitol had sided with an oppressive deep state that had cheated their hero.
On the first day of his second term (1/20/25), Trump restored the 'honor' of his Jan.6 "warriors" in a proclamation that ended the "grave national injustice" perpetrated by Biden's "weaponized" Department of Justice. All 1600 people criminally charged in the insurrection were given commutations or full pardons (including those convicted of assaulting officers and carrying weapons). This glaring show of disrespect for Congress, the legal system and the police was a clear warning of what to expect from Trump in his second term.
He is smoldering with resentment after two impeachments during his first term, and the incessant smears and court appearances coming from four criminal indictments during what he saw as Biden's 'stolen' term in office. At CPAC on March 4, 2023, he told the right-wing throng that he would "totally obliterate the deep state", if elected president again, saying, "I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." This is the thought-bubble of a diseased and narcissistic mind. The real referent of "your" in "your warrior," "your justice," "your retribution" is not the CPAC audience, or anyone else for that matter. It is himself, the epicenter and only intrinsic value in the private universe of a psychopath.
My only hope for ending the immediate crisis is that the wanton and widespread damage Trump is doing will make enough GOP members of congress realize that their only hope for re-election and the continued existence of their party is to impeach Trump. It's already reached the point where they are afraid to have meetings with their constituents. Maybe enough of them will vote for impeachment in the House and join a super-majority to convict Trump in the Senate. Of course, that leaves open whether either party would then support abandoning the neoliberal economic policies that did so much harm to working-class Americans and let Trump blame government itself rather than bad economic policies for the ills of society.
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