Donald J. Trump’s Turbulent Airship of State

“If you convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t know you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
– President Lyndon Baines Johnson

In his rhetoric and proposals throughout the past 9 years since he first entered the presidential sweepstakes in the summer of 2015, and clearly during his first term in the Oval Office, Trump let us know his intentions to reverse the engines on the airship of state. His elections have caused deep gashes and extensive tread marks in the nation’s tarmac giving some of us a painful and debilitating whiplash.

He has engulfed this airship of politics in the smoke and flames of his lies, bigotry, and social divisions resulting in the meltdown of standards of common decency.

We must now prepare our country again for his arrival on January 20, 2025 in the Oval Office. To do so, we need to return ourselves to the fully upright and arms-locked position keeping our values and one another tightly fastened together. Though political analysts forecast unusually heavy turbulence, our aircraft of state has a stellar record of withstanding even the most unstable social and political atmospheric conditions.

Though the landing may be hard and bumpy, and we may emerge a bit battered and weathered, we will remain in good working order ready for another flight if and only if we join and remain in coalition now and throughout the journey ahead.

In arduous times, I have come to know from personal experience that I must do my individual work and my personal processing: whether that be grieving, raging, emoting, reflecting, whatever. It is difficult if not impossible for me to give my utmost until I refuel, refresh, and recover on an emotional and physical level. That’s my process.

I believe that we need to work and fight even harder to connect with people from across all demographic groups with like minds, ideas, and ideologies to bring sanity back to our country.

Coalitions, however, are often very difficult. According to black feminist activist and writer, Bernice Johnson Reagon.

“I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.”

Even in an effective coalition, we also must expect that the near future will be very rough for progressives and moderates. But I’m certain we will push the pendulum back toward the left if and only if we stand together for the long haul. It won’t come overnight. I’ve learned from experience that the primary cause of “burnout” is having unrealistic expectations.

Donald J. Trump currently is involved with his transition team in advance, again, of taking the oath of the office of President of the United States of American, and time will tell whether his actions and politics follow his campaign behavior and rhetoric.

During his first term, Trump surrounded himself with some career political and military advisors who functioned to set up guardrails keeping him from swerving too deeply off course.

Now with his decision to surround himself with right-wing sycophants and with his threats to “be a dictator on day one,” to “suspend the Constitution,” to punish his “enemies from within,” to deport millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, and to protect women “whether they like it or not,” Trump’s first term has given him the training on how to manipulate the system to bend to his twisted desires. Now with his training wheels off and the guardrails torn down, his Project 2025 is now cleared for takeoff.

I have learned many lessons in my studies of fascism and of genocides perpetrated throughout the ages. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotyping and scapegoating entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations often refuse to intervene.

On a micro level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. Everyone, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, plays a key role in the genocide and bullying dramas.

Working within his divide and conquer scapegoating tactics as tyrants do, Donald Trump has a long track record of defining Mexicans and later most Latin Americans as “rapists,” “drug and human traffickers,” and “gang members” who engage in high rates of crime on the U.S. side of the border, to defining African nations as “sh*thole countries,” to Tweeting and lodging verbal insults on several black female journalists, and the list goes on.

During the past year, the Republican Party spent approximately $215 million in TV network ads, some which they broadcast on National Football League games, targeting members of transgender communities as posing a national threat in playing on girls and women’s sports teams and by consuming taxpayer funds to undergo gender affirmation procedures when incarcerated. These ads, however, failed to mention that these procedures became mandated by law during Trump’s first term in office.

“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is deeply alarmed at the hateful rhetoric at a conference of white nationalists held on November 19 [2016] at the Ronald Reagan Building just blocks from the Museum…The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words. The Museum calls on all American citizens, our religious and civic leaders, and the leadership of all branches of the government to confront racist thinking and divisive hateful speech…”

These words from a press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC refers to a white nationalist conference headlined by neo-Nazi, Richard Spencer, who greeted attendees with a tribute to President-elect Donald J. Trump shouting “Hail Trump! Hail victory!” from the stage before all in attendance gestured in a traditional Nazi straight-arm salute.

Once identifying himself as a Democrat, Donald Trump has transformed himself, at the very least, into the mouthpiece of the far-right-wing patriarchal Christian white nationalist segment of the Republican Party.

In political terms, a “strongman” is one who leads by force within an overarching authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial regime. Sometimes the formal head of state, sometimes another political or military leader, the strongman exerts influence and control over the government more than traditional laws or constitutional mandates sanction.

Strongmen situate themselves within positions along the political spectrum, usually toward the extremes on the right and the left. The list of strongmen includes Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolph Hitler of Germany, Juan Perón of Argentina, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Francois Duvalier of Haiti, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Manuel Noriega of Panama, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and so many more.

On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the philosophy and practice of “fascism.” While also deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early-20^th century Europe in response to liberalism and Marxism on the left.

Umberto Eco, who grew up under the fascist Mussolini regime, enumerates the characteristics of what he calls “Ur-Fascism,” or “Eternal Fascism” in 14 “typical” features. He stressed that:

“These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

But I have heard many people say, well, we survived Trump’s first term, and we will survive this term also. No, many people needlessly did not survive because of Trump’s denial and refusal to alert and mobilize the nation earlier to the dangers of the Covid-19 virus under his “watch.”

Maybe we should ask the legions of people who remain skeptical and in denial of the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic: those who assert that “it was a hoax,” something contrived by the media to take down their hero, Donald J. Trump, those who claimed that wearing a mask and socially isolating deprived them of their “liberty” and their First Amendment right of “freedom of association.”

We should have taken a representative sample of these deniers to visit near-filled COVID-19 emergency rooms to see what patients were experiencing: people whose noses and throats were stuffed with plastic tubing, those attached to ventilators, people whose organ systems shut down, the dead who succumbed to the virus.

In the clinics, they would have seen also the looks of stress and grief on the faces of the brave heroic healthcare workers who were functioning in previously unimaginable conditions and were bearing the brunt of essential lifesaving and life-giving duties.

They should have been made to attend memorial services for the victims of this partly preventable pandemic and witnessed the effects the losses had on friends and family.

And some pregnant women did not survive Trump’s state abortion bans instigated by his nomination of three far-right Supreme Court “justices” who, along with three other conservative members of the bench, refused to conserve the 50-year precedent of safe and legal reproductive healthcare.

The experiment we know as the United States of America has somehow endured for nearly 250 years. But who knows how many people will survive the next four years? Who knows whether the social institutions of our nation will survive? Will we continue on our path toward that goal of becoming “a more perfect union,” or will we devolve into tyranny?

Wherever we go and whatever we become is in the power of We the People” as long as, in the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin at another critical moment in our history,

“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Consider the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s history reminder: “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”

This is not mere hyperbole!