Monday’s inauguration offers America’s yammering pundit class another opportunity to fall all over themselves dissecting the true meaning of President-elect Donald Trump’s words. You’ll see opinion pages clogged with analysis comparing Trump’s remarks to his 2017 “American Carnage” speech, speculating on how the president has or hasn’t changed, and wondering what we can learn about the administration to come.
What if that’s pointless? It should come as no surprise to any observant citizen that Trump is stamped from the same deformed mold that produces uninspired autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Those leaders and their historical counterparts should serve as reminders that in administrations like this, words are little more than a shield for far-reaching and often brutal official acts.
As Donald Trump delivers his second inaugural address inside the Capitol building his supporters attacked four years ago, Trump’s most loyal deputies will be at the White House printing out the draconian, far-right policies they’ve spent years crafting. Those papers will be stacked on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, ready and waiting for Trump’s jagged presidential signature. Those papers—not the words Trump says about them—are what matter.
Trump’s roster of priorities includes executive orders that will reshape the White House and realign Americans’ relationship to their government in ways that won’t be fully clear for weeks or months to come. Worse still, some of those changes will survive Trump’s four years in power and become permanently embedded in America’s governing power structure.
Long after Trump leaves office, it will be those surviving policies that continue to corrode and weaken our fragile democratic system. So forgive me if I don’t care to dedicate much time to parsing Trump’s prose.
Stephen Miller
Chief among Trump’s priorities is a perverting of the justice system to serve his partisan interests. We see this in the executive orders and regulatory decisions that Trump promises to enact within his first hours in office.
Those orders have been drafted by far-right extremists, including Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski, and have as their single goal the centralization of all executive power under Trump. It is a terrifying vision of America’s future, and there’s little anyone can do to stop it.
For his part, Miller has amassed a level of personal power within Trumpworld that has little parallel in modern American politics. His vague official role doesn’t do justice to the fact that he is now on par with (and on immigration issues superior to) Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Trump’s words on Monday will come from Miller’s pen. More importantly, almost all of the signature Day One actions Trump has promised comes from Miller’s mind. What does that look like?
In short, like a horror show. Executive orders that Miller has helped author include one lifting ICE’s ban on raiding sensitive sites like schools, churches, and hospitals during immigration sweeps. Another removes civil service protections from thousands of government workers and replaces the meritocracy with a system of Trump loyalty tests for prospective government workers. Yet another puts the Department of Justice in the position of helping anti-abortion red states find and prosecute women who obtain abortions in places where reproductive freedom still exists.
With the stroke of a pen, the federal government will find its way into our schools, our bedrooms, and our doctors’ offices on a scope never before seen in American history.
Jan. 6, 2021
Oh yeah, and the over 1,000 people currently in jail for violently attacking the federal government on Jan. 6, 2021? Expect most of them to receive pardons within Trump’s first month in office. That act will give Trump a core constituency of former federal convicts who have already proven their willingness to engage in violence on his behalf.
Think of it as a modern Praetorian Guard—or a new generation of single-minded pro-Trump brownshirts. Those militant MAGA warriors will be Trump’s personal enforcers as his orders and demands veer increasingly outside the rule of law.
For the communities targeted by Trump’s sweeping actions, the response has been a mix of fear and determination. In Colorado, immigration groups are rapidly retooling their strategies to account for a more severe ICE and the possibility of larger, more aggressive immigration raids.
But even those groups struggle with the sheer scope of the challenge ahead and the swell of federal resources Trump is prepared to dedicate to terrorizing communities he dislikes.
“We’re trying to help as much as we can. And I think the reality is that for thousands of families, there’s just no path,” Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition Communications Director Raquel Lane-Arellano told local radio station KHOL 98.1. “There’s no way to make the next four years safer … so the alternative is to prepare for the worst, which is deportation.”
The terror will not stop there. Trump’s allies are preparing legal challenges to bedrock ideas of American equality, from attempting to overturn same-sex marriage rights to reversing the FDA’s efforts to ensure women can access the abortion medication Mifepristone. Trump will amplify those efforts with early executive orders ending federal protections for some LGBTQ+ workers and ending the government’s current policy of assisting women who must travel to obtain abortions.
It’s unclear whether most Americans fully recognize how quickly and deeply Trump will reshape the federal government in his own image. That’s the thing about the government we’ve built; so much can be undone in a matter of minutes, provided leaders are willing to face (or ignore) public criticism. T
rump has made clear he intends to make muscular use of the nearly limitless power afforded to the presidency. It’s a shame he’s choosing to use that power to achieve such toxic and divisive ends.
Regardless of what Trump says at noon on Monday, we can and must look past the bluster of his words and judge him based on his actions. If his team of advisors is to be believed, those actions will be quick in coming once Trump retakes his seat in the Oval Office.
For the MAGA movement, Monday represents not just an electoral victory but a generational, ideological one. It’s the rest of us who will pay the heavy price for that victory.
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