by Michael O’Neill

‘The Donald’, as he was known in his native New York City during the 1980’s and 1990’s, chose to describe himself in politics as a ‘liberal Democrat’. He was the same con man he is now, a business operator with at least five bankruptcies to his name, but not yet ‘the world’s most dangerous man’, part of the title of the book written by his niece, Mary Trump, during his first term as president. (1)

Now that he has just won for a second time the electoral college vote, that antiquated, and undemocratic, system the U.S. still has for electing a president, and unlike the first time eight years ago, he has also won the majority votes of the electorate, he is even more dangerous.

Right away, and not a surprise, considering he ran a campaign flooded with lies, conspiracy theories and violent threats, he and his MAGA acolytes claimed it was a mandate for his plans. These include removing eleven million or more migrants from the country, going after his enemies, and replacing the neutral civil service employees of government departments like the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense (The Pentagon) with Trump loyalists. In fact, the ‘mandate’ amounted to around 1.5 million votes more than Kamala Harris won, but under 50 per cent of the total votes cast in the election. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 4 million, and no one on the Democratic side talked about a mandate.

Trump was caught on camera a number of times during the campaign claiming he had nothing to do with Project 2025, the authoritarian, fascist blueprint for a second Trump term. It was cobbled together by a number of right wing and extreme right wing ‘think tank’ members led by the Heritage Foundation.

Once he was elected, Project 25 became the playbook for the migrant round-up, the prosecution of Trump’s ‘enemies’, also known as the prosecutors who tried to make him accountable for the illegal attacks on the 2020 election, the  insurrection of 6 January and his illegal transfer of secret intelligence documents from Washington DC to his Mar A Lago estate in Palm Beach County, Florida. It is now over three weeks since the election, and already a posse of Project 25’s authors are appearing among Trump’s cabinet and White House staff picks.

Catastrophe

This election was a catastrophe, not just for this country, but also a catastrophe for the rest of the world, beginning with the preeminent issue for the planet, the climate crisis. The U.S. is the world’s biggest polluter. Considering the number of vehicles on our highways, still mostly fossil fuel dependent, the fact that at present the U.S. is also the biggest oil producer in the world, and that Donald Trump delights in mindlessly entertaining his followers with the ‘drill, baby, drill’ ditty, this is a disaster for the climate crisis.

The person he just reappointed to be head of his White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, one of the authors of Project 2025, is a climate crisis denier. He plans to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency and its funding in order to cancel the rules necessary to address the climate crisis. (2)

Michael Leddy O’Neill is a Scot who has lived in the USA for many years.

Notes:

(1) Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020). She followed that up with a second book, based on the common experience of Americans who are baffled by the conundrum, ‘How did we ever get to this situation with this president?’ and felt compelled to learn more about American history. The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal (2021).

This year, she completed a trilogy with Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir (2024), a more personal account of the family tragedies, in particular her own, and her two treatment periods in Tucson, Arizona.

(2) See, ‘Put them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda’, The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024, Vol. 30, No. 21.