Letter From (a Hopefully Not Inevitable) Prison
Today it's fiction. Let's keep it that way.
If we allow Donald Trump keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. again, it will be the end of American democracy.
Think this is hyperbole?
The Washington Post reported last week:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
There it is right there.
Unambiguous.
Who are those he wants to “investigate” or prosecute?
How about his former chief of staff John Kelly.
Former attorney general William Barr.
Ex-attorney Ty Cobb.
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Out loud — not privately—he has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
There is no denying his intentions.
Trump wants to turn the United States into Hungary or Russia.
It’s all laid out in something called “Project 2025,” that, according to its website, proposes a goal to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” by “build[ing] on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”
It’s a blueprint to seed each federal bureaucracy with Trump toadies to circumvent any opposition to his potential authority, a plan “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
According to Salon:
This wide-ranging plan would include bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency directly under the president, the return of “impounding” funds — a strategy banned during the Nixon administration that empowered a president to refuse to spend Congressionally allocated money on programs they dislike — as well as the removal of employment protections for thousands of career civil servants and an intelligence agency purge of officials he holds personal vendettas against and has deemed to be “deep staters” and “the sick political class that hates our country.”
You can read about it in today’s — today’s! — New York Times piece titled, “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans,” he subheading for which reads: “If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.”
Yet there are still some who will dismiss this as mere campaign bluster from a notoriously grandstanding blowhard.
But remember when Trump promised “a complete shutdown of Muslims”?
One week into his presidency, he issued an executive order banning people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.
Remember when he promised to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accords?
Remember his promise to withdraw us from the Iran Nuclear Deal?
He promised to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Remember when Vladimir Putin told him to threaten to withdraw the US from NATO?
Remember the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, responsible for separating more than 5,000 families for which the Trump administration kept no records?
It was just 11 months ago when he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
While Trump was a failure as a president from the perspective of a constitutionally limited democratic republic founded on upholding the rule of law, he was successful in the eyes of autocrats, fascists, and those among us who believe democracy is for suckers.
Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Believe it when Trump and those loyal to him announce their intentions to revoke our freedoms.
It has happened in other countries and it can happen here too.
So maybe it’s time to start planning for the Trump administration’s mass arrests of opposition.
After all, a dictator with absolute power isn’t going to allow critics in the media or higher echelons of the government.
Progressive talk show host and prolific author Thom Hartmann recently published in The Hartmann Report a chilling dystopic piece foreshadowing his own potential incarceration as a prominent Trump critic.
Addressed as a letter to his wife Louise, he explains:
Following Viktor Orbán’s script from Hungary, Trump and several of his senior officials launched both civil and criminal prosecutions for things reporters and commentators had previously said about them, resulting in over a thousand progressive writers and several dozen publications being run into jail or bankruptcy.
Others — like me, Mary Trump, Heather Cox Richardson, Dean Obeidallah, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joy Reid, and Timothy Snyder — were charged with “impugning the character of officials of the United States” and are sitting in federal prison right now. I guess we knew it was coming.
He adds:
It was just a few years ago when Orbán spoke at CPAC in Texas and proposed — to a standing ovation — that Republicans should change the libel laws to put “liberals” in the media out of business: they were clearly paying attention. Now, just like in Hungary and Russia, all of the media spends all their time praising the wisdom and accomplishments of President Trump and Vice President Bannon.
Below is my attempt at the letter I might be able to smuggle out to my wife and kids should I too be changed with “impugning the character of officials of the United States”.
I assume if you’re reading this, the attempt to squirrel it out of my cell was successful. Hopefully whoever is reading it is for whom it is intended and not some government mandarin charged with the task of censoring “seditious material” like Winston Smith in his role writing Newspeak in George Orwell’s novel 1984.
The worst part of my day, next to the crushing yearning to see you, is the knowledge that life is still going on out there among people who were warned about creeping fascism yet brushed it off as “impossible”. People’s capacity to rationalize evil always fascinated me. I wrote about it a lot before the crackdown. I assume that’s why I’m here.
My former colleagues are retired by now, I’m sure, after the mass dismissals of humanities teachers. It always used to infuriate me whenever the English department would be sitting around at lunch and someone would mention the most recent encroachment on our civil liberties tepidly reported in the mainstream media as if it were a losing score for last night’s game. Someone would inevitably shake his or her head, finish eating, then go off to teach Night or Julius Caesar, not appreciating the irony of what what happening outside. I’ll bet they’re still denying it. I’ll bet they’re still proud to be Americans because of our “freedoms”. I’ll bet nothing appears to have changed much. People still celebrate birthdays and holidays, laugh at insipid TV shows, veg in front of Netflix, care for their families, go on vacations. They put up with the constant surveillance, tanks in the streets, police randomly searching them because they’re “safe”. Since politics was one of those subjects people didn’t like talking about before, they’re more than happy to surrender the freedom to do so now lest they wind up like me.
I guess we deserve it. After all, it isn’t like we weren’t warned. The morbidly wealthy who own the giant media conglomerates, after all, want it this way, so they weren’t about to operate in the service of democracy even when House Speaker Johnson rammed through a bill indefinitely suspending the Constitution. There weren’t enough Democrats left to put up a fight in either branch. Doing so, they knew, would land them at the end of ropes or sitting here with me and the other seditionists.
I spend most of my free time in the library, if that’s what we want to call it since there isn’t much reading material left besides the old Dick & Jane books. Seems like every day guards are in here sweeping shelves of another handful of “woke” books the Moms for Liberty decide are inappropriate, especially for political prisoners.
We should have fled to Canada when we had the chance, but I don’t resent you for your decision to stick it out. By the time I had convinced you things were dire enough, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau had ordered the border shut down.
Anyway, better sign off now before someone realizes I’m not working on another poem, which I would have to submit for review.