Moves to bring about a rolling coup by individuals and groups across the broad right in the United States are increasing and/or emerging almost by the week
At ‘best’ this potentially devastating pile of ‘changes’ comes from the vast bulk of the Republican party which has now unreservedly embraced Donald Trump; it will formally nominate him this week at the party’s convention in Wisconsin. This is despite the fact that he is a convicted felon who is obviously completely unfit for office — at least to everyone else — and despite the fact that it is Trump who has actually now brought defeat to his party three times, in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
At worst, such a takeover would come in the shape of threats by such the fascistic forces as those behind the infamous Project 2025 document, which stretches to 900 pages. The project’s funding, organisation and personnel (over a hundred far right groups and individuals) appear to be substantial and relatively sophisticated — unlike the ragbag of ill-conceived, racist, bigoted, poorly informed authoritarian, inegalitarian and destructive junk that forms the document’s content.
If Trump loses in November, mass denial and violent reaction are expected. After all, his cult members have promised refusal to concede. Perhaps small in membership, but large in number, menacing in degree of seriousness and loud in voice, these bodies (and indeed Trump himself) continue to plan for violence like that in 2021. They threaten, for instance, to lynch those who did not acquiesce to their fantasies of victory.
Both flavours of takeover are encouraged, enabled and potentially cemented by several major rulings from the highest legal authority in the US, the Supreme Court, against which there is no appeal.
This became clear when the Court issued its opinion on presidential immunity at the beginning of July. Trump or any other future president is now totally free to act (while ‘doing their job’) with complete legal impunity — regardless of state or federal law. This shocked most informed and fair-minded people; they had mused that a ruling which endorsed assassination, incarceration, deportation or other retributive acts against (political) enemies in the course of a Trump presidency was so absurd, unconstitutional and ethically wrong as to be all-but impossible. Nor was the actual ruling when it came expected to be so transparently and brazenly pro-MAGA nor to be so much more dangerous and potentially disastrous for public life.
One of the three dissenting Justices to the ruling on presidential immunity, Sonia Sotomayor, put it very simply when she wrote — and took the unprecedented step of reading aloud from the bench on 1 July — “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune… With fear for our democracy, I dissent”.
This month “Notes from the US” examines the origins, motives and possible damage in store if enough resistance to such plans is not mounted over the next, say, six months. Let’s start with the impact of recent Supreme Court rulings, for they are now already in force and the law of the land.
Chevron
The US Supreme Court’s term ends in June; that’s when it usually issues a clutch of often eagerly-awaited rulings. This ‘end loading’ helps to add to the impression that the Court’s ‘high-powered’ experts have spent many weeks or months carefully considering cases heard during the year in order to act in the best interests of the majority of the population.
Legal experts agree that several decisions which ought to have stayed Trump’s progress towards effective immunity should — and could — have been taken and made public many months ago – as they were when in his favour.
So the Court actually provided further indications of just how corrupt and biased it has become. Earlier in the same week, for example, the Court ruled in the bribery and corruption case, Snyder v. United States. It found that a bribe — wait for it — is not a bribe, nor is it a crime, provided that such a bribe is received after an official performs the corrupt act.
But of all the widely-anticipated set of opinions issued in the last month by the non-elected and far-right US Supreme Court probably the most far-reaching and oppressive ruling is that in the case of the 40-year-old ‘Chevron deference’ doctrine, which the Court overturned on 28 June.
Because the ruling appeared to concern the bureaucracy and administration of federal agencies such as those overseeing food and drugs, environment and many others, it failed at first to attract the attention which its implications deserve. Particularly as it came after the presidential debate which ought to have ruled Trump out entirely.
But the ‘Chevron ruling’ is a bombshell. Almost certainly a disaster.
The congressional system of government in the United States was not designed to draw (mainly) upon lawmakers’ own specialisms. Rather, over the last half century those regulations — admittedly not always as effective or watertight as thoughtful and perceptive people would like — have to some extent protected the US population, have made their lives safer, and have limited harm done to them by unfettered corporate greed. This has worked — to the extent that it has — precisely because legislators rely on these 50 or so government agencies to craft, deploy, enforce and monitor the effect of legislation affecting thousands of aspects of almost everyone’s (daily) life.
At the moment those rights, practices and procedures are in the hands of such agencies. It is their job is to work independently of government or lobbyists. A relatively well-thought-out set of measures has evolved which regulate telecommunications; which investigate, say, environmental pollution; which certify new drugs as safe or not; which identify banks as financially sound; which oversee food safety and (again, in theory) which co-ordinate aviation through the Federal Aviation Administration in ways designed to promote safety.
The new ruling by the Supreme Court sweeps all that away. Now.
It dilutes — or, worse, stomps on — the expertise and career or lifelong competences and skills of those who staff and run the agencies. It actually places planning, decisions, limits, lack of limits and potentially the overall directions in which these agencies can now operate in the hands of lay, amateur, biased, corruptible and corrupt courts; and of lawmakers’ vested interests and those who influence, ‘persuade’ and corrupt them.
In theory, for example, a powerful pressure group from the pharmaceutical companies can now override concerns for the safety of their products which — until this ruling — have been in the relatively safe purview of the Food and Drug Administration’s biochemists, epidemiologists and medical experts. Harmful medications could now become available in order for shareholders to profit from their sales.
Already, members of those courts have shown themselves not always able to deal with the specifics… in another case damaging the environment on which the Supreme Court ruled last week Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, had it that the EPA “set as its target the reduction of the emissions of one ozone precursor in particular: nitrous oxide”, which — of course — is laughing gas. He presumably meant nitrogen-oxides. But repeated his error half a dozen more times: the agency “sought to impose nitrous oxide emissions control measures that ‘maximized cost-effectiveness.'”
It is likely (Trump has said as much) that some agencies will be abolished altogether. This includes the Department of Education and several government bodies working on the environment.
The Supreme Court also ruled that local governments can legally ban homeless people from sleeping outdoors whether or not (and in many case, it’s not, of course) they provide shelters. So being homeless is effectively now a crime in the United States.
With these rulings, any shred of credibility which the Supreme Court had can fairly be said to have gone.
Indeed, the progressive congressperson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who still appears to support Biden), has brought articles of impeachment against two of the Court’s most egregious members, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. This would seem to have little chance of success.
Election
The apparatus of the élite (Republican and judicial) has now made sure that Trump will evade prosecution (and sentencing) for having tried to overturn the 2020 election in his favour; for having stolen a multitude of top secret documents; for having provoked an armed insurrection to try and ensure that he stayed in power; for having raped and assaulted multiple women; and for having subverted the electoral process in Georgia in the interests of what he now seems likely to be able to do from 2025 onwards.
If he is elected (as most polls suggest) he may well be, this process will begin with an authoritarian rule without limit to deploy a supremacist, environment-smashing, anti-egalitarian, bigoted agenda regardless of many of the principles which most other people believe are essential to a civilised society — or, at least, to which they pay lip service and appear to subscribe when pressed.
If elected, Trump and his supporters will make the main thrust of his exercise of power — as many of his supporters openly admit — the punishment, imprisonment, attacks on and conceivably murder of his (political and judicial) opponents. For instance, Trump wants to see Liz Cheney, the (Republican) senator who was forced out of office for speaking out against Trump’s crimes, tried in a televised military tribunal.
Present at the Republican convention this week, and voting to confirm Trump’s candidacy, will be fake electors from seven battleground (the ones mostly likely to decide the election) states. They were amongst those who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
One tactic being used more and more by the far right is entryism. Several dozen members of the fascist group, People’s Rights Network (which was founded by Ammon Bundy), stood openly in Republican Party Primaries (the local elections which determine candidate for the party at national elections). Now they are mainstream official candidates.
Nor does the fact — commented upon by The Washington Post’s Aaron Black last month — that barely one third of Republicans responding to a CBS/YouGov poll seemed to know that Trump was even facing criminal cases as a result of his attempts to overturn the most recent presidential election.
How and why can a majority of electors be expected to understand the threat of fascism in anything like its necessary full historical context, or that of political science, when their decisions are so poorly informed?
On the other hand, at times the sophistication and sheer maturity of the MAGA intellectuals takes your breath away. You step back in wonder. Take the great Mary Morrissey, for example. She is a 67-year old (Republican) member of the state House of Representatives in Vermont. She has actually served 13 terms in that role. So sure is and was she of her obviously advanced political philosophy that she has several times in the last few months… are you sitting down? … poured water into the bag of an opponent legislator – Democrat Jim Carroll – presumably in order to drive home her ‘case’.
Biden
Biden still clearly fails to present a viable alternative — within the confines of the two party system — to Trump. But the former’s possible ‘cognitive decline’ is no less potentially severe than Trump’s. Neither person can help being old. Indeed, neither should be criticised, still less penalised, for feeling the ravages of time. Indeed, as a young and popular ‘live wire’ in Congress, Biden’s spoken gaffes and gaps were legion and proverbial.
But why would a centre-right career politician whose (public) life has been built around an obviously fervent belief in capitalist party politics, believe in compromise with your opponents, in what he sees as the necessity of acting ‘patriotically’ inside the rules of a system which is specifically and irrevocably designed to perpetuate the norms of oppression, inequality and destruction even bother to try and understand the historical context of resurgent fascism… as long as he “gave it my all” and gains credit with the establishment to which he sees himself accountable. To Biden, Trump’s ‘ideas’ seem little more than “malarkey”.
Behind the scenes ‘off the record’ reporting is claiming more earnestly in the last few days that Biden doesn’t review and/or doesn’t believe the polls, which reflect his weakness with respect to those of Trump. And claiming that Biden’s ego is driving him, not a true desire to defeat Fascism.
So the real reason that Biden should step down is that a Trump landslide looks likely. So every move of Trump and the MAGA candidates in Congress needs to be attacked and blocked.
Biden can also be blamed though for many (other) things. For what he has done in promoting genocide in Gaza: he continues to help the Israel army slaughter still more children by sending yet another shipment of 500-pound bombs. He also recently re-instated appallingly cruel rules allowing the hunting of bears and wolves and their offspring in Alaska.
Oppression
Although against the law separating church and state, the élite in Oklahoma has mandated that Christianity be taught aggressively in all its schools. Other trumpy states are planning similar illegal impositions.
Talking of churches, Mark Robinson (about whom ‘Notes from the US’ has written before) is the Lieutenant (deputy) governor of North Carolina. He is broadly and enthusiastically supported by the Republican party; indeed he is that party’s official nominee for governor of North Carolina. On the Sunday before Independence Day in the United States, 30 June, Robinson gave a half-hour address at a church in White Lake (North Carolina) to his Christian congregation. Included in his thoughts was the following – from a Christian and an officially-supported member of the Republican MAGA mob, remember: “We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent… some folks need killing… It’s a matter of necessity! [T]hey’re bad. Kill them”.
In an attempt to see more innocent people killed by gun violence, the manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction, Texas-based American Rounds, has begun to install bullet-vending machines in grocery stores in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas; it says it plans to extend the operation to other injury- and death-friendly states that have few or no restrictions on the ownership and use of guns.
Racism
A former employee of an organisation owned and run by Trump last month gave a small insight into the kind of antisemitic humour which he enjoys. The anecdote of Barbara Rees is hearsay. But disturbing. And it is in line with Trump’s foul supremacist comments, which very much are on the record.
Supremacists on the right have begun to call non-white (and presumably non-male, Roma, LGBTQ+, the disabled and so on) people who are appointed to some jobs ‘DEI hires’. This is meant to suggest that the there is no possibility that their qualifications and experience merit their appointments. Rather that they have – in the minds of these offensive bigots – only been successful because they have taken advantage of ‘woke’ regulations (that is, practices to respect and promote diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) – and the right of everyone thereto). Otherwise their race precludes them from such achievements. Here, for instance, is the latest from white supremacist, Fox columnist, Charles Gasparini, last weekend when he applied the insult to potential replacement for Biden of Kamala Harris. How sick can you get: they’re black (etc), so they must be inferior.
Well — if you’d been in downtown Nashville (Tennessee) over the weekend after Independence Day you’d have witnessed crowds of people from the Patriot Front fascist group. Their main idea is that the United States has lost its exclusively white identity. Hence banners exhorting ‘Reclaim America’; and offensive Confederate flags as well as standard American flags flown upside down to show support for the insurrection incited by Trump on 6 January 2021. Chants at the fascist rally ranged from “Sieg heil” from Nazi Germany to “Deportation saves the nation” – as advocated by Trump and the MAGA crowd. In fact Patriot Front is a group which splintered from one of those which Trump said was comprised of “good people” at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by one of their number.
As readers to ‘Notes from the US’ or who read the press on the USA know, the fascist governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is one of the most evil, foul and putrid people in public life in the country. Now he has almost (but, one fears, worse could yet come) outdone himself by cutting support for the state’s arts and culture budget by $32 million (£25 million). The apparent reason for this vandalism seems to have originated in DeSantis’s fear of and bigotry towards the LGBTQ+ community – something which he has in common with many, perhaps, most Republicans… the Colorado state Republican account on ‘X’ called for pride flags to be burnt, for instance. DeSantis ‘felt’ that he could hardly withhold support from a pride event without – in ‘fairness’ – also destroying the struggling (youth) orchestras which have provided music to Florida’s residents, and without also defunding its choirs, museums, art galleries, cinemas, dance companies and theatres.
Gaza
New credible estimates – such as those from The Lancet – suggest that the number of Palestinians massacred in Gaza may be as many as over six times the published – but still largely ignored in the US – figures; so closer to 186,000. But those who continue to protest against the involvement of the élite in the United States in the shape of approval, encouragement and the supply of weapons continue to be beaten up, arrested and denied a voice. Academics and professionals who see (and express) the need for an end to the genocide are still being removed from their posts.
Some weeks ago, for instance, Palestinian American obstetric nurse, Hesen Jab, received an award from New York University’s Langone Health for her work in the city. But she was sacked on her first day back at work after accepting the award, where she had expressed solidarity with mothers in Gaza and spoken out against the genocide.
Presenting facts to urge the élite to act has just become more difficult: at the end of last month, the House of Representatives banned the US State Department (the equivalent of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in the UK) from quoting death toll figures as provided by the Ministry of Health in Gaza… out of sight, out of mind.
Representative Rashida Tlaib responded “There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all, not when they’re alive and now not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial”.
Environment
Back to the Supreme Court. In the midst of the other rulings and opinions issued recently, the Court reversed a move introduced by Biden to reduce airborne pollution from crossing from one state to another. The EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) ‘good neighbor’ initiative imposed strict upper limits on environmentally harmful and destructive emissions from power plants and industrial sources in states which are ‘upwind’ from those which stand to receive the poisons. In a win for largely Republican states, the Court struck down this plan by a vote of five to four.
Alarming and extreme climate events are already affecting the United States: wildfires in California, for instance, have already burned five times the average for early summer. There have been severe floods across Florida less than a month after that state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, tried to pretend that there is no climate catastrophe – as reported in last month’s Notes from the US. And much more extreme effects in Texas of an unusually early and powerful hurricane which have left millions without power in a period of excessive heat. It is feared that the eventual death-toll may climb to several dozen.
Ron DeSantis is also already taking advantage of his new powers by pushing measures dangerous for the (local) environment. He vetoed state Senate Bill 165, which gave the (Florida) Department of Health powers to adopt and enforce rules for sampling beach waters and public bathing spaces. If they were injurious to health, the Department would have been able to notify the public and local media, then to close affected areas if necessary. DeSantis referred specifically to giving lay/amateur/non-specialist interests (the courts) the final say. He wrote: “…(the Florida Department of Health)… should not be vested with the power to supersede local jurisdictions regarding the operation of beaches”. Why not? That’s their job.
Meanwhile the far right in power in Wisconsin (a state which could well decide the upcoming presidential election) is refusing to release funds allotted to rectify the widespread contamination by PFAS in drinking water unless those responsible are granted legal immunity.
Almost needless to say, there is no mention of ‘climate’ at all in the Republican manifesto for this year’s election; and only reversal of the meagre efforts by the Biden administration to address the catastrophe in Project 2025.
~ Louis Further
Top photo: Elvert Barnes, on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0