As it become clearer just how horrible having Trump as president becomes, we will have at least some idea of how to fight against it. And it will be horrible. Among other things being talked about:
Having Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General. Rudy Giuliani, the man who was obviously working with agents and, I've got little doubt, officials of the FBI who made the federal police agency a tool of the Republican Party in order to destroy the candidate of the Democratic Party. In no unmistakable terms, that is a defining practice of fascism. The FBI will certainly become even more the Republican Parties tool for going after politicians, activists, nongovernmental agencies, and others who the Republican Party THE TRUMP-PENCE PARTY see as a possible danger to their interests. Oh, yeah, and they'll go after real journalists as well, though the so-called journalists who do their bidding and serve their purpose - most of the ones you see on TV and hear on the radio probably don't have anything to worry about so they'll help provide the overtly Republican FBI cover.
If that isn't enough to make you understand that those who voted for Trump and the Electoral College system that put the loser of the popular vote into office have given us a government which will be in the hands of actual fascists, Trump will almost certainly get to replace, not only his fellow fascist, the late Antonin Scalia, but almost certainly Ruth Bader Ginsberg, very likely he'll get to replace Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy and it wouldn't surprise me if Clarence Thomas, another overt fascist, left the court so another younger federalist-fascist could be put on the court by those who will choose Trump's nominees for him. Of course he could choose them himself which would mean they'd probably be about as qualified to be on the Supreme Court as Trumps physician is. Maybe he'll name that quack Surgeon General, or head of the FDA.
The implications of having Newt Gingrich as Secretary of State are horrifying but I haven't thought through those as of yet. We'll have at least four years to find out. We do know that with the election of Vladimir Putin's asset, the Russian dictator has successfully colonized the United States. We are, perhaps, the first nation which chose its colonization by getting tricked into it by the masterful manipulation of our media and our political system. You would think that when you face someone as clever as Putin and his team of thugs you would want to be at your smartest, but our decadent media and intellectual class combined with our anti-democratic, antique 18th century political system were a remarkably easy push-over for them, in the end. All of those will have to be replaced, replacing the revered and dangerous political system will probably be the hardest to change, in the end. If you think the Gingriches among us are going to do anything to protect our independence, you are a fool.
Trump's financial team is going to be full of even bigger crooks and thugs and robbers who will steal from the poor and give to the rich. I don't know if, as Keith Olberman has said, that the rustbelt states that went for Trump will be the first ones to feel the effect as their plight becomes even worse but they won't be left behind in the wreckage they'll produce. Again, the degenerate media we have will not report it, they won't report anything that would displease their owners who will get rather used to Trump's style of fascism, a style they sold through his media career over the past two decades. I read somewhere that Morning Joe on the "liberal cable station" MSNBC was full of happy talk about how much fun the Trump regime will be. I doubt the liberal ghetto hours on that one and only cabloid station to have one of those will survive.
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The consequences of what almost half of the American votes did on Tuesday are going to be horrible and they will last for years. Among the lessons to be learned from allowing the media to flood the limited time that Americans will give to news with lies will be that those choices, to allow the media to lie because "the first amendment" is that you can't have an egalitarian democracy if people fall for lies. And with modern methods of planning how to deliver those lies, made more attractive and appealing and exciting, enough people will fall for them to make democracy impossible. Only no one will say that because "the first amendment". There were lots of real journalists who fell for that line of secular liberal superstition, that the truth would win in the end, even when the lies it would have to fight were told with the multiplying effect of the mass media, owned and operated by and for the wealthy owners and corporations and their friends, associates and families. My beloved Molly Ivins, so brilliant, so cagey, so much nobodies fool in just about every other way once declared herself to be a "first amendment absolutist". It was about the only thing she ever wrote I really thought was dangerously wrong.
But the truth is that egalitarian democracy depends on both a knowledge of reality sufficient to make good choices and, I would say even more so, the sense of moral obligation to not make those choices on the basis of selfishness and self-interest alone. Trump is a princling among liars who is a complete and amoral egotist who has never made a choice on the basis of the good it will do anyone else. He's a man whose "charitable foundation" is there to buy him things and to be a con-game.
And the truth is that people will vote for fascists when sold the right lies in the right way. That truth overrides the widespread magical thinking that holds that because someone can get something said in The Nation or on Pacifica that means the lies told on all of the for-profit TV and radio stations will be defeated. Don Quixote had more of a sense of reality.
The intellectual class we have is decidedly stupid. Their idiotic superstition holds that just because they and their tiny circle of friends know the truth that that suffices when egalitarian democracy, by defining practice, extends the vote to hundreds of millions of TV watching and radio listening voters whose lives aren't dedicated to searching out the truth obscurely on display in magazines and books they've never heard of and will never be told of by American TV and radio.
The secular intellectuals are the ones who created and bought that superstitious line which was mostly good for permitting pornography a free hand when anyone who really thought about the consequences could have predicted it would destroy democracy in exactly the way it has when its permissions were applied politically.
I am sorry to say that far, far too many of religious intellectuals, probably under the coercive peer pressure of their secular colleagues, have also fallen for it when they certainly know better. The fashions of the secularists who would disdain and mock the necessity of morality in producing and defending egalitarian democracy and a decent life are things that religious intellectuals should never have fallen for, though if they had pushed the necessity of telling the truth, the secularists would have mocked them and even more effectively marginalized them. Morality, even asserting the moral basis of egalitarian democracy, has often been silenced through that mockery, it is not rewarded in academia and certainly not in the media. It's high time that the alleged smart people in our intellectual class took responsibility for their role in creating the environment that both produced Trump and sold him to the American People.
* The only real crime among secular intellectuals is based in the one and only lie they will punish and that deals in one, specific lie. Plagarism, falsely claiming the words of other people for yourself without attribution is the one and only time that lying is really punished in academia and it isn't based in whether or not the content is true or false, good or malignant in effect, it is a commercial crime based on the theft of "intellectual property". Spreading lies even those which risk killing lots of people in what is written won't get you into real trouble with secular intellectuals. Not so long as you give them recognition through citation. The most dangerous things are pushed in academia all the time and no one is so much as shunned because of it. That's the atmosphere that started us on the slide into fascism. Secularism and its refusal to acknowledge moral truths can't sustain democracy because democracy is a product of moral behavior.
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