Where is Donald Trump Headed in his Second Term?

Note: This essay was generated using ChatGPT. The following questions were put to the app:

1."What are the principal components of President Donald Trump's executive agenda, and what overall objective do those components apparently aim to achieve?"

2. "It seems to me that Trump's attack on institutions of higher education, illustrated most recently by his attempts to freeze funding for Harvard, and to eliminate Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students, is another component of his agenda."

To which the app responded:

You're absolutely right—and your observation pinpoints an increasingly prominent component of Trump’s second-term agenda: an ideologically driven campaign against institutions of higher education, particularly elite and research-oriented universities like Harvard. This campaign serves multiple functions within his broader authoritarian-nationalist strategy.

The response of ChatGPT to each question has been consolidated an reproduced below.

Part II, posted separately, will be an outline of what we, as private citizens, can do to thwart Trump's authoritarian agenda.

 

Artist's conception of Donald Trump in "King Trump vs. The Bond Market," by Kenneth Rogoff, in Project Syndicate, June 2, 2025.

 

President Donald Trump’s second-term executive agenda—based on public statements, policy actions, Executive/administrative orders, and aligned legislative efforts—revolves around a set of core themes that emphasize executive power, national sovereignty, economic nationalism, and a rollback of liberal democratic norms. These components appear to aim at consolidating presidential authority, remaking the federal bureaucracy in his image, and reshaping US governance and international posture according to his ideological framework.

Principal Components of Trump’s Executive Agenda (Second Term)

1. Expansion of Presidential Power

• Emphasis on “unitary executive” theory: Trump and his legal advisors argue for nearly unchecked presidential control over the executive branch.

• Claims of immunity: He asserts legal immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, with the Supreme Court taking up these questions.

• Defiance of checks and balances: Trump has shown a willingness to ignore judicial rulings and marginalize congressional oversight, particularly regarding subpoenas, budget authority, and the administrative state.

2. Control and Purge of the Federal Bureaucracy

• Reinstatement of Schedule F: Reclassifying civil service employees to allow for their dismissal and replacement with ideological loyalists.

• Loyalty tests: Efforts to ensure government employees align with Trump’s agenda, including investigations into “deep state” influence.

• Curtailment of independent agencies: Moves to bring agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve under tighter presidential control.

3. Hardline Immigration and Border Policies

• Mass deportations: Plans for large-scale removal of undocumented immigrants, including use of the National Guard.

• Use of military for domestic enforcement: Expanding the role of federal and even military forces in policing the border and urban protests.

• Asylum system rollback: Policies to deny or severely restrict refugee and asylum claims.

4. Retrenchment from International Institutions and Alliances

• Threats to withdraw from NATO: Continuing efforts to reduce US commitments to collective defense structures.

• America First foreign policy: Prioritizing bilateral deals over multilateral frameworks; reducing U.S. foreign aid and engagement.

• Appeasement or realignment with authoritarian leaders: Favorable posture toward leaders like Putin and Orbán.

5. Rollback of Environmental and Regulatory Protections

• Elimination of climate regulations: Withdrawal from international climate commitments and dismantling EPA authority.

• Deregulation: Broad dismantling of financial, environmental, labor, and consumer protections under the guise of economic growth.

6. Weaponization of Federal Agencies Against Political Opponents

• Justice Department investigations: Politicized investigations into Trump’s critics and adversaries.

• Use of IRS, DHS, and other agencies: Allegations of using federal power to intimidate or punish perceived enemies.

7. Curtailment of Voting Rights and Electoral Oversight

• Restricting mail-in and early voting: Advocating for measures that limit access to the ballot.

• Challenging electoral legitimacy: Continued refusal to accept past results and groundwork to undermine future electoral outcomes.

8.  Delegitimizing and Defunding Higher Education Institutions*

• Suppress Dissent and Intellectual Independence:

1. Universities have historically been sources of resistance to authoritarianism, offering platforms for critical thinking, research, protest, and investigative journalism.
2. Weakening these institutions undermines a major check on government overreach and narrows the space for ideological pluralism.

• Undermine Meritocratic Elites and Reshape the Knowledge Economy:

1. Trump’s broader populist narrative hinges on attacking “elites” and replacing professional expertise with loyalty and ideology.
2. By degrading the authority of academic institutions, Trump delegitimizes the scientific, legal, and journalistic communities that challenge his claims.

• Cultural engineering:

1. The university is one of the last bastions of multiculturalism, globalism, and critical inquiry—all targets of the “America First” worldview.
2. Attacks on DEI programs, gender studies, climate science, and global partnerships aim to reorient education toward a narrow, state-aligned ideology.

• Appeal to Authoritarian Voters:

1. For Trump’s base, especially white evangelical and ultranationalist voters, these attacks resonate deeply as a defense of “traditional values” against cosmopolitanism and liberal secularism.
2. It’s not just about policy—it’s a symbolic assault on a class and culture they resent.

_________________________
*Like attacks on the press or the judiciary, these efforts to control or silence universities follow a familiar pattern from autocratic regimes—think of Hungary under Orbán, or Turkey under Erdoğan—where academic independence is crushed as a threat to national unity.

Overall Objective: Autocratic Executive Realignment

These components point toward a systematic restructuring of American governance to concentrate power in the executive branch, erode democratic guardrails, and transform the presidency into a more authoritarian institution. The assault on higher education complements his attacks on the judiciary, media, civil service, and voting systems—each a pillar of a constitutional democracy that resists authoritarian consolidation.

 
This is often framed by Trump and his allies as a restoration of American greatness and sovereignty, but operationally it resembles an effort to:

• Undermine institutional checks on the presidency (courts, Congress, civil service, education)

• Reorient loyalty from the Constitution to the president personally ("Re-educate" the populace)

• Reinforce a nationalist-populist ideology hostile to globalism, immigration, and pluralism

• Secure long-term political dominance by altering the administrative and electoral infrastructure

In essence, Trump’s agenda aims not just to govern differently, but to change the nature of governance itself, shifting the US toward an executive-centered regime with fewer constraints, less transparency, and a more exclusionary vision of national identity.

What goes around comes around

 

December 4, 2020

Dear Dr. Badalamente,

Thank you for contacting me regarding the importance of addressing global climate change. I appreciate hearing from you about this matter and share your sense of urgency about the need to tackle the climate crisis.

Our nation’s leading scientists and government agencies have determined that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing the Earth's climate to warm which will lead to more frequent and intense droughts, floods, wildfires and other extreme weather events. In Washington State, carbon pollution is already altering the region's natural systems, causing longer and more intense wildland fires, harming wildlife and salmon habitat, and making our oceans more acidic and less hospitable to marine animals. Doing nothing will cost trillions and risk leaving future generations with an uninhabitable planet. 

I support legislation that would put a predictable price on carbon in order to reduce our nation's dangerous over-dependence on fossil fuels, as long as low- and middle-income families and trade sensitive industries are protected from any associated energy price increases.  That’s why I authored the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act with my colleague Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Our bill would force fossil fuel producers and importers to bid for a gradually declining number of permits in order to bring coal, oil, or natural gas into the U.S. economy. By using an auction to put a price on carbon, the CLEAR Act harnesses the free market to find the most cost-effective ways to reduce carbon pollution without adding to the national debt. Of the hundreds of billions of dollars that would be raised annually from fossil fuel producers, three-quarters would be refunded directly to the American public through equal per-capita monthly dividends, protecting all but the most prosperous households from any resulting energy price increases. The remaining auction revenues support a range of climate related needs including investments in clean energy technologies, improving the resiliency of our nation’s infrastructure and public lands, responding to extreme weather damage, reducing greenhouse gases in the forestry and agricultural sectors, and providing needs-based, regionally targeted assistance for communities and workers transitioning to a less carbon intensive economy. Unlike a carbon tax, this model guarantees that the U.S. will meet science-based emission reduction targets and comply with international climate commitments.

As the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, I have also offered legislation to improve our understanding and response to climate change impacts to our oceans and waterways. I introduced S.1425, the Coordinated Ocean Monitoring and Research with Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi. This bill would improve ocean data collection and monitoring as well as bolster ocean acidification research, which is critical to protecting shellfish and fishery resources in Puget Sound.

Note: The new Trump administration is recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I am also concerned about the impact climate is changing is having on our public lands, like our beloved national parks. That’s why I was pleased that in March Congress overwhelmingly approved my bipartisan public lands bill, S. 47, the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. This bill permanently extended the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), our nation’s most important public land protection program. Besides increasing outdoor recreation opportunities, many LWCF projects help our public lands adapt to climate change and sequester carbon. A combination of over 120 public land bills, in total S.47 designated more than 1.3 million acres of new wilderness areas and 694,000 acres of new recreation and conservation areas. In Washington State, this bill permanently protected the Methow Valley watershed by removing 340,000 acres of Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest from potential mining development and designated the Mountains to Sound Greenway, 1.5 million acres of land stretching along the Interstate 90 corridor from Seattle to Ellensburg, as the Pacific Northwest’s first national heritage area.

Throughout my tenure in the United States Senate, I have made making our nation’s energy system cleaner, more efficient, and more affordable a top priority and I’m proud to have successfully enacted legislation to promote the production of renewable energy, incentivize energy efficiency, and protect our environment. Those efforts include authoring the legislation that provides the $7,500 tax credit for consumers who purchase a plug-in electric vehicle, securing the first increase in fuel economy standards in 25 years, and championing clean energy tax incentives, financing instruments, and research and development that have enabled companies and credit markets to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and empower homeowners to generate and save their own energy. 

Note: In his inaugural address, Donald Trump stated, "We will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers. In other words, you'll be able to buy the car of your choice." One of his first acts in office was to revoke Biden's 50% EV target.

I have also strongly opposed the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken climate science and slow our nation’s urgently needed transition to a cleaner, more diverse, and more secure energy system.  Please be assured that I will continue to work with my colleagues to enact additional laws that help reduce carbon emissions and combat the climate crisis.

Note: The new Trump Administration is suing four Democratic-led states to prevent them from enforcing "burdensome and ideologically motivated" laws and pursuing lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry over the harms caused by climate change [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/protecting-american-energy-from-state-overreach/].

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance.

Note: On May 1, 2025, the Senate narrowly voted to overturn a critical Clean Air Act safeguard that protects public health from highly toxic air pollutants that cause cancer, birth defects and brain damage. The Senate passed the legislation under the Congressional Review Act to repeal the important EPA rule that ensures that industrial facilities emitting the most toxic air pollution continue to meet Clean Air Act standards requiring maximum reductions in that pollution. 

Sincerely, 
Maria Cantwell
United States Senator

Cancer is on my Mind

 Facebook opens by asking, "What's on your mind?"

Cancer is on my mind. I had a dear friend and pillar of the community here die from pancreatic cancer less than 2 years ago. My cousin, whom I dearly love, has just been diagnosed with the same disease -- Stage 4. I had prostate cancer. My best friend here had the same disease. I benefited from prior research on the condition, and excellent treatment at the UW Medical Center, which receives substantial government funding through NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other federal grants for research. This funding is crucial for supporting research initiatives, training future researchers, and providing advanced medical care, like that I received almost twenty tears ago.

About 1,200 jobs are expected to be cut at NIH as part of the layoffs at the Health and Human Services Department, and the administration also has canceled hundreds of NIH grants to scientists around the country. HHS is expected to lose about 20,000 people.

National Institutes of Health main research campus

 "HHS deals with Americans from birth to death. There is absolutely no way you can lose 25% of the workforce without directly affecting Americans across this country," former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, adding this includes "research and science at NIH, which is the gold standard of the world."

Anjee Davis, the CEO of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News her reaction to the cuts was fear.

The University of Maryland has more than 250 active clinical trials, many that bring experimental medications to cancer patients across the country — but these trials are at risk of disruption.

Despite improvements in research and treatments, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the country, highlighting the importance of continued research (Heart disease is the leading cause of death).

The Trump Administration, with Elon Musk [a man who can afford the best medical treatment anywhere in the world] leading the charge, is gleefully taking a chain saw to medical research and funding. Meanwhile the man who heads of HHS, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is attacking fluoride in public drinking water.

Someone you love, a friend, an acquaintance, a valued member of the community, will be impacted. Friends, loved ones, neighbors, will suffer and die because of ignorance, incompetence, inhumanity, and mendacity in a federal government led by Donald Trump, enabled by his cadre of sycophants.

Make sure you tell your representatives and senators how you fell about this. Carry a sign at the next protest you attend that says, "STOP KILLING US!"

Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump’s Tyranny

 

By Ralph Nader

March 14, 2025

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. He is 91.

Thank you for your service

My wife and I are both Air Force veterans. We met and married in Bitburg, Germany, while assigned to the 36th TFW. I made the Air Force a career. My wife, an Air Force nurse, helped save my life, retired, and then raised our two boys.

I volunteered for Vietnam after my assignment to Bitburg. I did so because I had friends, guys like myself in their early twenties, putting their lives on the line to serve their country. News was coming back to us that some were KIA or MIA. I felt a need to serve, as they had, and to honor them in doing so.

As it turned out, the Air Force had other plans for me, and I didn’t end up going to Vietnam. I was assigned to the Pentagon instead. I was lucky. So many of my generation weren’t. They gave the “last full measure of devotion” to their country — those who died, and those who live afterward with the scars of their service forever etched in their psyche.

I had a good friend, 'Dan' (pseudonym), who was shot down and spent 6 years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” When the war was over, he transited Hawaii, where I was stationed at PACAF HQ. He had dinner with us. We had music playing. He asked me to turn it off. He’d been beaten so severely about the head, that what we heard as music was just a cacophony to him.

I haven’t the words to express my emotions when seeing Donald Trump’s disdain for my Brothers in Arms. He will never understand, “What's in it for them,” because for him sacrifice is a sucker’s bet. For Trump, there's always a way to get around an obligation, an oath, and even a law.

Several thousand protesters on the National Mall on Friday, March 14, included veterans, who rallied against the Trump administration's unilateral deep cuts to the federal government, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump's cuts to the VA and rollback of veterans healthcare is further evidence of his disdain for "service," a concept foreign to him.

In case you missed it, March 14 is abbreviated as 3/14, and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, disqualifies anyone from holding office if they engaged in insurrection. Trump should have been disqualified, but a heavily conservative Supreme Court, even then held in low esteem, quelled at the thought of "disenfranchising voters" (Justice Kavanaugh's words), and on March 4, 2024, ruled that states could not disqualify Donald Trump.

So, here we are a year later, after more than seventy-thousand Americans (just under 50%) voted to install the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, victims to the whims of a man intent on creating a nation in his own image; selfish, mean-spirited, unpredictable, and destructive.

God Bless America.

Eliminating the Department of Education

 This is Heather Cox Richardson's November 16, 2024, Newsletter Regarding President-Elect Donald Trump's Pledge to Eliminate the US Department of Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-16-2024?r=zf7p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/12/trump-close-education-department-proposal-explained/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/15/trump-abolishing-education-department-may-hurt-students-with-disabilities/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/evangelical-homeschooling-and-the-development-of-family-values

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos

https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf

https://glaad.org/moms-for-liberty-book-bans-anti-lgbtq/

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162

https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/130020/a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools

X:

SteveRattner/status/1856816905379532870

DGComedy/status/1848389872165306824

Tom Nichols tells us we must stay engaged. He's right.

An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threatsthat appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

So now what?

The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. 

Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

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This is republished from The Atlantic Newsletter. You can subscribe here: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/