The Trump regime had a 54-year (and a 76-day) head start

Donald Trump keeps illegally acting out Republican fever dreams that no one but the rabid GOP base wants, and even their children will greatly regret. Yet much of the press keeps playing along, acting as if the 14-17th most impressive presidential victory since World War II has voided the Constitution.

Last Thursday, Donald Trump declared that he was closing the Department of Education on Thursday while Congress was out on recess.

Pick any news article about his constitutionally preposterous decree, and do a little Ctrl-F. You'll have difficulty finding a vital keyword for this story—"Reagan."

Here's a little background from the Cato Institute that has been disappeared from its site:

President Reagan made a campaign pledge to eliminate it, and renewed his promise in his first State of the Union address in January 1982: “The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.”

Unfortunately, President Reagan was unable to achieve his goal because of solid opposition by the Democratic House. 

Hmm. You may wonder, what is a House? Also, do we still have a Congress? Unfortunately, that is an excellent question. The answer is TBD.

You—a smarty—might rebut, "Well, we certainly don't have a Democratic House!"

To that, I say, "Almost! Republicans have the slimmest House margin in over 100 years, and Democrats picked up seats as a Republican president won, something that rarely happens." Two facts that rarely get mentioned. Also, "Great, call for the bill. Let Congress vote. Have everyone run on it!"

If Congress, which created the Department of Education, doesn't want it, it must decree its demise. But no one should obey and accept that Trump can skip the key obstacle that has prevented the GOP leeches from pulling this stunt before.

What you definitely should never, ever do in any way possible way promote the idea that Trump—lacking the actual power to do what he wants—can just do whatever the fuck he wants until he decomposes or John Roberts gets a spine and an army. No one who cares at all about freedom should assent to the weaponized fantasy that our democracy is, in effect, void because every Republican is scared to have Trump rain rape and death threats on every woman in their lives forever.

I offer this context only to explain or remind you that nothing Trump is doing is new. The wet dreams he's living out aren't even his own.

Nearly all the actions that he's taken in the first 60 or so days of this shameless and shameful regime are the authoritarian versions of policies Republicans have been fantasizing about for most of the century.

The strategy for achieving domination over democracy was first sketched in 1971's Powell Memo, "a call-to-arms for American corporations." The document we now call Project 2025 is just the most recent version of a series of documents that Powell-minded reactionaries have issued since 1980, where they first called for tossing aside of the Department of Education to return power "to the states." That, of course, is "racist" for stopping anything that helps the "woke," AKA "non-whites and the people who aren't scared by non-whites."

I first heard about the Powell Memo from George Lakoff, the legendary cognitive scientist who revealed how metaphors frame how our politics are waged and elections are won. From a 2003 interview:

Why do conservatives appear to be so much better at framing?

Because they've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

Lakoff saw this coming from decades away. His 2008 book The Political Mind, which the FrameLab Book Club is currently reading, opens with this warning:

Republicans used that headstart—which led to their dominance of the courts and birthed AM radio, Fox, and all the noxious 4chan goop that Elon now floods into Twitter—to give us November 5, 2024.

Elon Musk and his cadre of Silicon Valley goofs, whom Gil Durán calls The Nerd Reich, then used the 76 days between Trump's win and the inauguration to do the unimaginable. They engineered a hostile takeover of our federal government by seizing digital and physical control, aiming to eliminate any role the courts or Congress—and thus the people—might play in governing ourselves.

How have we fought back?

On November 15, 2024, in the first episode of "Next Comes What," which I help produce, Andrea Pitzer—who studied authoritarianism around the globe to write her global history of concentration camps—told us that the two months we had to prepare for the regime's arrival were a massive gift. People facing this kind of threat to democracy rarely have time to prepare for what is coming.

How did we use this time? Is there any evidence Democrats in Congress were preparing to counter the array of plans laid out in Project 2025?

Did I happen to miss a coordinated response to Trump's decree on the Department of Education, where parents of kids in Special Education in all 50 states were elevated to speak of the abandonment by the Trump regime that's coming due to confusion and mayhem that's being caused by this utterly unnecessary action?

The groups that seemed to take that time most seriously are federal workers who, through Democracy Forward, have effectively delayed many of Trump's worst attacks on democracy's workforce and immigrant/refugee rights groups who never have had the luxury of pretending that the worst might not be coming.

In the latest episode of "Next Comes What," at the top of this post, Andrea explains that the authoritarian threat we've feared is already here.

The #TeslaTakedown is the best sign of the creative, unpredictable opposition necessary to face the threat our country faces. And the hunger to fight back is overflowing, as we're seeing in the response to the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour featuring Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This is the kind of urgency we need from the bottom-up to match the top-down plot to destroy American democracy. Because what we do now will decide how we live the rest of ourselves—something Republicans figured out 54 years ago.