The World Does Not End in 2025
No--you're going to have to live in it.
Donald J. Trump is the odds-on favorite to be your next president. He is already the worst public figure in American history, and he may soon ring down the curtain on the United States as we know it.
And yet, the world will not come to an end if he succeeds.
No, you must think beyond the day he becomes dictator, because you will be living in his world. That is, unless you organize sufficiently well to vote him down to defeat in November.
In 2025 his world will be equal parts Christian Nationalism and idiosyncratic fascism. His family and his acolytes will plunder public coffers without shame. He will deport hard-working immigrants right along with the “drug dealers”. He will empty the prisons and your nation will be run by bikers, bigots and sex predators. Women won’t be equal under the law. Intellectuals will be persecuted. Books will be banned. There will be no right to choose your reproductive future. An army of liars will be empowered to drag you back from the comforts of the 21st Century to the unjust court of a capricious 14th Century king.
You, unless you are very rich and very much okay with the destruction of civil society, will be treated as a serf—without rights, without recourse. Most importantly, steps will be taken by the GOP to make our nation a cruel imitation of prosperity: where the few are fewer, and more wealthy and powerful than anything you have yet experienced—and where you have no rights, no dignity and no future.
This is not the end of the world. It is the beginning of a new one. One that you will be forced to live in, unless the GOP is defeated soundly at the ballot box. And even then, we will have to fight hammer and tong against a dedicated enemy that will refuse the result of the election.
Monstrous Greed
The only actual driver of Trumpism is monstrous greed. But to attain the power that satisfies this greed, Trump must leverage those who want license to practice their evil upon humanity. And those evildoers support Trump because he alone will give them that license.
Both Christians and fascists seek license, under Trump, to inflict their cruel ideologies upon a world that needs them not at all. The Christians want to bring women back to the cave, where they are dragged by their hair to the inner sanctum of a predatory priesthood. The fascist looks only to practice his personal perversions—sex predation, racist violence, and unmerciful retribution—on a population made defenseless by a weaponized Department of Justice. Remember that the Supreme Court has granted the president immunity from criminal prosecution, and that even Trump’s most unthinkable behaviors shall be protected by judicial edict.
None of this happens because “the middle class has been forgotten”, or because “the rural voter has a legitimate gripe”, or because of the prevalence of DEI, or because drag queens read stories in libaries to children, or because of any great economic crisis at hand. Instead, it happens because a foreign adversary (Russia) has managed to create a fifth column in the US made up of what one might call “fellow travelers” or better yet, “traitors”: Americans, especially Americans who have taken an oath of office, who profess fealty to an authoritarian, anti-democratic foreign power.
It’s part of a global power struggle, and make no mistake: the Russians have declared war against the West. Their primary target is the United States. This is because Russia wants its empire back, and more than that: they want Poland, they want Germany, they want Ukraine, they want the US. They have set their sights on the day when an American president defers to the wishes of Vladimir Putin as he deploys the US Army about the globe. They have set their sights on the day when democracy has been defeated here and abroad, such that they can exploit your labor and your children’s labor to suit their oligarchical vision.
Project 2025
If and when Trump wins, he takes office in 2025. So we should briefly review that political plan known as “Project 2025” as put forth by a right wing think tank. It provides a good look at what the GOP has in store for an unsuspecting nation. Trump recently has claimed to disavow it, but he is a professional liar whose word means the opposite.
According the Wikipedia, Project 2025 is “a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican candidate win the 2024 presidential election.”
Hailed by its creators as “the Second American Revolution”, it calls for a number of drastic measures that you will not want to live under. The head of the heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, informs us that this revolution will be “bloodless—if the left allows it”.
If that sounds ominous, perhaps it’s because it is a violent threat.
In government, Project 2025 wants to bring every person employed by the federal government under the direct control of the president such that every civil servant (including judges) serves at his pleasure. This makes Trump’s whim into law. It makes your taxpayer-funded government into a subsidiary of the Trump Organization.
On immigration, it calls for the mass deportation of immigrants who have come to the US illegally, despite the manner in which the US requires immigrants; and probably also due to a native hypocrisy in the US about immigrants generally (we need their labor but wish we did not). This will result in enormous police actions, dragnets and mass incarceration where resistance is broken.
Project 2025 will increase your tax burden, unless you are a billionaire; which shall be accomplished either by tarriffs or by direct taxation.
In culture, Project 2025 aligns itself against diversity and in favor of white supremacy, specifically against the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and people of color. It does not openly call for a national abortion ban, but would rather outlaw the so-called “abortion pill” as a proxy.
In law, it seeks to roll back every protection for every group that didn’t have voting rights before the Civil War. In other words, white, land-owning, hetero, cisgender males and that’s about it.
Will the Real 2025 Please Stand Up?
But under Trump, 2025 will be much worse than anything even Project 2025 can imagine. That’s because Trump himself, the man, the beast, is a law unto himself and an erratic, incompetent blowhard whose whim will shape American policy for decades to come. Think martial law in blue cities “to combat immigrant crime”. Imagine a police force that has been told by the Commander in Chief to “not be so nice” to suspects. Imagine racists with shotguns patrolling your town, with the backing of the police and a military that has been turned against its own people.
And with AI, social media, targeted disinformation and expanded corporate command and control, this all gets amplified beyond your imagination.
The above misdeeds, at one time or another, have all been visited upon populations that have lost their democracies. Why should America be any different?
Russia wants us gone because it leaves them free to dominate the globe. Christians want the US destroyed because they beleive it has been taken over by “demons” whose only crimes have been to throw off the yoke of priestly domination in a project of personal happiness and achievement. Fascists, as ever, seek only to act out their hateful dreams upon a world made victim to the strong.
Trump and his minions don’t like the diverse nation that America has become, they don’t like that Americans have civil rights, and, very personally, unless you are a bigoted, white Christian male, they don’t like you.
2025 will be your living nightmare unless you act now.
Today’s social media has been weaponized by enemies of the United States and hate and discord are now the currency of thousands of anonymous “content providers.” My new book Army of Liars unpacks how we got here, what exactly is wrong with digital enterprise, and how to go about fixing it so that humanity may survive even in an age of artificial intelligence and digital command and control. Army of Liars is designed to help humans not only survive in a digital age but to conquer digital and prosper in an age of truth in media.