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Scared. Determined. Exhausted. Angry. Those are just some of the ways readers described how they felt in the days following the 2024 election. The locals who actually voted for Trump (some 33%) have mostly remained silent, not necessarily jubilant.
And while we are still navigating these emotions, Trump and his MAGA cronies are wasting no time preparing to govern. In fact, they’re hoping we are too heartbroken to stand in their way as they turn Project 2025 into a reality.
But we know something they will never understand: Our communities are worth fighting for! What has already started with the “transition” ( it might even be called a transformation) of the government from something normal to the new American fascism will be rapid but incremental at first. They will come for the immigrants first, then the political activists, then the intellectuals, and control of the media. The opposition will be targeted and removed until there’s no more criticism of the “dear leader” and his insane ramblings will be normalized by both the far-right media and then the so-called “liberal” media. The LA Times and Washington Post have already been cowed into a non-endorsement. Who will be next?
Let me make it clear Donald Trump did not win a mandate. He failed to get 50% of the vote, a threshold the GOP has only crossed once since the end of the Cold War. Voters realigned in a clear manner that will take time to unpack what it all means fully, but the predominant message from this election is that the Democratic Party failed to turn out the vote that it did just four years prior. Trump won this time by about the same number of votes he lost in 2020. It might appear to some that the Democrats can’t win elections against Donald fucking Trump without the help of a global pandemic. If there is any kind of mandate in the final vote totals, it’s that the Democrats must change into a different party than they are right now as progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders and others suggest.
One cannot blame Kamala Harris for losing this one because her campaign was absolutely inspirational. She raised billions in a very short period, she was smart, on point, and prosecuted Trump in the campaign calling him out as a fascist but a slim majority of the jury wasn’t buying it. I’m not so sure that this set of voters actually understands what fascism is or what it will mean when it arrives wrapped in the flag carrying a cross. Were the 7% here in LA county that switched sides racists, misogynists, or just unconvinced? I don’t think so. But confused? Perhaps… Yes!
I think the slim majority who voted against Harris doesn’t really believe that Trump will do what he says he’ll do. They’ll be wrong and America will learn the hard way that “it can happen here” and the crooks, cronies, and vulture capitalists will pave the way for a 1984esque future, brought to you by Big Tech, AI, and government deregulation of corporations. The impacts on communities like ours will emerge gradually as the environmental standards are removed and they start picking up your immigrant neighbors in unmarked vans for deportation or worse–internment camps– like the Japanese during WWII.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see what’s coming and many will deny it until it affects them or their family and friends. Then the shock of it all will settle in but will it be too late? This may sound alarmist, you may say that I’m exaggerating it way too much to come true, but the writing is already on the walls and in the propagandists’ media. In the Nazi black shirt marches in Ohio. Our allies abroad are alarmed and cautious, but they see what’s happening perhaps more clearly than Americans do. There will come a time for you to choose between freedom or fascism. Is America a white Christian nation or a secular state?
What many don’t see or choose to remain ignorant of is that we have as a nation confronted this before, the American Civil War, the Jim Crow laws after reconstruction, the Palmer raids during WWI, and the attempted coup against FDR are just a few. What is at stake here is the progressive reforms of over 150 years of attempting to perfect human rights and freedom. From the abolition of slavery to passing the 19th Amendment, the creation of the FDA and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the instituting of child labor laws, the creation of Social Security and Medicare, the Civil Rights voting laws of the 1960s, all of these has been a struggle against oppression of one kind or another. And in the process “fear” was always used against the people of this country to keep us fighting amongst ourselves and against our own best interests.
This is what Trump has used now and he has effectively divided the country and it has become more dangerous and less free. And will continue to be more weird and scary than even the campaign evoked.
