MAGA Reichstag Moment: Part 1
This is the first relatively long post I've written for a long time. Now two days old, I wrote it Saturday, September 27, starting it as a short essay for the Waterford NY Democratic Committee Newsletter. But it grew, and grew, until it became too long for either a WDC Newsletter, or even a FB post. So here we are, on September 29, with day 1 of the MAGA Reichstag moment underway. So I'm putting it here on the website. For posterity's sake, and, yeah, the right to at some level say “I told you to watch out for the Trumpensteins. As for the content of this essay, Cocktail Pete's Convocation of Generals convention is tomorrow, and it's lock-solid certain now that there WILL be a shutdown tomorrow night. I have full confidence that times will get bad and worse in the near future. Because this really is the moment we will remember as the week when the SS Goons Came For America.
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NOTE FROM THE CHAIR:
I try to avoid writing longish essays for the WDC newsletters because they’re not intended to be about me. On this occasion, however, I’m making an exception, because I believe that this coming week is likely to be remembered as the point we crossed the threshold from worrisome times to tumultuous times. Given the gravity of the moment that I fear, I think it’s important to talk about the “fierce urgency of NOW” in an impassioned way. So I want to share my anxiety in an op-ed that reflects my own impressions and opinions, while making clear that it is not intended to represent the Democratic Party at any level.
Starting with historical fact rather than my opinion, Trump has never been a model of admirable behavioral or rational communication. But recently, particularly since the Epstein files have become an issue, he has shifted into full blown crazed-Frankenstein mode, rampaging and battering his way through civil society, hellbent on exacting vengeance on those he perceives as having slighted him at some point in his overly long life.
You don’t have to be a news junky to be able to click off a list of enemies he and his underlings are persecuting with the full power of the federal government, along with the support of a legion of terrified Republican congresspeople, six perverse and cowardly Supreme Court Justices, and an army of morally vacuous cronies and lackeys who are eager to enthusiastically emulate Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS).
The first blow of Trump’s illegal personal vendetta was last week’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey. But Frankenstein Trump himself warns us, as he wobbles clumsily and incoherently along, that he intends to prosecute dozens of others: Leticia James, Adam Schiff, Fani Willis, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bill Barr, Brian Kemp, Brad Raffensberger, Liz Cheney, Generals Mark Milley and Jim Mattis, John Bolton, Mark Esper, a cast of thousands. Those he wants to crucify include every single Democratic member of congress, and every journalist who works at CNN or MSNBC or the NYT, every comedian who ever made jokes about him, and any Congressperson of either party who votes against him.
But the DOJ and Homeland Security and the judiciary system are only part of Trump’s arsenal in his War Against Free America. Frankenstein Trump and Cocktail Pete Hegseth are scheduled this week to read the riot act to ALL American Generals and Commanders, who for the first time in this nation’s history will be assembled in one room. Cocktail Pete himself has said the goal of this unprecedented, dangerous, hugely expensive, and utterly unnecessary convocation of America’s top brass will be to reinforce the “Warrior Ethos” that he envisions as the preferred culture of the American military.
Do Pete’s own personal history and long history of inappropriate comments lead one to suspect that “warrior ethos” could mean “rape and rampage?”
Sure. That’s the way I would take the view of “unfettered masculinity” that Hegseth promotes. Meanwhile, summoned generals are on edge, because for a field commander general to be called back to Washington on short order has almost always meant “getting fired.” So knowledgeable observers are predicting that however the purpose of the convocation is framed, it will also be a significant “reorganization” that will cull, or pave the way for culling, commanders who might object to Trump’s unconstitutional use of the military as a personal police force.
Police State anybody?
It seems clear that a police state is the ultimate goal of Project 2025, which is unfolding more quickly than anybody ever thought it could. And it seems very likely that owning the military is simply one more giant step toward that goal.
Trump’s repurposing of the U.S. military from a national defense body to a ‘Palace Guard’ is unlikely to be the biggest story of the week.
No, the biggest news story will almost certainly come midweek with the government shutdown, which the Trump regime promises will not be like any other shutdown we’ve had before. The difference, Frankenstein and his craven cronies say, is that they will fire, rather than furlough, all federal employees who are not essential to fulfillment of Project 2025. Which is to say, they are threatening to take this opportunity to burn down America so that they can recreate it in a more cristo-nationalist and autocratic model.
Will wholesale firings be possible? At a legal level, not immediately. Trump has the authority to lay off workers after 60 days without approval from the Office Personnel Management (OPM). With approval from the OPM, he can lay them off with just 30 days’ notice. In preparation for that, Trump has directed the Office of Budget and Management to prepare a “reduction in force” plan that can be presented to the OPM.
For the next couple days, the big question is whether the shutdown will actually kick in at midnight on September 30. At this point it seems prrobable. A HOR stopgap continuing resolution failed in the Senate last week by a vote of 44-48, with Fetterman being the only Democrat to vote for it. After the vote, Trump flat refused to meet with Democratic Senators. With Congress in recess until October 6, it seemed like a done deal.
Or maybe not. An article in The Hill last Friday reported that centrist Democratic Senators are looking for a way around the impasse, and there may be fissures in Democratic solidarity. Surprised that some Dems might cave? Ha! But maybe they won’t. Our own NY Senator and majority leader Chuck Schumer is thus far leading the resistance against passing a clean HOR resolution, and announced “unequivocably” that he will not support it. He has subsequently defended his position in video interviews.
A response to rumblings that AOC might challenge him in the 2028 primary? Very well could be. But as of the weekend, he seems solid.
Most of the other Senate Dems who voted for the CR that kept the government open back in March, however, have not committed to opposing it this time. That would include the other NY Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, who appears to have kept any mention of the CR completely off her website. In any event, If the two Republicans who voted against the CR this time – Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski – buckle under the pressure and change their vote, it will still require 8 Democratic votes. And right now, it’s not clear there are that many Dems willing to break ranks and join the Republicans.
Assuming Trump makes good on his promise and drags the country into a shutdown, government workers in “nonessential” positions will be laid off immediately. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar services, along with military personnel and TSA agents, should not be suspended. But even protected workers will start being affected by mid-October because they will not receive regular paychecks during a shutdown. Military personnel other than the Coast Guard will stop being paid in mid-October (another reason for the top brass meetings this week?), and guardsmen along with other federal employees will miss their first full paycheck on about October 24th.
As a bit of trivia, because the Coast Guard is tied to Homeland Security rather than the Defense Department, guardsmen won’t be able to access unemployment benefits, and Congress must pass specific legislation to approve retroactive pay once the shutdown ends.
A Rough Ride?
The bottom line is that the next week is likely to be the takeoff for a particularly bumpy ride, even by the usual chaotic Trump Regime Politics. We should find out more about the mysterious ‘rah-rah-rah Warrior Soldier session’ by the end of the week. It could be horrifying, or merely a bizarre pep rally. Or very likely a pep rally with threatening overtones.
The national shutdown, if it happens, will probably be a bigger deal, with strident attempts by both Parties to blame the other. Polls indicate that most Democrat voters are ready for this PR struggle, in large part because most Democrats are sick and tired of letting Frankenstein Don and his demented cult followers lurch unchallenged toward the police state they openly endorse.
Of course, Dems could lose their nerve, or the Taco President could back down in the face of public condescension. But at this moment, a shutdown continues to look highly likely. If there is a shutdown, Trump’s 2018 shutdown of 35 days that holds the record for shutdowns could serve as the model. A major difference between that event and this one, however, was that the budget resolution that led to the 2018 impasse was in late December, after an election that returned control of the House to the Democrats. As soon as the new Dems were sworn in a month later, the House immediately passed the less contentious Senate budget bill, which had already passed unanimously.
As it was, however, nine federal departments were partially or completely shut down, and 800,000 workers were furloughed or had to work without pay. The debacle was enormously expensive, with the CBO estimate of direct costs running to about $11 billion. Not included in that figure are indirect costs that are, at best, difficult to estimate. For instance, Moody’s downgrade of U.S. treasury bonds caused U.S. 30-year mortgage rates to rise above 7%, which resulted in decreased home sales and an unknowable, but definitely huge cost of lost sales.
In the current case, however, there is no new Democratic House majority waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, there appears to be no appetite for moderation on the part of Trumpenstein and his army of morally vacuous cronies and lackeys who are eager to stage a repeat of Hitler’s Reichstag moment. What we know about Trump is that he’s astonishingly impressionable and fickle, and often changes his mind based on the last conversation he had, or in response to the threat of losing support from his base.
We in the anti-Trump faction of American voters, meanwhile, have not shown the ability to be reactive in any sustained way. If we are to successfully resist the chaotic Frankenstein tyranny of the Trump regime, or even to curb the astounding level of corruption engaged in by this sallow old führer and his sycophantic plutocratic cronies, we must get much more determined to shape our own destiny by speaking out and standing up.
Can we do that? I don’t know. As an excellent article by George Packer in The Atlantic magazine noted this week,
Foreigners are baffled that Americans are allowing an authoritarian to rob them of their precious birthright [of functional democracy]. I’m baffled, too—but I also recognize that we have no experience resisting this kind of government. So we can study what ordinary people living under other modern authoritarian regimes have done. Witness, protest, speak out, and mock in creative ways that catch the popular imagination. Politicians can run for office, lawyers can sue, journalists can investigate, artists can dramatize, scholars can analyze. Americans are already doing these things, but so far none of it has made much difference because the public isn’t engaged, and without the public on their side opponents of authoritarianism are too weak to win.
My hope is that we can become a nation of resistance. But frankly, I have a great deal of fear that too many current day Americans 1) do not understand the gravity of the threat we face; 2) do not prize freedom and meaningful democracy enough to struggle for it; and/or 3) cannot compromise our own political and social ideals enough to stand with those who have different preferences to fight the common enemy of a clownish but deadly tyranny of a monstrous ruler and his fascist ghouls.
Or to pose the necessary question in another, more crass way, can we at least temporarily understand that the threat to our well-being, our country, and our world is such that we need to adopt some version of the maxim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend?” in order to fight for everything we hold dear?
If the answer is even a qualified “yes” by some but not all people, what that means is that we must coalesce around the Democratic Party. Not because of its real or supposed traditions of standing for common people; and not because it’s a model of efficiency and transparency and fealty to little ‘d’ democracy; and not because it has any overriding claim to high moral values. It’s not even because the Democratic Party is the political vehicle of choice because it is almost always better than the Republican Party in general, and is always wildly better than the Republican Party of Trump.
All of those things are at least partially true. But the REAL reason we must coalesce around the Democratic Party is because there is no other option other than despair and surrender. We have no other party infrastructure to install reasonable legislators or officers to government. And we have no time to dream of creating a better party than the one we’ve got.
So Please … join with us. Offer whatever resources you are able. Volunteer the time, talents and endorsements you can. Share your ideas. Stand with us to save our freedom, our country, and our world.