Jonathan P. Baird

The first month of the Trump presidency has featured the much-discussed “flood the zone” strategy. Conducted at a breakneck pace, the multi-pronged campaign has been an effort to overwhelm the public to make resistance seem futile. Courts cannot keep up with the onslaught of events. No one can.

Trump’s plan is to discourage opposition by making it seem like peoples’ movements and courts cannot stop an irresistible tide that is moving very quickly on many fronts. I believe the plan was in place before Trump took the oath of office. It is Project 2025 jet-propelled by the Musk squad.

President Trump’s social media tweeted out a line from Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves the country does not violate any law”. This was the Napoleon who declared himself Emperor of France in 1804. At almost the same time, the White House social media also sent out a picture of Trump wearing a crown. On his social media, Truth Social, it was proclaimed “Long live the King”.

Whether this was supposed to be a joke or just owning the libs, I don’t think the deeper strategy behind Trump’s actions are being appreciated. I will offer a big picture perspective on how I see the Trump end-game. He does not want to leave the presidency during his lifetime. This is his most lucrative scam yet. He wants to be a dictator or a king ruling over the serfs whose role is to praise him.

Relying on an extreme version of the unitary executive theory giving the President absolute power, Trump seeks to turn back the clock to a gilded age before the New Deal. In that era imperialist great powers carved up the world as they colonized the Third World. Trump wants a return to the heyday of U.S. imperialism where might made right. Emulating Putin, he wants to maximize his personal fortune so he can be a legitimate billionaire instead of a fake one. He doesn’t want to have to worry about going to jail, ever.

The billionaire posse around him at the Inauguration was a tipoff. They plan to serve each others’ interests to insure they receive their precious tax cut. Could someone explain why tax cheats like Trump and the other billionaires deserve a further tax cut? So many of them never have paid their fair share of taxes in the first place. What a staggering display of greed! No doubt they will throw a few crumbs at the masses. They will pretend they are “pro-worker’ as long as it doesn’t interfere with their raking-in billions.

So far, Trump has, in effect, outsourced his presidency to Elon Musk. He doesn’t appear to be that interested in the job of President. While he plays golf (10 outings in 33 days) he leaves the dirty work to Musk who allegedly is fighting corruption in the Deep State. The idea that a convicted felon like Trump who has an extensive record of cheating his contractors cares about fighting corruption is laughable. One of his first acts was firing Inspector Generals.

Musk’s main role has been to fire federal employees, particularly probationary ones. This is part of deconstructing the administrative state. The firings have been done in the most callous disrespectful way imaginable. Federal workers receive anonymous, cowardly emails that often accuse them of poor job performance even though there is no record of poor job performance. Often the workers have had excellent performance records. The firings are in contravention of federal law and without any good cause.

In bullying fashion, Trump/Musk apparently believe he can bulldoze federal statutes and regulations which have mandated job protections. The arrogant way Trump treated Gov Janet Mills of Maine showed how full of himself he is right now. He believes he is the law.

Federal programs are intricate and complex and they take time to learn and understand. The idea that Musk’s twenty-somethings will blow in and discover big fraud is an illusion. Musk is playing a smoke and mirrors game. There is fraud and waste in the government but these kids are not going to find it in 15 minutes. The chance that they understand anything about the programs they are savaging is next to nil. Here the truth matters not at all. The image is everything which is why you have Musk on stage at CPAC with a chainsaw.

Musk’s entire DOGE enterprise is lawless from top to bottom. DOGE is not authorized by Congress. Its authority rests on the thin reed of an Executive Order. Trump says DOGE is an extension of his limitless Article II power under the Constitution but no court has yet given Trump the type of Article II power he craves.

The United States was created in opposition to a monarchy. Separation of powers and the three branches of government were created so the U.S. would never degenerate into a monarchy. Rule by non-stop issuance of Executive Orders could not be a more shaky legal ground. Trump is hollowing out the legislative and judicial branches so all power rests with him.

DOGE has zero transparency. We don’t know who they are or what they are doing but like good serfs we are supposed to shut up and let them do whatever. We are supposed to ignore Musk’s obvious conflicts of interest. If Trump’s maximalist program is like Putin or Orban, very bad trends of worsening income inequality, lower life expectancy and shrinking of democracy are likely.

The racism and sexism of the Trump presidency must also be called out. It is clear they are trying to rehabilitate racism and sexism in service of white and male supremacy. The obsession with DEI is a fig leaf: they are trying to roll back all civil rights gains made since the 1960’s. Renaming military bases after Confederate generals is a good indication of the reactionary mindset as is the dangerous hate they have directed against LGBTQ people. Trans people are such a small number and they have used them as a group to hate on.

Prepare for a post-constitutional government with white men once again large and in charge. Expect rule by fear with civil rights stripped away and perceived political enemies prosecuted. Say good-bye to abortion rights in all states as well as an end to gay marriage. Toxic masculinity will be the rule and there will be a resurgence of violence against women. No fault divorce will start disappearing in the states and there will be an effort to repeal womens’ right to vote. Patriotic education will mean Americans will be indoctrinated into a fraudulent history that whitewashes our national sins.

Whether this is our future depends on whether the American people resist. There is still time.

Great turnout in Concord on a freezing cold day! And Leonard Peltier is free!

As a secular Jew, I would not pretend to any great knowledge of Jewish theology. I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed in the reform Jewish tradition a long time ago. However, there are some parts of Jewish thought that are so central to the tradition that they are inarguably Jewish.

Judaism emphasizes treating strangers with kindness and compassion. Obviously that is something that has often not happened in the Jewish world like everyplace else but the aspiration and practice have to do with the treatment Jews received in Egypt in ancient times. In the book of Deuteronomy, there is this famous passage: “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Passover is about welcoming the stranger.

That message about the stranger is central to a Jewish perspective on mass deportations of immigrants and their incarceration in concentration camps. More than many groups, Jewish historical experience has a repetitive aspect where we have been forced to flee or have been subject to expulsion and mass deportation. Being scapegoated, Jews have been herded into ghettos and forced into concentration camps.

I know when I hear of the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions and to build camps for them to be held, including at Guantanamo, it evokes Jewish history because our people have been subject to that same viciousness.

While most would immediately conjure up World War 2, there are earlier parallels. In the early 20th century, immigration to the United States became a hot issue. In 1911, Congress issued a comprehensive study known as the Dillingham Commission Report. It concluded that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of them Italians and Jews, posed a threat to American culture and well-being.

Just as has happened now, a climate of extreme intolerance, nativism and xenophobia developed in the United States. Antisemitism reached new levels of acceptance. In her book, America for Americans, the historian Erika Lee describes it:

“Manhattan upper-class elite barred Jews from the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, resorts and private schools. Discontented farmers in the Midwest and South who formed a new political party known as the populists blamed Jews, whom they believed controlled the nation’s banks, for their economic suffering. Both Protestant and Catholic religious leaders promoted antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as Christ killers and as dishonest and greedy businessmen. Eugenicists argued that Jews were irredeemable and biologically inassimilable. The KKK actively promoted Jewish conspiracy theories and charged that they were congenitally incapable of virtue or patriotism.”

The exact same scapegoating that happened to Jews in the early 20th century is going on with those categorized as “illegal immigrants” today. Trump falsely says other countries are emptying out their jails and asylums. Instead of any effort to understand why so many people have sought to enter the United States, immigrants are unfairly slandered and fast-tracked for mass deportation.

Trump has suspended all refugee admissions. He is ending protected status for hundreds of thousands and he wants to deport millions who are not serious or violent criminals. Many have lived in the US peacefully for over 15 years. Trump is treating all immigrants, including legal and undocumented immigrants, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, as threats to the United States.

So many of the immigrants from Central America are coming because it became unsafe and impossible to live in their home countries. The U.S.-financed wars in Central America created crises of livability in their countries. We have seen the results in the greatly increased numbers coming to the Southern border since 2014, especially children and families.

Really since the 1980’s, many people who came from places like El Salvador and Guatemala had entirely legitimate asylum claims as civil wars forced people to leave. These were wars the U.S. played a major role in perpetrating by financing brutal military regimes.

As a Jewish person, I see immigrants as often fleeing for their lives much in the way Jews tried to escape the Nazi death machine. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 formalized the unwelcoming of Jews in the U.S.. That law mandated tiny entry quotas to America while the Nazi terror ramped up. The United States could have saved millions of European Jews from the death camps but the Jew hating in America prevented that.

The extent of the antisemitism at that time remains under-appreciated just as xenophobia is today. It was not just the spewings of Father Coughlin or Henry Ford. Antisemitism kept escalating. Both Britain and the U.S. closed their door to Jewish arrivals. Even after two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust, in 1947, 250,000 Jews in Western Europe remained in Displaced Persons Camps. No one would take them.

Part of the argument used against allowing more immigration of Jews in the 1920’s-1930’s was that Americans would be displaced from jobs. The argument had some legs because of the Great Depression but the same argument is used now against immigrants. The truth is that we need more people to fill jobs that there are not enough Americans to do.

The mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps was the ultimate horror but Trump is following in that cruel tradition sending immigrants to Guantanamo. He signed an Executive Order about it. Guantanamo has been the site of torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial. It is a law-free zone, outside the United States’ legal protections. What could go wrong? The script writes itself.

Stephen Miller, a Jewish person, is the architect of Trump’s mass deportation/concentration camp scheme. One biographer titled his book “Hatemonger”. There is a Yiddish word , shanda, which perfectly describes Miller. The word means “shame”. “terrible embarrassment”, and “disgrace”.

As a kid, I remember these words on the wall of my temple: “Justice, justice shall you pursue”. It should be clear that mass deportations and concentration camps have nothing to do with justice. They are the opposite.

Many years ago, there was a very popular film thriller, Seven Days in May, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey. The movie told the story of a military coup in the United States where the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs turned against the President. During my lifetime, coups have been run by militaries. There were the Brazilian generals in 1964, Gen. Suharto’s coup in Indonesia in 1965 and Gen. Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. We don’t tend to think of coups outside a military context.

What we are seeing now from Trump and Musk is a different kind of coup. Operating entirely outside law, the coup plotters have tried to capture the computer and payment system of the United States. By doing that, they effectively hold the nation captive. The strategy is to move quickly on many fronts and to break things.They are trying for a fait accompli where their actions dictate irreversible results regardless of what courts might later do.

They say they are combatting fraud and abuse but they have not gone through any legal channels authorized by federal law. Instead they bypass all norms and focus on declaring jobs are eliminated. This is what they have done with US AID which Musk says is in the wood chipper. Meanwhile Musk’s team gains access to enormous data including the personal and private information of millions of Americans who are either taxpayers or federal benefit recipients which people widely thought was secure and protected.

Data is power and there is no doubt this information could be of enormous value to Musk’s business operations. For all we know he may already have downloaded Americans’ data onto his personal servers and computer network.

Because the law moves slowly, Musk’s hope is to destroy institutions before there can be a reaction. As of this writing on February 9, courts are beginning to respond to both job loss at US AID and the monkeying-around inside the Treasury Department.

So we have the world’s richest man, an unaccountable private citizen and a questionable security risk, who is a major defense contractor, making unilateral decisions unvetted by anyone. Clearly, he is not calling Trump to ask permission for his actions. We have only the vaguest notion of what Musk and his band of juvenile tech bros are doing. There have been no hearings or public debate about someone, anyone, gaining access to the federal payments system.

No legal process gave Musk the authority he is exercising. His actions are a smash-and-grab. It must be pointed out that only Congress has the spending power under Article I of the Constitution.

Whether the issue is special education, consumer protection, air traffic control, food safety, environmental pollution or myriad other areas, federal laws have been in place for a long time and are protections for the public. Musk belittles federal workers but without these workers, many more people would die or be seriously injured. About the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) , Musk just tweeted “RIP”. That followed a tweet saying “delete” CFPB. He will make it “DOA”. He is entirely out of control.

Anyone who thinks Musk would care about consumer protection is out of their mind. Musk is not just anti-consumer protection, his thinking is post-constitutional and post-ethics..

Wired Magazine has reported that Musk’s team has not just “read-only” access but actual administrative privileges to the entire payment system and they have been re-writing code on it. On Twitter/X, Musk himself has said that “the DOGE team is rapidly shutting down certain “illegal payments””.

Musk has no authority to decide what is illegal. We don’t know if he is stealing money, compromising national security, gaining future financial advantage or retaliating against his enemies. He is trying to re-design the entire U.S. government with Trump’s seeming blessing. Musk blessed Trump with $300 million.

Because Musk is a major defense contractor with billions in government contracts, he is in a conflict of interest position. He got Trump to fire the head of FAA after his rocket company was fined.

He has been tweeting hateful posts about US AID. It is not clear why he hates it so much, maybe because it helps poor people and promotes democracy, Musk, with Trump’s apparent agreement, fired 97% of the agency, cutting its global workforce of more than 10,000 to 294 employees. You will not see Musk cutting any Musk businesses to save money.

As is the case with many federal workers, US AID workers are unionized. Musk and Trump could not be more anti-worker and anti-union. They try to rip up collective bargaining agreements like they are confetti. Their hatred of the federal workforce extends across-the-board. Trump’s pick to head the OMB, Russell Vought, has said he wants federal workers “traumatized”.

Not surprisingly, unions representing US AID workers are suing the Trump administration. Public Citizen and Democracy Forward lawyers, acting on behalf of the AID workers, stress that not a single one of the Administrations’s actions received Congressional approval.

If Musk can get away with decimating US AID, expect that to be a road map for what they will do to other federal agencies. They are not cutting with a scalpel, more like a meat cleaver. Many lawsuits have been filed by a wide array of actors to stop Musk and DOGE.

It was telling that Musk stated he would re-hire the 25 year old DOGE employee who resigned for having a viciously racist social media account. The individual had posted: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”. That post, which Musk never repudiated, speaks volumes.

Musk and Trump are trying to rehabilitate racism and white supremacy. Musk’s nazi salute was no accident. He has been actively supporting the neo-nazi party in Germany.

One big question is how the Trump administration will respond when courts reverse their illegal and unconstitutional actions firing people and invading privacy. Will they respect court orders or disregard them? Blowing off court orders would reflect an absolute constitutional collapse, opting for fascism.

Congress should be standing up for its own power as a separate branch of government because Trump and Musk are usurping power from that branch to the Executive. The Republican Party has disgraced and humiliated itself by collaborating with the coup. They are pretending what is happening is some kind of normalcy but they are promoting congressional impotence. No doubt many Republicans are afraid MAGA thugs would turn on them if they spoke out.

In a case about birthright citizenship, a Reagan federal court appointee, Judge John Coughenour, made a statement that is equally applicable here:

“It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

The months ahead will determine if there is any rule of law left in the United States.

For Democrats and progressives, this is a very dark time. Leading up to the 2024 election, the Democrats had one major overriding goal and that was the defeat of Donald Trump. They failed. If the Democrats were a football team, their general manager, head coach and assistant coaches would all have been fired and replaced.

But that is not how Democratic leaders have responded to a catastrophic loss. I am reminded of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” The lack of leadership is striking. The Party has made no effort to look hard at what went wrong. Nor do they seem up to the challenge of fighting autocracy and billionaire rule. As Sen. Bernie Sanders has said:

“The Democratic Party is increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system.”

Voters did not sign up for the overwhelming onslaught of unconstitutional maneuvers we have so far seen from Trump. He is violating laws on a scale we have never seen before while scapegoating DEI. He is reveling in his own brand of performative cruelty. He has turned lying on social media into an art form. Anand Giridharadas called all the Executive Orders a coup against Congress, like a second January 6.

The Democratic response has been underwhelming and lethargic. It is like Republicans are on a search and destroy mission against democracy but Democrats are asleep at the switch. Our septuagenarian and octogenarian Democratic leaders don’t appear to appreciate the gravity of the situation. They are busy voting for absurd and laughable cabinet choices.

Our two New Hampshire senators voted for the dog killer, Kristi Noem, for Homeland Security Secretary. Noem defended the dog murder as an example of her ability to perform “gruesome jobs in life when necessary”. How revolting! That person may not be as ridiculous a choice as Hegseth, Kash Patel or RFK Jr. but she most certainly did not deserve confirmation. Such a sycophant would never stand up to Trump no matter how unhinged he might be. No doubt she will be a key operative in carrying out his racist and hateful immigration plans.

I have nothing against Kamala Harris but she underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 national popular vote by more than six million votes. Democrats raised a billion dollars but our base voters were not inspired to turn out to vote. What is the story behind the poor turnout when there was so much money to spend? Democrats lost every battleground state and Trump gained in blue states and among male and working class minority voters. Democrats also lost both Houses of Congress.

The same thing played out at the state level. As Andy Volinsky pointed out in the Concord Monitor on January 31, this is the fifth election in a row Democrats lost the Governor’s race. They also lost the House and Senate in the state legislature and the Executive Council. As Volinsky wrote, that is a political disaster but who is holding leaders accountable for poor state election results? Where is the new blood that maybe could turn it around? Leaving the same leaders in charge is a self-destructive repetition compulsion.

Democrats don’t understand why they lost but they want to keep doing the same thing. And they have shown seemingly no interest in reforming themselves. For example, uninspiring Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer should be removed for ineptness. Where is the fightback? He is sleepwalking through a constitutional crisis pretending this is business as usual.

Then, on the House side, there was the Democratic choice to make Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead of picking a charismatic young legislator with social media expertise, Democrats picked a 74 year old suffering from esophageal cancer. It is like they want to lose.This is a political party in desperate need of an overhaul.

We need a vital opposition from the grassroots that can motivate and rally masses of people and will stand up to the billionaire class and autocracy. Democrats should frame the struggle as the working class versus the billionaires but the Democrats are afraid to frame it that way and pick a fight maybe because of their own reliance on billionaires.

The Harris campaign presented a canned, phony message massaged by their out-of-touch consultants. Other than abortion rights, who could figure what they stood for? Instead of any authenticity, Democrats thought it would be wise to play it safe and not tell the story of how much the American working class has been screwed by the system. Democrats told a story about how great the economy was. People weren’t buying.

One writer, Thomas Frank has consistently diagnosed the Democrats’ problem. He has pointed to a 50 year history of the wreckage of neoliberalism reflected by NAFTA, shuttered factories and the loss of good paying blue collar jobs across the country. This was engineered by Bill Clinton, not Republicans. Instead of defending a working class majority as they did in the FDR era, Democrats now focus more on appealing to suburban Republicans and the professional managerial class.

Democrats don’t tackle income inequality or even defend Medicare-for-all. Harris, who had previously supported Medicare-for-all, opposed it during the campaign. I think Democrats failed to give masses of people good reasons to vote for them. They could not persuasively say how their election would improve life.

Speaking more broadly about the whole progressive movement, it is time for some soul-searching. The movement is hardly a welcoming place. Anyone who has been around progressives would have to acknowledge the attitude of sectarian nastiness and intolerance that are all-too-common and it has been that way for a long time.The magnitude of our loss should mandate much greater humility.

We face an unprecedented threat. Trump and his MAGA movement are trying to fast track a theocratic autocracy. They seek a post-constitutional regime where the dictator has all the power with hollowed-out checks and balances. They are out to reverse everything progressive since the New Deal.

I found peoples’ strong response to the Trump administration’s across-the-board spending freeze very hopeful. That response forced Trump to rescind the OMB memo. Then two courts blocked Trump. Every effort to slow down autocratic takeover matters and has value.

On social media, I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say this: “One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground”. That is the spirit we need now. Resistance matters if the American people are going to save our democracy.