Fascism

How the United States went from a functioning democracy to a fascist dictatorship.

The foundation of our democracy

We all grew up believing in the inherent good of living in a democratic society. It seemed inevitable that the American ideal was going to be the future of the world order, with totalitarian and autocratic governments disappearing and being replaced by democratic governments. Most of us were smug in the belief that our system was the best system in the world. We knew that it wasn’t perfect, but we thought that a governing system did not exist that was better. So how did the United States of America become a fascist oligarchy?

In order to understand how we went from being the ‘leader of the free world’ to a country that is part of the ‘axis of evil’, it helps to be aware of the history of our democratic experiment. Our political system and our constitution did not come into existence by all of the ‘founding fathers’ agreeing on every principle. In reality there was a dispute between our country’s early version of today’s right wing white supremacist ‘oligarchs’ and the eighteenth century version of today’s progressives. This conflict has existed ever since, with each side’s power either ascending, or descending, depending upon the political philosophy of the elected leaders. The difference this time is that the oligarchs currently in charge of the government have no appreciation for the constitution, or for democracy. They want to turn the country into an autocratic Christian nation and to end our democratic experiment.

The American revolution was not just a revolt against the King of England, but also a repudiation of rule by wealthy lords, barons, dukes, earls, counts and princes, as well as a revolt against both the oppressive puritan Christian religion that was being practiced in New England and the Church of England, of which the king was the head. Therefore, the insistence by MAGA Trumpists and Republicans that America was founded as a Christian nation is antithetical to the reality. The reason that the constitution explicitly separates church and state is that the founders understood that whenever a religion controls the power of the state, it will preempt the rights afforded citizens in a democracy by forcing everyone to adhere to its creeds.

After the British were defeated in 1781 and before the constitutional convention was held in 1787, wealthy colonialists in some states and all of the oligarchical slaveholders in the southern states, believed that political power should remain with the states. Even as they were exercising most of the political and economic control of the governments in their various states, they still complained that the newly created state constitutions were '“too democratic” and that legislators were not “doing what was best for the nation”. They wanted the control of the political and economic policies in their states and they didn’t want to allow ordinary people to have any political power.

The founding fathers set up the consitutional convention because the central government, which had been created when the Articles of Confederation were written at the end of the revolutionary war, was not being supported by the state governments. The “Confederation Congress”, the name of the central government, had not been given the authority to tax, or to force the states to financially support it. The problem was that the wealthy slaveholders and some wealthy businessmen in the north did not want a strong central government. Therefore, the idea of the convention was to have the political leaders from all of the states come together to resolve the differences between those who were pushing for states rights and those like James Madison who claimed that they had fought against the King of England in order to create a democratic society with a strong central government.

Madison was dissatisfied with the weak national government that had been established by the Articles of Confederation, so he arrived in Philadelphia eleven days before the convention and proceeded to set the agenda. He believed in a government wherein all male members of society, regardless of their economic status, had equal rights. But in order to reach a consensus with the wealthy elite, he was forced to concede certain elements of the new government to those who continued to promote states rights and a weak central government. One of these concessions was to elect a president through an electoral college, the creation of which was the result of a compromise reached between the ‘founding fathers’ who were members of the upper class in the slave states and the Madisonians, who were mostly of the younger generation that came from all segments of society. The philosophy of the southern oligarchs was not that different from the philosophy of the wealthy Trumpists who have taken over the Republican Party and embrace Christian Nationalism. It is also similar to the Nazi embrace of eugenics. All three have insisted that one group of people is superior to all others. For MAGA it is white Christians, for Nazis in Germany it was ‘Aryans’ and for the Revolution era elite and southern slaveholders, it was wealthy white landowners.

Just four decades after the consitutional convention, Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh President of the United States. He was an arrogant former military officer who created the first real constitutional crisis of the new republic by ignoring the Supreme Court. He famously said after a ruling by the Supreme Court Chief Justice “John Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it”. Disregarding the separation of powers delineated in the constitution, he asserted that the executive branch does not have to abide by rulings of the judicial branch if he, as president, does not agree with their decrees. Ignoring the court’s injunction not to remove native Americans from their traditional homeland in Georgia, Jackson ordered the military to arrest a group of missionaries who supported the Cherokees’ right to their land and then to force march more than 100,000 native Americans to Oklahoma along what the native Americans called “The Trail of Tears”. Thousands of men, women and children died enroute.

Donald Trump adheres to the same philosophy as Jackson. He insists that his power as the chief executive cannot be challenged by any court. He has referred to the sadistically cruel Andrew Jackson as “his favorite president” and has installed Jackson’s picture in the Oval Office.

In 1854, a decade after President Andrew Jackson ordered the expulsion of the native American families from their homes in Georgia, the wealthy southern slaveholders conspired to force the ‘free states’ in the north to become slave states. They had accumulated enough power in congress to overturn the Missouri compromise, which had kept the southern states from making slavery legal in the west. Then they stacked the supreme court with southern sympathizers, so when a black slave by the name of Dred Scott sued for his family’s freedom, the supreme court rejected the lawsuit and declared that people of African descent were not included as citizens in the constitution. The southern oligarchy then used that decision and the overturning of the Missouri Compromise in an attempt to extend slavery throughout the United States, which would have undermined the constitution and destroyed American democracy.

Like the legions of poorly educated low information Trump voters who weren’t ready for the chaos and ruinous policies that came after they voted for a convicted criminal and serial liar to be president, people in the north hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress overturned the Missouri Compromise. If the newly constituted states were allowed to have slavery, it would have been only a matter of time before slave states were in the majority and would be able to make slavery national. Like the Canadian reaction to Trump’s threats to make Canada a state, northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over virtually every other issue came together to stand against slavery and the end of American democracy.

During the presidential debates for the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln, speaking for the newly created Republican party, told his Democratic party challenger Stephen Douglas that the congress “took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

His words seem to reflect the feeling of the people throughout America today in response to the Trump presidency. The civil war, fought soon after Lincoln’s remarks, was a battle between those who believed in a diverse democratic nation and those who believed they had the right to control the lives of other human beings. But the battle has never ended for the descendants of some white Americans who still believe they are superior to black Americans and that black people should not have the same rights as they do. As soon as union forces were removed from the south in the 1870s, the southern state legislatures made up of former wealthy slave holders, created Jim Crow laws which reestablished white supremacy and codified the segregation of blacks from whites. These laws had the effect of keeping millions of people subjugated long after the Civil War. The lack of freedom and rights that were denied to black Americans meant that between the 1870s and the civil rights era, they were existing in what to them was not a democracy in America. They were forced to live in ghettos, their schools were substandard and segregated from white schools, many of them were excluded from voting, the best jobs were out of reach and reserved for white applicants only, they couldn’t even sit with white people on public buses in the south, and they lived with a myriad of other legal and societal prohibitions throughout the country.

The Jim Crow laws and the laws segregating blacks from the rest of society were so effective that after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, he assembled the top Nazi legal scholars in the country to a meeting that would decide how the German government could use the Jim Crow Laws and segregation in America as the legal basis for their drive to segregate and eventually eliminate the Jewish population.

During and after the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, some white Americans chafed at the reality that black people had equal rights. Their resentment festered for the next half century until Donald Trump tapped into their sense of bereavement and pronounced; “I am your retribution”. He sanctioned their grievances and promoted the idea by white mysogynists and racists that they were really the ones being mistreated by a government that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). So, he ended those programs when he was elected president, reversing a half century of advances in civil rights for both women and people of color.

Soon after the civil war, American oligarchs began to control the government through corruption. They were called “Robber Barons” because they robbed from the poor to increase their wealth. This was referred to as the “Gilded Age” because it was an era of economic expansion and materialistic excesses. But it was also an era of significant poverty and growing inequality. Donald Trump has expressed nostalgia for this era, claiming that it was the “richest period in American history”. In reality, it was only the richest for the corrupt “Robber Barons”, who were able to bribe government officials with impunity, since there were no laws against corruption. In order to return America to that era, Trump, along with Elon Musk, have proceeded to eliminate government agencies that oversee laws against corrupt business practices by individuals and corporations, both in America and around the world.

With the exception of Grover Cleveland’s presidency, Republicans controlled the White House throughout the Gilded Age. It was during this period that the Republican party began to identify with business interests and it was also when the wealthiest Americans used their wealth to lobby and bribe government officials to oppose any laws that would give average citizens more rights. The Republican Party became addicted to money, bribery and corruption and virtually all of its presidents and members of congress have taken money from lobbyists to promote the interests of corporations and the wealthiest Americans since then.

Democrat Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to begin to limit the power of the wealthy in American politics. As governor of New York, he had been an energetic reformer, removing corrupt officials and enacting legislation to regulate corporations. As president, he expanded the powers of the federal government in support of the public interest in conflicts between big business and labor. Teddy Roosevelt was followed in office by another Democrat. Woodrow Wilson oversaw the enactment of the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Like today’s Republican Christian Nationalists, most of the Republicans were members of the white male establishment in 1920 that opposed women’s suffrage. They thought that only men should have that right and that women belonged in the home cooking and caring for children. In reaction to the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson presidencies, most of the wealthy members of society threw their financial support behind the three anti-labor, pro business Republican presidents who followed Wilson, but whose policies led to the great depression.

It was in the 1920s that the oligarchs began to be joined in the Republican party by religious fundamentalist preachers seeking political power. Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” had explicitly contradicted religious dogma when it was published in the 19th century, so conservative religious states like Tennessee banned the teaching of the theory. They did not want people to question them or their religious beliefs. In 1925, John Scopes, a biology teacher, was charged and convicted of violating the ban in what was referred to as the “Scopes Monkey Trial” This was the first time that religious fundamentalist preachers joined with Republican politicians for a cause, but as time went on, many preachers became political. During the Evangelical Christian movement of the 1970s, fundamentalist preachers began to build huge megachurches, through which they became part of the wealthy elite. The majority of them convinced their congregations to join the Republican party and to become more politically active. Since that time, fundamentalist preachers have been working with Republican politicians to break down the wall between church and state. The Christian Nationalists who are now MAGA Trumpists are using Project 2025 as a guide in their effort to insert their religious beliefs into our public schools and our private lives.

As a result of the great depression, caused in large part by tariffs imposed by Herbert Hoover and his Republican party, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office in a landslide. His New Deal policies intended to reverse the effects of the depression, were opposed by both the wealthy businessmen and the conservative Supreme Court. His creation of the Social Security Administration in 1935 resulted in many of the era’s upper class joining the “Liberty League”, an organization made up the wealthiest and most prominent businessmen who opposed Roosevelt’s programs. In addition to the Liberty League, political opposition to the New Deal and Social Security came from the “conservative coalition” made up of conservative politicians in both parties. They opposed the New Deal because it added to the power and bureaucracy of the federal government. Just as in 1787, the wealthy class in the 1930s, many of whom were from former slave states, promoted “states rights” and did not want the country to have a strong federal government. Although most people were poor and suffered during the Great Depression, the Rockefellers and the other oligarchs became even wealthier through stock market manipulation and by buying struggling companies at bargain basement prices. Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other oligarchs are now doing the same thing as Trump manipulates the stock market with his tariffs and leads America into another depression.

America’s involvement in World War II, increased Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity and sidelined his political opposition. The Liberty League had disbanded, but in 1943, industrialist Lewis H. Brown, one of the wealthiest men in America, created the first conservative think tank: The American Enterprise Institute. Then in 1958, Robert Welch, a prominent conspiracy theorist, founded the John Birch Society. Many of the wealthiest members of American society supported its libertarian ideals and their contributions allowed the JBS to develop local chapters throughout the United States. Robert Welch created the John Birch Society to oppose what he believed to be a ‘Communist conspiracy’ in the American political estabishment. However, the ‘conspiracy’ was largely a fantasy of the far right. Since its founding, the JBS has been responisible for the creation of many of the false conspiracies and divisive ideologies that Donald Trump promotes. ‘Bircherism’ and the legacy of conspiracy theories that it inspired remains an element of the Republican Party and the far right and shapes the conspiratorial elements within MAGA Trumpism and the Republican party.

The beginning of the oligarchy

In the 1960s, the liberal consensus that had dominated since the New Deal began to fracture. Prior to President Johnson signing the civil rights legislation in 1964, most southern white voters had been Democrats. That was because the Republican Party had been created to oppose slavery, so after the civil war, all the white southerners who had been a part of the Confederacy and their projeny, had voted Democratic.

The Civil Rights Movement ignited a conservative backlash, particularly in the southern states. The Republicans recognized an opportunity and took advantage of the backlash by cultivating the anger that southern white voters had towards the Democratic Party for giving black people equal rights and for ending segregation. The Republican Party embraced their prejudices and convinced the majority of white southern voters to switch parties and join the Republicans.

Once the majority of voters in southern states had switched parties, Republican Richard Nixon, or ‘Tricky Dick’ as he was referred to, went on to win the the presidency in 1968 with treason, corruption and deceit. When President Johnson was negotiating a peace deal to end the war in Vietnam, Nixon secretly sent envoys from his campaign to encourage the South Vietnamese leaders not to attend the peace talks in Paris. He promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d make them rich when he was President if they waited until after the election. Nixon was worried that if Johnson’s peace overtures were successful and the war ended before the election, the Democrats would win the presidency. So the South Vietnamese government pulled out of the peace talks and the war continued for seven more years. Nixon’s treasonous machinations caused over a million more Americans, Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians to lose their lives. Nixon was never held to account for his obvious act of treason and genocide, but the Republicans learned that treason was a useful political strategy. Since Nixon, Republicans have used whatever means is at their disposal to corrupt our democratic system of government.

The first indication that the wealthiest members of society in the country were creating an oligarchy and getting involved in politics once again was when Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memorandum for the American Chamber of Commerce titled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System." It was an anti-Communist, but more importantly, an anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to ‘retake America’. This was really the beginning of the 50-year-long campaign to turn America into the Christian Nationalist oligarchical kleptocracy it is today. The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the U.S.

Powell inspired wealthy heirs of American industrialists to pursue his vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the policies of Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the power of government out of the hands of the oligarchs and wealthy business interests and gave it to the average citizen. Powell’s memo also inspired three very wealthy businessmen, Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, to establish the Heritage Foundation. Then in 1982, conservative law students at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago created the Federalist Society. Both of these think tanks began to promote conservative judges who went on to establish legal rulings that were alined with the philosophy of the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Party. Because they had so much money, they began to control the media and the political discourse, moving the political center in America steadily to the right.

The goal of both the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society has been to change the entire culture of America by making the legal system more in line with conservative Christian right ideology. Unlike the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation didn’t just promote pro-business conservative ideas, they also promoted a right wing cultural ideology that has resulted in the current rise of Christian Nationalism.

When the Heritage Foundation was formed in 1973, Richard Nixon was in the process of appointing four Supreme Court justices, which moved the court to the right. Not long after Nixon’s presidency, there were two court cases that began the inexorable march towards oligarchic rule. In the 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo case, the court opened the floodgates for the first time allowing unlimited political expenditures, stating that “limits contravene the First Amendment provision on freedom of speech because a restriction on spending for political communication necessarily reduces the quantity of expression”. Then two years later in First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, the courts ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to make contributions to ballot initiatives. After these two rulings by a decidedly conservative court, it was only a matter of time before another, arguably corrupt, Supreme Court would exacerbate the power of the wealthy to control our politics. In 2010, the ruling in Citizens United enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. Since then. the role of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups has ballooned, resulting in a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the corrupt Gilded Age of the late 19th century. This was the reason that Elon Musk, the richest man in the history of the world, was allowed to spend two hundred and sixty million dollars to get Donald Trump elected and to then help him destroy the American system of government.

The political dismantling of the democratic system

After Nixon’s treasonous machinations, the next Republican to win the presidency was Ronald Reagan. Because Nixon was never charged with treason, Reagan correctly assumed that he could also commit treason and get away with it. In November 1979, during the Jimmy Carter presidency, the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and 66 Americans in the embassy were taken hostage by the new Islamic government, led by both President Bani-Sadr and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The hostages were held for almost a year by the time President Carter had reached a deal with Bani-Sadr to have them released. The story had been the top news event for months and the American presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was imminent. Without the knowledge of President Carter, Reagan immitated Nixon’s treasonous deeds and worked out a separate deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Reagan promised Khomeini that he would give Iran spare parts that they needed for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran if Khomeini would scuttle Carter’s deal so that he would win the election. The hostages were held for an additional four months, then released within hours after Reagan’s inauguration on January 20th 1980. Those two back-to-back acts of treason by Nixon and Reagan should have been exposed and punished, but they weren’t. The operatives in the Republican party were learning that they could do whatever it took to win elections without fear of reprisal, including committing acts of treason against the United States. Their lust for power was boundless and they began to use whatever methods they could think of to obtain and then retain that power.

The ideas promoted by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute were the basis for Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy. His administration began the undoing of the American middle class that had been the foundation of the country’s economic success since its emergence from the Great Depression. At the same time, Reagan began to make Americans distrust their own government. He intentionally belittled those who believed in the virtue of government and disparaged the ways in which government helps average citizens to have a better life by proclaiming: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. He also constantly repeated his mantra that “Government is the problem.” That was the beginning of the Republican Party’s drive to destroy what they later referred to as the “administrative state”. In reality, what they wanted to destroy was government’s ability to help the average citizen to survive with dignity within a middle class environment and to climb up the ladder of success.

Immediately after assuming office, Reagan reduced the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans from 70% to 50% and then to 28%, creating large deficits and forcing cuts to the social safety net that Franklin Roosevelt had created. The deficit went from 74 billion when Reagan came into office to 221 billion after he left office. While, at the same time, he began the process that Trump is expanding to starve government agencies that help citizens. Reagan also began taxing social security benefits, which was income that retirees relied on to remain in the middle class after they stopped working. These Heritage Foundation inspired programs had the effect of not only helping the wealthiest Americans accumulate even more wealth , but of reducing the percentage of those in the middle class from 61% in the 1970s to less than 50% today, and increasing the number of citizens in the lower income class from 25% to 29%. They also stifled the ability of many middle class citizens to do the things they wanted to do in their retirement years. While at the same time, the percentage of wealthy citizens and the amount of their wealth has exponentially increased, creating an enormous gap between the wealth of the oligarchs in the Trump administration and the average citizen.

Since Reagan’s presidency, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society have been able to create and then control much of the political narrative. As a result of the influence the John Birch Society has had on the Republican party, a good portion of that Republican narrative is based on false conspiracy theories, rather than truths. Because many of their adherents are extremely wealthy, these right wing think tanks have not only been able to create the false narratives, but also to communicate those narratives to the general population. Their gradual takeover of the majority of the country’s media outlets by conservative or right wing corporations has contributed to the election of Donald Trump and the cult of Trumpism.

A perfect example of this distorted sense of reality that has become part of the national consciousness is the truth behind the huge national debt. Since Reagan, the Republican party has been responsible for creating almost all of it by giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations. Once a Democrat is in office, the Republicans scream that the country is leaving a huge debt to be paid by our children and grandchildren, so they insist that government programs need to be downsized or eliminated to reduce the debt that they had created.

After Reagan, President George HW Bush used corruption and deceit to stay in power. As Reagan’s Vice President, he had been involved with the Iran/Contra scandal. The criminal investigation into it came to a head when independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenad him after having obtained convictions for his co-conspirators: Weinberger, Ollie North and others. Rather than testify and admit his guilt, Bush used his presidential prerogative to pardon all of the convicted men in order to kill the investigation.

Since the Reagan Administration, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society have not only become more and more powerful, but they have also become more and more aggressive in their campaign to dismantle democratic institutions and to promote a Christian authoritarian state. Republican administrations have relied on them to recommend the most right wing conservative judges in the country for them to appoint. But as with the Republican party, many of these judges are extremely corrupt. Their wealth, corruption and collusion with America’s richest citizens has informed their egregious disregard for the constitution and the democratic system, resulting in decisions such as the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and the one that gave Donald Trump immunity from prosecution for his illegal acts.

The fourth Republican to take the presidency corruptly did so with the help of the Supreme Court. Five Supreme Court judges led by Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas invalidated the results of the election in 2000 and handed the presidency to George W. Bush rather than Al Gore. The electoral college plurality relied on the outcome of a vote recount in Florida, but when George W. Bush was slightly ahead of Al Gore in the recount, the five conservative judges on the court decreed that the recount should be discontinued. The corruption on the court was blatant. At the time that Scalia wrote the decision, his son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush. That should have been cause for him to recuse himself, but he didn’t. Also, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife was working with the Bush transition team, but he did not recuse himself either.

Although the judges gave the presidency to George W. Bush, Al Gore actually won the election, both nationally by 543,895 votes and in Florida as well. The vote in Florida would not have even been close if George Bush’s brother Jeb, who was the governor at the time, had not purged 57,000 black voters from the rolls prior to the election. Yet, even with those voters purged, a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today recounted the vote in Florida and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000. In what was one of many actions by conservatives in America to silence the will of the majority, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated the results and gave the presidency to a man who then proceeded to allow Americans to torture prisoners, ignore constitutional guarantees and invade Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning two wars that lasted over two decades and killed millions of people. George W. Bush also created the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is now being used by Trump to illegally arrest and deport immigrants without due process, a constitutional guarantee that the Trump administration is ignoring.

Since the United States Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush to the presidency, the Republican party and the Heritage Foundation have been on a mission to destroy what’s left of our democracy. They are aware that the majority of Americans do not support their ideas and instead believe in a liberal democracy, so they have used the wealth of their many rich supporters to control most of the information provided to American citizens. Besides promoting unfounded and false conspiracy theories on a daily basis, right wing entertainment television outlets such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, One America News and Newsmax, plus dozens of right wing podcasts obfuscate or use disinformation, much of which is created in Russia and then fed to the right wing outlets to fool the public into thinking truths are lies and lies are truths.

The downsizing and outright destruction of many of the governmental policies and agencies so that they can be replaced by Trump sycophants and white Christian Nationalists who support Evangelical Christian dogma is the goal of ‘Project 2025’. Initially, Trump used Elon Musk to begin dismantling the government, then when the richest man in the world was forced to step down to spend more time with his struggling EV, space exploration and AI companies, Trump appointed Russell Vought, the principal author of ‘Project 2025’, to continue the dismantling of government agencies and programs.

The Republican Party has also been promoting an anti-democracy political agenda by working with Republican state legislators to disenfranchise as many non-white American voters as they possibly can through Gerrymandering and various other voter suppression gimmicks. These efforts have been ongoing for decades, even before the Supreme Court stole the election of 2000. Although the Democratic party has also been guilty of Gerrymandering in some states that they control, the vast majority of these efforts have been by Republican controlled state legislatures.

This is all part of the fifty-year plan to turn the United States into a religious autocratic state with a legal system that is similar to the religiously inspired system of Sharia Law. Sharia Law is used to suppress dissent in places like Iran, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is currently being implemented by the Trump administration, is a 900 page document describing how to create a similar type of government in America. The Christian version has added a white supremacist element that is not in the Muslim version. Both use religion as a basis for their fascist governments controlled by dictators, and both are anti women’s rights and against rights for LGBTQ citizens.

Vladimir Putin recognized the opportunity created by the division and racism in America and has made every effort to exacerbate it. His goal is to end the era of American dominance in the world and he had a plan to do that from within the United States. That plan involved Donald Trump. He wanted to use Donald Trump to help him create a ‘multipolar world’ that he could control and in which the oligarchs around the world, including him, could profit.

Putin’s plan has been to create “spheres of influence” with Russia controlling Europe and his ideological partner Xi Jinping controlling Asia. He was confident that the obsequious Donald Trump would do anything he asked, so he got him elected to make the United States the third ‘sphere of influence’. Putin borrowed the concept from colonial era agreements between England, France, Spain and other European countries. As they were colonizing countries around the world, they formed an agreement to divide the world into ‘sphere’s of influence’, with each country in charge of those areas of the world in which they had colonies. They had agreed not to interfere with the other colonial powers in ‘their areas’. Putin’s plan is to have Trump focus on controlling Greenland and the countries in North, Central and South America and not to interfere with either Russia or China as they expanded their empires in Europe and Asia.

Putin had been in the KGB when the Soviet spy agency flew Donald Trump to Moscow on an all-expense paid trip on the fourth of July in 1987. During Trump’s visit, the KGB developed Kompromat on him and convinced him to become a Russian asset, and then to run for the office of president of the United States. Trump had done what his KGB handlers had requested by running in the 1988 presidential election. It was unsuccessful, but he tried again in 2000, running as the presidential candidate for Ross Perot’s Reform Party.

Putin recognized the opportunity to insert false conspiracies into America’s political conversation nearly two decades earlier. It was obvious that people around the world were becoming addicted to their phones. Both Vladimir and Xi Jinping knew that they could use this addiction to mold supple minds, which belonged to the kind of people that ended up voting for Donald Trump. When Trump announced his candidacy , Putin directed a small army of internet trolls and hackers to influence the election of 2016, primarily through the social media platforms that Americans had become addicted to, such as Facebook and Twitter. By November 2016, Putin had created legions of servile Republican judges, politicans and right-wing media outlets in America that accomplished an unimaginable feat; electing a Russian asset. Hearing the news in 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president, Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs in Moscow threw wild parties. Now they knew the world was theirs.

In addition to the proliferation of outlets that masquerade as news media and regularly regurgitate Russian talking points and conspiracy theories, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and every major news outlet is now owned by either a large corporation whose board is overwhelmingly Republican, or by individual oligarchs who supported Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. They all ‘sanewashed’ his speeches and would not allow their organizations to write or say anything negative about him. Billionaires Jeff Bezos, who had purchased the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the L.A. Times both stopped their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris. The billionaire owners of most of the major newspapers and television stations that had previous reputations for balanced journalism did not allow their stations or editorial boards to say or do anything that would upset the narcissistic Donald Trump. Twitter, which had been purchased by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, created algorithms that promoted Trump and denigrated Harris to the millions of voters who used the platform. This barrage of misinformation, disinformation, Russian propaganda, conspiracy theories and outright lies is the reason that the American people either voted for a convicted felon, or were convinced not to vote at all in 2024.

Throughout the campaign, the only media outlets that were actually reporting the unfiltered truth and informing the voters about the real issues, were independent outlets like Meidas Touch, podcasts like those of David Pakman and the Hartmann Report, or non-profits like National Public Radio. The reason Trump wants to shut down NPR is that it reports the truth. When he won the 2024 election it was with the help of both Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk.

The U.S. government today is the result of the right’s half-century campaign to destroy American democracy and replace it with a religious dictatorship run by oligarchs who use the government for their own profit motives. The psychologically flawed Russian asset that has been elected president of the United States is really just a convenient tool for the Heritage Foundation authors of Project 2025. They are now witnessing the results of their campaign and the rest of the world is horrified at what the U.S. has become.

What can we do now?

The only way that Trump will not succeed in the long run is if citizens take to the streets and constantly protest until his regime falls apart.

If elections are held again, it is imperative that we do not allow the Chuck Schumers and Clintons of the Democratic party to help their rich lobbyists stop us from making an America like the one that FDR had begun to create. We need leaders like Bernie Sanders, David Hogg and A.O.C. to make America an example of what can be accomplished when average people create a truly free and inclusive country. The racists and oligarchs on the right know that we are the majority. It’s time that we act like it.