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Trump is at this very moment attempting to take the first steps in an authoritarian takeover of the government. By forcing Jeff Sessions to resign and placing Matt Whitaker over the Mueller investigation, Trump is attempting to end the independence of the Mueller investigation, by using Whitaker either to shut the investigation down or turn it into the latest stage of the cover-up of his crimes. The Mueller investigation has been the only authoritative governmental process seriously attempting to determine the nature of any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the dictatorial government of Vladimir Putin to secure victory for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Mueller investigation also has been the only independent and authoritative inquiry into the extended pattern of obstruction of justice committed by Trump himself and his various agents to undermine the revelation of any conspiracy with Putin.

 

In the course of tracking down, recording, and assessing all the evidence and witnesses (relating to Putin’s assault on the American electoral process in 2016, the accusations of the Trump campaign’s conspiracy with Putin’s intervention in our elections, and the accusations of Trump’s own obstruction of justice—much of it in plain sight—to keep the American people from having information on these accusations), the Mueller investigation has also inevitably uncovered evidence of the long, varied process of Trump’s corrupt business practices and the long chain of degradation and abuse of women that has constituted Trump’s obscene personal life. American and international journalists have documented a series of threats by Trump as President to shut down or undermine this investigation in one way or another, which, however, after the firing of James Comey as head of the FBI, Trump has been blocked from carrying out, mainly by the urgings of close advisers and supporters that to act against Mueller before the November 2018 elections would risk a political crisis that could severely damage the electoral prospect’s of Trump’s Republican Party, leaving him more vulnerable, not less, to the attacks of his opponents.

 

Now, with these elections past, Trump is moving swiftly to act on his threats. Within hours of the Democrats’ winning a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, while Trump’s Republican Party increased its majority in the U.S. Senate, Trump has concluded that he can and must assert increasingly dictatorial executive power to protect himself against the mountain of evidence collected by the Mueller investigation concerning his and his associates’ various forms of legal, financial, political, and personal misconduct—thus, the firing of Sessions and the appointment of Whitaker.

 

But more than this, Trump, his closest allies, and millions of his racist supporters have believed or have come to believe as an article of faith that Trump’s ability to carry out his draconian policies against immigrants and to succeed in a series of racist and sexist attacks on civil rights and women’s rights gained by the mass movements of past generations—that Trump’s ability to keep his real promise to make America white again and male-dominated again—depends on his being able to assert extra-constitutional executive authority to bypass congressional scrutiny and legal delays and to subordinate both the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government to Trump’s own reactionary, single-minded will.

 

With the confirmation of the widely-hated and extremist Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in September, Trump has reason to believe that he has gained a compliant court majority to give a twisted stamp of constitutional approval to any abuse of power Trump would commit, as long as he presents some fig leaf of a pretext of some sort of “national emergency.”

 

With the increased Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, Trump has gained almost certain protection against any threat of removal from office through the carrying out of the constitution’s impeachment procedure by the two houses of Congress. In moving directly against Mueller, Trump is showing his and his supporters’ determination to suppress the expressed and implied checks and balances of American constitutional law and tradition in a way no President has ever done before, and for purposes both anti-democratic and cruel in ways never seen before in our nation’s history.

 

These steps already taken by Trump, and the steps clearly implied in them, are typical of the historical process by which fascist regimes have been and are now being formed around the world, in past history and in our present moment. As of this moment, without the mass-democratic check of the direct intervention of the American people themselves, Trump has gotten away with taking the dangerous steps he has already carried out and can realistically look forward to getting away with the next set of steps even more dangerous and deadly to democracy.

 

The threat of Trump shutting down the Mueller investigation and establishing an authoritarian regime has been a ticking time bomb as long as Trump has remained president. This is no longer a danger somewhere in the future—it is happening now. The longer Trump remains President, the more brutal attacks on immigrants, the more racist, misogynist attacks by his government and by his emboldened supporters.

 

By the time the Democrats assume their majority control in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2019, it is entirely likely that Trump will have completed the most decisive measures he needs in order to consolidate a sort of pseudo-constitutional despotism, with the uncritical, obsequious support of his Republican Senate majority and the frenzied, mindless, wild-eyed enthusiasm of his racist mobs. The Democratic House coming into session in January 2019 will have no capacity to pass any legislation unless Trump and his fawning Republican acolytes want it. The Democrats’ only actual power—if they find the audacity to use it—will be the House majority’s ability to hold hearings in the various committees that can attempt to present to the American people the truths about the odiousness of Trump’s past and present that Trump is now attempting to prevent the Mueller investigation from revealing to the eyes of America and the world. This power itself would be feeble, except for the fact that these hearings would take place in the context of a mass movement against Trump, the Resistance, tens of millions of rank-and-file progressive Americans who have been, since Trump’s inauguration, determined somehow to save their country from Trump’s demagogy and tyranny.

 

So far, however, the Democratic Party politicians who have been accepted as the main de facto national leadership of this potentially powerful mass movement, have been more afraid of the movement’s power than they have been of Trump’s attacks on democracy. The Resistance, the mass-democratic movement of the American people against Trump, has the objective power to stop Trump’s coup-in-progress.

 

But to do this, the Resistance will have to force the Democrats to overcome their chronic passivity and timidity, and at the very least, to hold the public hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives that can provide the precious truth of the exposés the movement will need in order to keep itself oriented and moralized in an ongoing, relentless, and courageous campaign to stop Trump’s attacks on democracy and to force him and his demagogic gang out of power and out of American history once and for all.

 

The Democratic Party politicians have conducted themselves utterly as a timid talk-shop, pledged not only against any real attempt to defeat Trump, but even committed to a cowardly, superstitious policy to avoid saying his name. These cringing habits must be rejected by the Resistance in favor of the independent consciousness and bold action of the mass movements of the past in which millions of Americans, committed to the principles of democracy and equality, have defeated “too-powerful” enemies, for a certain period, taking history away from the cringing, routinist, cowardly politicians, and changing American and world history for the better.

 

This was the character of the original movement that built the nation through the defeat of the British empire. This was the character of the Abolitionist movement that forced the country to abolish slavery and emblazon the principles of human rights and racial equality on its constitutional banner. This was the character of the women’s movement that would not desist from whatever action was necessary until women had achieved the equality of the right to vote and declared the commitment to achieve full social, economic, and political equality between women and men. This was the character of the labor movement that built the CIO and forced workers’ rights on a constitution that originally had no place for them. This was the character of the civil rights movement that abolished Jim Crow segregation and forced a reluctant government to adopt civil rights and voting rights legislation. And this was the character to the anti-war movement which forced the government to end its most shameful and futile war.

 

Inspired by the independent courage and consciousness of those movements that have characterized all the greatest moments in American history, the new movement against Donald Trump can defeat his and his supporters’ efforts to empower all the ugliest and most inhuman elements of our national legacy, and having defeated Trump, can place the country securely on a road to democratic freedom, equal rights, and human progress.

 

Our greatest danger is allowing ourselves to be lulled to sleep with the false comfort of the Democrats winning the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and the fantasy that “checks and balances” have somehow been automatically restored without a fight. Within hours of the election, Trump has already punctured that particular utopian balloon. Trump has been ruling by decree throughout his entire presidency—one of the hallmarks of the strong-man, proto-fascist governments around the world that Trump so much admires. The politicians who have claimed to be opposed to Trump, for their part, have mainly limited their contribution to watching him issue his decrees while they utter a few carefully-chosen, not-very-unkind words about how “concerning” Trump’s behavior is. If the last two years should have taught us anything, it is that we cannot rely on the politicians to save us.

 

We must rely on our own collective power, on ourselves and each other.

 

Today, we are trapped between politicians who have embraced and supported Trump’s ugly, demagogic vision of America on the one hand, and on the other hand, politicians who offer opposition only in words, who run from the shadow of their own criticisms, who—even when they pretend to stand up to Trump—only cringe before him, and the worst of whom openly declare their yearning for Trump to “like me” and their desperate desire to “align ourselves” with Trump.

 

Trump must be defeated, not “aligned with.” The new movement can do just that, if it bases itself on its own outrage and idealism, and rejects the timidity of the “business-as-usual” misleaders. The new movement is, little by little, creating a new generation of leaders who are prepared to be their own heroes. These new leaders, young in body or spirit, have been struggling for a way to save their country, their communities, their friends, their families, from an impending catastrophe. That catastrophe is now rushing down on us. But the new movement can defeat it, if it can only find the leadership—brave, self-sacrificing, determined and idealistic enough to do the job.

 

We have idealistic and heroic forebears who defeated the supposedly relentless and invulnerable powers of slavery and war. We can defeat the oafish power of Donald Trump, with all his arrogance, if we can only unite on the basis of our own capacity for critical thinking and courageous action. To do this, we will have to reject the timid counsels of the “business-as-usual” false prophets.

 

BAMN is fighting to build the kind of idealistic and bold leadership that is needed. We call on everyone in the new movement who is fighting to win to join together with BAMN, to defeat the deadly danger that is before us. The time is now—we have to start fighting to win.

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)

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