Robin Messing

It is a bit of an understatement to say that Donald Trump has not been known for creating peace and harmony within the United States. Ronald Reagan has gone down in history as The Great Communicator. It is a safe bet that Trump will not be known as The Great Unifier. Or so most people thought, until Trump was shot at his rally. Traumatic events can change people, and after that terrible event we were told by some of Trump's allies that Trump was different now. He was more contemplative, serene--even spiritual. They told us that we would see this dramatic change in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. And indeed we did see Trump's call for unity to heal the nation within the first two minutes of his speech. There were three passages in particular that I will cite, with their time stamps below.

The Republicans are chomping at the bit to implement Project 2025 if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election. I had previously written that Project 2025 dovetails into Trump's plan to seek revenge against his enemies. I am not going to go into detail here about Project 2025's radical agenda, but I will point you to this video by Beau of the Fifth Column as a starting point to learn more. Beau is one of the most astute political commentators I know of, and it's a damn shame he doesn't have a show on one of the major networks. (Here is Beau's main Youtube channel.)

Project 2025 is about as popular among people who have more than a passing knowledge about it as root canals or cockroaches. Donald Trump is smart enough to know it is wildly unpopular, so he is doing his best to distance himself from it.

There are at least three lines of attack against Donald Trump that have flown under the radar that could devastate him during the campaign.

1. Trump can be easily blackmailed, and our enemies will use that against our national interests.
2. We are far more likely to have an intelligence failure because we will be flying blind in a dangerous world. Expect a 9/11 type disaster or bigger under Trump.
3. Trump has a long history of crying "RIGGED" when things don't go his way. Of course, he claims the 2020 election and his New York trial were rigged against him. And he is prepping his followers to believe the 2024 election will be rigged against him. But these incidents are part of a historical pattern that most people don't know about. (He has even claimed that the FBI’s crime statistics have been rigged because they show crime has been going down recently, and that does not fit his narrative of America becoming a crime infested hellhole under President Biden.)

You can learn a lot about a person by seeing how he talks about his former employees and how his former employees talk about him. I wrote a post back in June 2020 to examine whether Trump had kept his promise to hire only the best people--and I wanted used his own words as a measure to determine whether Trump had achieved his goal. Now it is time to write about what his former employees have to say about him. What they say about him could shed further light on whether Trump really wants to be a vengeful dictator or not.

Let's start with Trump's former National Security Advisor, John Bolton.

Trump is unfit to be President for many reasons. For the good of the country, Republicans must demand he end his presidential campaign immediately and permanently. Trump's become a joke boasting he can end the Ukraine war in 24 hours immediately after losing a sexual abuse and…

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) May 11, 2023

Dear President Biden,

Please give Michael Cohen a full pardon. I ask you this because he has more than earned it. I base this claim on three reasons.
First, he has admitted the depths of his depravity after what I am sure was much painful soul searching. He did not hold back in blaming himself for his crimes in service to Donald Trump. This is from page 105 of “Disloyal: A Memoir”

But here’s the ugly truth—a motive I shared with deep and abiding regret and shame, and one only unearthed after much soul searching and reflection as I painted the walls in prison and stared at the ceiling from my bunk. The real real truth about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world. I know it sounds crazy, but look at what Trump is doing now: running the world, into the ground, but still, he literally rules. Underneath all the layers of delusion and wishful thinking and willful ignorance and stupidity, I was like Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings", lusting after the power that would come from possessing the White House—'my precious’—and I was more than willing to lie, cheat, and bully to win.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series of articles, I predicted that Donald Trump would be an existential threat to our democracy--and I made that prediction roughly two weeks before the 2016 election.

The previous articles in this series have set the stage for my new prediction: If Trump is elected in 2024, we will see at least one—and very possibly more—Tiananmen Square-style massacres on U.S. soil.

I argued in my last column that Project 2025 will enable Donald Trump to wield great power. But Trump is running on two agendas that could expand his power exponentially. And whether intended or not, minorities will suffer the most as Trump solidifies his dictatorship.

Trump's two dangerous agendas involve a declaration of war against Mexican drug cartels to counter the fentanyl epidemic and a program that will deport suspected members of drug cartels without due process and that will require building massive detention camps to hold undocumented immigrants for deportation.

The takeaway from my last column is simple, but horrific: Donald Trump wants to become a dictator for the purpose of revenge. But how will do this? How will he expand the already awesome power of the presidency? This story by the Washington Post provides part of the answer.

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

In my previous article I discussed how concentrating too much power in the hands of ANY one person could lead to disaster--especially if that person is only advised by "yes" men and women. A president who only seeks out the opinions of others who tell him what they think he wants to hear will be basing his assumptions on faulty or incomplete information, and stumbling around with blind spots never ends well.

However, if the imperial president with nearly unchecked power happens to be Donald Trump or someone like Trump, the danger becomes exponentially greater. Trump plans to implement an extreme authoritarian agenda that will transform America into a police state. The Los Angeles Times reports:

In speeches, interviews and campaign videos, Trump has promised to:

• Use the military to participate in the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history;
• Order the National Guard into cities with high crime rates, whether local officials want it or not;
• Prosecute Californians who protect minors coming to the state for gender-affirming care;
• Impose a 10% tariff on almost all foreign goods, increasing prices for consumers;
• Appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” his political opponents, beginning with Biden;
• Purge the federal civil service of anyone who questions his views.
  

Donald Trump and his allies plan to greatly strengthen the power of the president should Republicans win the presidency in 2024. If they get their way, many of the checks and balances that have constrained Trump's most illegal and dangerous policies will be removed in a second Trump Administration. This is from an extremely important New York Times article by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman. I urge you to read it all.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.