Tag Archives: Elaine Tyler May

Trump Presidency — It’s Only Going to Get Worse

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I have been reading four books dealing with authoritarianism, a doctrine the Donald Trump, among others, is trying to use to overturn American democracy. The books are:

Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum, who has a Pulitzer Prize to her credit.

How to stand up to a dictator by Maria Ressa, who has a Nobel Prize.

Fortress America-How we embraced fear and abandoned democracy by Elaine Tyler May.

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

I have only finished Autocracy, Inc., which is subtitled The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It describes Donald Trump and those like him around the world with frightful clarity:

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us.

To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. [Autocracy, Inc. at 10]

This should look familiar. It is Donald Trump’s agenda to the letter. And, to the dismay of many Americans, it is the goal of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an outrage that Trump supports. For its part, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov summarized it this way in 2022:

This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order …. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. [Autocracy, Inc. at 14]

Trump, of course, has not intellectual grasp of any principles related to any of this. His understanding of the world centers around his image and his money. They form the basis for his approach to almost everything.

***

My original plan had been to accumulate news stories about the horrors of the Trump presidency and lay them out in bullet format, but I simply could not keep up with the daily dose of outrages.

But just when you think you’re done, sometimes something good happens. Meidastouch that publishes extensively on substack.com has more resources than I do and has done the job for me. It has published in two sections thus far, appropriately titled: 500 Worst Things Trump Did in 2025 It is authored by Ron Filipkowski, Editor-in-Chief of MeidasTouch Network:

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/500-worst-things-trump-did-in-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3078900&post_id=182695550&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=34np5m&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

This is a comprehensive list documenting 500 of the worst things Trump and his admin did just this year. The list is in chronological order beginning on January 1, 2025, to the end of the year. This is not merely a list of the things Trump did personally – it is an accounting of the worst things his administration has done this year.

Part Two of the series, covering the worst things Trump’s administration did between late February and early April, may be read here:

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/500-worst-things-trump-did-in-2025-4d7?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3078900&post_id=182764313&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=34np5m&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

His related column, the ‘25 Worst Villains of the Trump Admin’, can be read here: https://www.meidasplus.com/p/25-worst-villains-of-the-trump-admin?r=9qw74

If you want to continue reading Filipkowski’s pieces, and you should, simply go to substack.com and sign up. It’s free, although there are paid subscriptions with benefits available. Parts 3 and 4 of the series have been published.

***

It is now 2026. If democracy in America and around the world is going to be saved, this is the year in which it must happen. We can only save ourselves. No one is coming to our rescue. The Republican Party, likely with the concurrence of the Supreme Court, is doing everything it can to rearrange the voting districts to make it impossible for Democrats to regain control of the Congress. This effort must be defeated or we are lost. The last chance to resist is NOW!

Donald Trump – America’s Mussolini

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I have finished reading a series of books that purport to explain what has been happening in the politics of the United States and the larger world. The books are:

Age of Revolutions: Progress and backlash from 1600 to the present (2024) by Fareed Zakaria

Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy (2020) by Elaine Tyler May

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (2024) by Anne Applebaum

And, finally, the most recent is one I have just begun: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2021) by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The book was published before Trump fully manifested as the malignant fascist that he has become, but it was after he had been elected the first time and gave his infamous “American Carnage” inaugural speech in 2017 that prompted former Republican President George W. Bush to exclaim: “That’s some weird sh*t.”

The compelling opening of Strongmen lies in the description of one “strongman” in particular, perhaps the model for those that would follow: Benito Mussolini. Ben-Ghiat writes:

The disaffection with conventional politics and politicians after a ruinous war created yearnings for a new kind of leader. The cults that rose up around Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1920s answered anxieties about the decline of male status, the waning of traditional religious authority, and the loss of moral clarity…. Out of the crucible of these years came the cults of victimhood that turned emotions like resentment and humiliation into positive elements of party platforms…. Mussolini prepared the script used by today’s authoritarians that casts the leader as a victim of his domestic enemies and of an international system that has cheated his country.

That is Trump’s and the Republican Party’s 2025 legislative and other agendas in a nutshell.

Aside from the parallels between Trump’s raison d’etre and Mussolini, one other thing caught my eye in the early going in Strongmen:

Two-thirds of dictators were removed by coups between 1950 and 2000.

Not all, of course; several remained in power for decades. Still, I was reminded of the line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  While the line generally is taken to refer to the burdens of leadership, I have also seen it as a reference to the risks that the leader faces from those who would take his power by force. In that sense, it suggests the leader had best be a light sleeper if he wants to survive.

In Trump’s case, however, I doubt that he is restless out of concern for his health. The fears and anxieties that must ravage his mind every night likely relate more to his insecurities and lust for more money and power.

That aside, the parallels between Mussolini’s messaging and Trump’s are unmistakable. They lend compelling weight to the proposition that Trump is a fascist with a fascist message. Those who seek ways to resist Trump and separate his cultish followers from him might do well to study Mussolini’s rise to power and eventual downfall.