‘I Will Lose My Job for Speaking Out About the Mayhem a Donald Trump Us Presidential Election Victory Will Cause – But I Have To’

I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. If you’re reading this after Donald Trump has won the election, it no longer matters that I will lose my job for speaking out.

It is one thing to have some fuzzy understanding that “Trump is a fascist”. It is another to know what this means in real and practical terms.

Unfortunately for us both, I possess the gift of foresight. Not as a curse from the Gods, but as someone who has both studied fascism, and will be one of its first targets.

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Consolidation of Power

Trump intends to consolidate power quickly. This will look far more like Hitler’s first hundred days than Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban’s.

He will lead with perhaps a hundred or more pre-prepared executive orders written by the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, that include re-implementing Schedule F to fill the government with sycophantic true believers.

At the same time, he intends to remove any military officers suspected of being “woke”. In effect, he plans to make sure that no one within the government or military will say no to his follow-on orders.

Trump intends to use the military, DOJ, and FBI to eliminate opposition. This includes rounding up prominent Democrats, and using the military to put down the protests that will inevitably erupt after his draconian executive orders.

He will invoke the Insurrection Act to do both. The suppression of dissent is likely to be brutal: Trump has declared them evil enemies of the people, and he admires how China handled Tiananmen Square.

Those protesters who aren’t killed will be among the first sent to the military-run prison camps he intends to establish. Many of those taken prisoner will disappear into black holes run by DHS (like what happened with the Portland protests under Trump).

He will neutralise the power of the courts using the powers they gave him. The Roberts Court accepted the argument that Trump could have SEAL Team 6 execute his political enemies as long as it constitutes an “Official Act”.

Putting down an “insurrection” under the Insurrection Act is official, and any judge who sides with those opposing the government’s actions is clearly siding with the insurrectionists.

It also means that Trump will be free to intimidate courts, elected officials, billionaires, and anyone else as much as he wants.

His goal won’t be to lock everyone up, but to get compliance or silence. He comes from a New York mob background, so a lot of the intimidation will be of the “Nice family. It’d be a shame if something happened to them”, variety.

Given that protesters and Democratic leaders will be arrested (or shot), this will be a sufficient threat for the vast majority of people to quietly do as they’re told. Much like in Germany in 1933, I expect functional and effective opposition to Trump to collapse very quickly.

Very few people will be willing to risk everything to defy America’s first Mad King since George III. We now see organisations everywhere, run by the most powerful rich people in the world, already working to obey in advance. 

However, these first hundred days are only the beginning of our descent into madness and death. Unlike the first Trump administration, there will be no sober adults left in the room to temper his worst instincts; only fanatics and ideologues who don’t care about the law, the constitution, or even crimes against humanity.

To them, all of it is right and necessary to make America great again. What extends in front of the US for the rest of its foreseeable existence is a tale of oppression, terror, misery, and genocide.

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The Economy

Trump’s (and Project 2025’s) economic plans can be summarised as implementing tariffs, handing tax cuts to the rich, and slashing spending on everyone else.

But, because of his plans for deporting more than 20 million people, his other non-economic policies will have outsize effects that absolutely devastate the middle class and the poor.

First: the tariffs. The independent Tax Foundation found that Trump’s proposed tariffs would reduce US GDP by 0.8%, which is economically significant.

It would effectively raise costs the most for people who can least afford it: ie if poor people pay more for food and toilet paper, they pay a much larger portion of their income on such items.

Then there are the mass deportations, which would set off an economic recession on a par with the Great Recession of 2007-2008.

A recent study which looked at various scenarios showed a GDP reduction of 7.5% below the baseline if 8.3 million people are deported (which is only a fraction of the 20 million JD Vance recently promised at a rally). It would also result in a net loss of 6.7 million jobs, which translates to about an 8.2% unemployment rate.

The economic effects would be far-reaching, increasing the cost of everything as childcare, hospitality, construction, and agricultural workers disappear. Combined with Trump tariffs, the US would experience rising costs of everything while average incomes fell.

At the same time, these programmes of mass deportation would cost $88 billion per year at a time when deficits are already high, and Trump tax cuts reduce government revenue.

Speaking of the Trump tax cuts for the rich, they would increase the deficit by 3 trillion USD, while providing an economic boost (that goes to the wealthy) that is completely negated by his tariffs. It would be a tax hike on all but the richest 5% of Americans, and fall the hardest on the poorest 20%.

Combine this with soaring inflation, high unemployment, and slashing of social services, and the Trump economic plan is likely to create stagflation, poverty, starvation, disease, and homelessness.

Trump has also promised to revoke the independence of the Fed, meaning that reactions to economic shocks will be guided by ideologues rather than economic experts. Trump, and his cronies’ incompetence, will ensure massive shocks.

This includes his plans to put Elon Musk in charge of slashing $2 trillion from US budgets. Given that most of the 6.75 trillion dollar federal budget goes to defence, servicing the debt, and entitlements like social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, this means massive cuts to incomes of people who are least able to take care of themselves (the poor, the elderly, and US enlisted troops who don’t get to have a “side hustle”), leading to poverty, homelessness, and disease. This sudden drop in federal spending would further cripple an already battered economy.

Trump’s isolationist foreign policy would also likely set off wars around the globe (discussed in detail in the section on foreign policy), particularly as China invades Taiwan, North Korea invades South Korea, and the US conducts military actions against its largest trading partner, Mexico.

This would set off massive disruptions to global trade, particularly in terms of durable consumer goods and semiconductors, raising costs and boosting inflation even as American incomes plummet. 

All of this together adds up to an economic situation worse than the Great Depression. But Trump has a plan for the homeless: deportation to government tent cities or a government run prison camp. Anyone who dares protest under such dire economic conditions will face a hail of bullets or joining other political prisoners in the camps.

The worst part is that Trump’s billionaire donors know this is exactly what will happen and have acknowledged it publicly.

Musk stated that cuts will affect people who rely on federal benefits for such trivial things as eating, having a place to live, and access to medical care. He states that his and Trump’s policies, “involve some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity”.

In the longer run, while the US economy collapses and the government divests of capability, Musk and other billionaires intend to buy them up for pennies on the dollar, the way Russian oligarchs acquired the remnants of Soviet industry, making themselves some of the richest men alive even while the average Russian saw a drastic decline in life expectancy.

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Mass Deportation

Trump has promised to invoke the Insurrection Act and the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport over 20 million people in the US.

This would include not only people who entered illegally as adults, but people brought to the US as children (Dreamers), people on TPS visas, and potentially people born in the US to individuals who were here illegally. As described above, this would have devastating economic impacts.

While Vance and Trump claim that this would alleviate housing shortages in the US, in reality, it would destroy the ability to create new housing along with people actually being able to afford a home in an inflationary, economically depressed environment.

Conducting mass deportation will be costly and manpower intensive. One estimate suggested that it would take more than 100,000-150,000 National Guard call-ups to meet the manpower requirements to deport a million people per year, plus another 50,000 to run the camps.

For this reason, many have suggested that the idea of mass deportations is a fantasy that Trump cannot conceivably carry out. However, Masha Gessen has correctly warned us to “believe the autocrat”.

He will attempt this given it is actually one of his more popular policy proposals, with 47% of Americans supporting putting detainees in military-run camps, according to a recent poll.

The reality is that finding people and detaining them will result in horrors. Deputising local law enforcement, the National Guard, and even potentially right-wing militias to detain people suspected of being here illegally will cause mass chaos.

Very few people carry their birth certificates with them, so the potential for US citizens to be detained, and even deported is extremely high. Indeed, up to 60% of the people deported by Franklin Roosevelt as part of “Mexican Repatriation” were American citizens.

The potential for bribery and abuse is also high. If local law enforcement, the National Guard, and militias start grabbing every Latino they can find and threatening them with the camps if they can’t produce a birth certificate on the spot (or worse, their parents’ birth certificates), desperate people will be willing to pay anything to avoid being sent to a country where they will likely die horribly and painfully.

Anything includes money, or with their bodies. In a system where rapid processing for deportation is the goal, few will get a fair hearing.

The camps themselves will be under pressure to be run as cheaply as possible given the size of the operation. This likely means inadequate medical care, supervision, and food. It also means having a lot of people unqualified to be prison guards acting as prison guards.

I’m old enough to remember what happened at Abu Ghraib and know that this will be much worse given the scope of the detentions, the dehumanisation of detainees, and the lack of resources.

The countries where the US intends to deport people to places that cannot support them. They do not have to allow the US to send them back (ie they can refuse to let aircraft into their airspace).

The US has two choices at that point: either continue holding these individuals in detention indefinitely, or a military forced entry operation (ie sending the 82nd airborne to secure an airport, or the Marines to take a port, from which detainees can be told “walk out of here or we shoot”). Both will be disastrous.

In the end, it seems likely that Trump will attempt mass deportation. He’s not going to listen to anyone who tells him “no”, and literally nothing he does will be illegal.

The logistics of mass deportation appear nearly impossible to people who approach it from the perspective of “how could it be done within the constraints of the existing system,” without realising that Trump, and his allies, intend to completely break the system and bend it towards their ends.

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Corruption and Incompetence

The goal of Project 2025 is not to produce an effective federal government workforce, it is to produce a government that is ideologically pure and serves the interests of Trump and the party.

Schedule F is meant to fill most middle management positions with loyalists. Heritage has already been making lists of those to be replaced and pulling in tens of thousands of resumés of ideologically pure people to replace them with.

These people do not have to be qualified for the jobs they are filling; they just must do them the way they are expected to.

The result will be a federal government where many people are hostile to the agencies, and the missions, they are supposed to support.

Everyone’s annual evaluations will be dependent on how vigorously they support the administration’s goals, no matter how unethical or immoral those goals are.

Any sign of reluctance to “just follow orders” will be career death. At the same time, the fastest way to advance your career within the federal government will be to accuse those around you of disloyalty.

Corruption will run rampant. Trump plans to sack and replace most inspector generals to ensure that his appointees are able to operate without much oversight, as well as root out people who might be hostile to his, and the Project 2025, agenda.

As a result, corporations will have unprecedented ability and access to manipulate federal processes, to the detriment of the public.

Pardons will be given freely to those who act in his name or advance the authoritarian agenda. Generals and their troops who brutalise or murder protesters: pardoned. People who act as vigilantes against “enemies of the state”: pardoned.People who commit financial or election crimes that are friends with the administration (eg Bannon, Stone): pardoned.

At the same time, Trump and top members of the administration will be free to exploit their positions for maximum financial benefit. Which is exactly how Putin and his inner circle have become some of the richest men on earth.

In short, many of the essential functions of the federal government will cease, and it will become a viper’s nest of unqualified corrupt cronies intent on enriching themselves and punishing “enemies of the people”.

This is an inevitable result, given how strongly the GOP plan resembles the Nazification of the German bureaucracy.

At the same time, media outlets that might report on this will be unwilling to. All it takes is a call to an owner, journalist, or an editor, reminding them what a nice family they have, and how it would be a shame it would be if something happened to them.

Which, SCOTUS has now deemed completely legal under the nebulous umbrella of “official acts”.

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Death of the Fourth Estate

Free media in the United States is doomed. There’s a reason why Viktor Orban was the keynote speaker at CPAC, and advised the GOP that the most important thing to do was, “get your own media”.

Most will obey in advance and refuse to publish anything negative about Trump or his administration, the way we have seen the LA Times and Washington Post do.

Under the Insurrection Act, and with judges, Generals, FBI agents, and the DOJ made compliant through the threat of firing or military incarceration, or simply true believers in the cause, Trump will have the ability to detain virtually any journalist (or their families) indefinitely.

The conditions of their incarceration are unlikely to be pleasant. The intended result is that no media outlet in the country will dare to publish anything that might reflect poorly on the administration or the GOP.

At the same time, there will be great rewards for media outlets that ape North Korean media and report that everything is perfect, and the dear leader is double-plus perfect. America has never been better now that all those nasty communists and deviants have been removed from society.

The economy is booming, the military invincible, harvests bountiful, and anyone who isn’t perfectly happy with things the way they are is probably a nasty communist deviant, whose employer should be promptly informed.

If this sounds preposterous, remember that the previous Trump administration rarely granted interviews to anyone but fawning hosts on Fox, and is currently threatening to shut down CBS for its interview with Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign have sued CBS for $10 billion dollars.

His cabinet meetings involved everyone starting with them telling Trump what a magnificent job he was doing as a leader.

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Employers and Employees

Every employer with a federal contract, or that receives federal money (eg Medicare, Medicaid, etc…) will be put under intense pressure to ensure that not only does it do as it is told (yes, we need more Zyklon B. Don’t ask questions), but that its employees remain silent and passive.

They will be responsible for scouring their employees’ social media and political associations and sacking them promptly if there is even a hint that they are not happy with the current government. If companies refuse or do not search out people unhappy with the regime zealously enough, they will stand to lose access to federal contracts and money.

If this sounds far-fetched: it is not. It already happened to me with my employer. They almost immediately caved and imposed rules on employees prohibiting them from anything resembling political speech.

This happened before Trump ever took power, and the intimidation happened via his proxies within the House Freedom Caucus.

This is a perfect example of obeying in advance, and how our institutions’ commitments to freedom and equality will last about as long as a snowman in Hell when Trump takes power again.

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Foreign Policy

Trump’s foreign policy, which he describes as “America First”, is based on appeasing dictators with nuclear weapons, abandoning allies at best, and bullying them at worst.

He is susceptible to flattery and manipulation and greatly admires dictators who brutalise their people and act free of constraint, such as Xi, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and even Hitler. This gives insight into how he plans to handle any opposition to his domestic policies.

His foreign policies will be no less disastrous. Trump intends to bomb or invade Mexico to go after cartels.

However, if Israel’s war in Gaza is any indication, such operations are likely to cause significant civilian casualties.

It will absolutely destroy relations with Mexico, which is our second-largest trading partner behind Canada (more on that later). This means no more cooperation on legal matters, and Mexico will likely stop cross-border traffic, further devastating a plunging US economy. 

Trump’s approach to what is happening in Gaza is likely to offer Benjamin Netanyahu a “deal”: finish them off quickly, we’ll support you as long as we get a crack at putting the Trump label on some of that sweet Gaza beachfront property (minus the people who used to live there, of course).

He will green-light anything and everything Netanyahu does, no matter how far it goes. He believes Muslims are sub-human rabid dogs, and that they should be put down quickly and permanently.

To him, solving the situation in Gaza revolves around giving permission to Netanyahu’s team to lean into genocide, hard and fast.

He will abandon Ukraine and attempt to coerce them into an unfavourable peace with Russia. It seems possible he will share intelligence with Russia to help them bring a speedy conclusion to the war. At the same time, he will threaten to leave NATO, and then do so.

This will destabilise Europe, and Russia will begin the process of re-equipping and re-arming in preparation for the future invasion of the Baltics.

Without the US, and with Nuclear Nonproliferation in tatters, states threatened by Russia (Finland, Baltics, Poland) will begin considering their own programmes.

Trump has also hinted that he will not defend Taiwan. China is an empire that has begun its inexorable decline as its population has begun to shrink after decades of the “one child” policy, industrialisation, urbanisation, and increased per capita GDP.

I concur with the assessments that this pushes them towards the invasion of Taiwan to secure the “glory” of Xi’s regime, while plundering it for its semiconductor wealth to prop up Chinese global hegemony. Without US support, Taiwan will fall quickly, and China will take control of 20% of the word’s semiconductor industry, and 50% of the world’s semiconductor foundry operations.

The invasion will cause short-term supply chain disruptions in electronics, and long-term shortages and price hikes as China retaliates for US sanctions and tariffs.

In short, the US abandonment of Taiwan will likely cause massive global disruption of electronics supply chains, and drive prices of consumer goods in the US even higher.

This would be on top of the price increases caused by tariffs, and on top of the declines in income caused by unemployment and tax increases on the poor and middle class.

At the same time, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has indicated that repealing the CHIPS Act (which puts federal money into building up an organic production capability of semiconductors in the US) will be a priority.

This ensures that the effects of an invasion of Taiwan cannot be mitigated by internal US capabilities, maximising the economic damage both within the US and globally.

The forecast gets worse from there. Trump has indicated that he would withdraw US troops from South Korea unless they agree to pay $10 billion dollars per year in protection. 

Doing this would require tearing up the current agreement for $1.4 billion per year for facilities and civilian worker support and rolling back security guarantees to them.

The first Trump administration severely strained US relations with South Korea with a demand of a 400% increase, and this demand multiplies it by a factor of seven.  It seems unlikely that South Korea would be willing, or able, to pay such a sum. 

This will happen even as North Korea has dropped its longstanding goal of peaceful reunification, even blowing up a monument dedicated to that goal. The DPRK is sending tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine to obtain actual combat experience and prepare for war.

During the first Trump administration traditionalist defence officials and officers pushed back on Trump’s plans to abandon our allies in South Korea. No such internal opposition will exist in a second. Thus, there is every indication that an isolationist second Trump administration will set off a devastating invasion of South Korea, further deepening the American (and global) economic pain, while dictators and despots are emboldened. 

US mass deportations will likely cause additional strife with other countries who refuse to take in people whom they cannot support.

Other countries will see refusing to take back millions of people as a matter of national survival: a massive influx of people will be hugely destabilising, and could lead to mass death, increased cartel power as they enslave thousands, or revolution.

The Trump administration, for its part, will lean into heavy-handed tactics to deport individuals, up to the point of establishing lodgments in other countries to deport them into or simply starving or brutalising them in the military detention camps to build internal pressures within their countries of origin.

Canada will be in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. They will do everything within their power to stoke culture war anger directed at the current PM Justin Trudeau. After he is out, Trump will offer a variety of carrots and sticks to Pierre Poilievre to give the US better trade deals and implement draconian social policies.

These demands are likely to include revoking asylum status and deporting Americans in Canada who have fled the Trump regime. While I suspect Poilievre will comply readily if he hesitates, Trump will point out what he has done to Mexico, the fact that the US isn’t part of NATO, and that NATO itself lacks the power to do anything if the US decided to take matters into their own hands. 

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The End of Civil Rights

The short version is that the military and police will secure power for Trump and will not be subject to any sort of legal constraints outside of what Trump sets on them.

Given how much he enjoys talking about brutalising people who oppose him, and how everyone who does is an enemy of the people, there’s likely a pardon and a medal waiting for anyone who murders “one of those people” in cold blood.

This isn’t speculation. Between what he did for SEAL Eddie Gallagher and his promises to make police completely immune from all prosecution dealing with “bad guys”, it’s obvious where this goes, as awful as it is.

Abortion and birth control are gone. They will use the Comstock Act to ban abortion drugs and pornography. They absolutely plan on using the 14th Amendment to obtain a court ruling that grants “fetal personhood”, meaning the end of IVF, and many forms of birth control.

They will successfully lean into ISPs and social media networks to turn over any data they want to get a hold of evidence of who might be against the administration. At the same time, states will look to end no-fault divorce and increasingly refuse to provide marriage licenses to LGBT couples.

Additionally, there will be an all-out push to overturn Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas, outlawing gay marriage and making sodomy illegal again.

The US will also risk a return of lynchings. If the DOJ and other entities refuse to prosecute people who assault or kill “undesirables”, people can literally get away with murder.

Alternately, if the President and red state governors hand out pardons to people who commit crimes against disfavoured groups, it makes any prosecutions a moot point.

There’s no better way to send a message to atheists, LGBT people, academics, and activists that they should leave now, than to convince them that absolutely no one would ever face justice if they were assassinated.

At the same time, online personalities like Chaya Raichik and Matt Walsh will continue dropping big hints to their audiences about who can and should be, targeted.

If this sounds implausible, it is actually exactly what happened in the US as part of the wave of lynchings in the South, or how Jews were treated in Germany between 1933 and 1939.

This isn’t a coincidence: Hitler took his lessons from the US. Academic institutions habit of going to great lengths to prove they’re not woke in order to continue getting federal dollars; and the quickest way to do that is to stifle speech and reduce the number of people who aren’t white and male (unless they’re vocally ultra-MAGA).

The narrative that any woman, person of colour, Muslim, or LGBT person in a position of power is an unqualified diversity hire or slept their way to the top will be actively encouraged.

Companies will effectively be rewarded by the government for less diversity, and consumers will be told by eager-to-please media outlets which companies are “good” because they reject DEI. Basically, think of a reverse Budweiser campaign.

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Health Care

Abortion and birth control in the US are both effectively doomed under a second Trump administration.

Trump and Johnson have also made it clear that the ACA will be repealed, and that any replacement will effectively be junk policies at best (and nothing at worst).

People with pre-existing conditions will no longer be able to get affordable healthcare coverage. At the same time, between massive federal spending cuts to social services (including Medicare and Medicaid), while prices on everything (but especially food) skyrocket, health care will become completely unavailable to the people who need it most.

At the same time, the Trump administration will protect the profits of healthcare companies, instead relying on the power of capitalism to find solutions. This Malthusian outlook rules out doing anything that might make health care affordable for people in the middle of an economic depression.

Trump is also saying he will put anti-vaccination advocate RFK Jr in charge of HHS (and the FDA). Other notable Republicans, including JD Vance and Trump transition team leader Howard Lutnick have endorsed the idea that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism. The anti-vax movement is full of kooks who reject the germ theory of disease that specific microorganisms cause specific diseases.

It’s not hard to see how this goes horribly wrong. Measles is one of the most communicable diseases known to man. It’s also easily preventable with vaccines, which is why it was (at one point) eradicated within the US. It’s also very lethal.

Anti-vax sentiments discouraged American Samoans from getting the MMR vaccine. Then a 2019 outbreak killed 83 people, almost all of whom were children under the age of 15, after vaccination rates dropped to just 34% on the island.

In a second Trump term, vaccines will either be outlawed or made optional (and not paid for by the Government or insurance). This ensures that only the rich and educated will have their children vaccinated, leaving the poorest and least educated to deal with massive outbreaks of diseases that had been all but eradicated.

As a reminder, mumps can cause sterility, and polio causes extensive neurological damage resulting in permanent muscle weakness or paralysis. In a country where the social net is collapsing, medical services beyond what people can afford, and waves of children getting sick and being permanently disabled will add to the financial misery and death.

In the end, a second Trump administration will cause a drastic decrease in life expectancy that hasn’t been seen globally since the fall of the Soviet Union. There will also be a sharp rise in medical bankruptcies.

Maternal, infant, and childhood mortality will rise to levels not far off those seen in the world’s least developed countries. People will rightly be angry, but, you know, bullets and gulags for anyone who protests.

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Eradicating Transgender People

Under Trump, transgender people will cease to exist as a community, and as an identifiable legally recognised minority within the US.

To put it bluntly, Trump and the GOP are looking for an answer to the transgender problem, and a careful reading of Trump’s own Agenda 47 website spells out clearly what the intended final solution looks like.

Project 2025 lays out how transgender people will be stripped of legal recognition as a class, and of their government IDs (which include passports). 

They would strip protections from discrimination in the workplace, ban them from public facilities, drive them out of the military and federal employment, punish federal contractors that don’t mistreat their trans employees, strip them of access to health care, and reduce them to rational basis scrutiny, or less. With the court system kowtowing to an authoritarian, there’s zero chance that they fail.

But it gets worse.

Agenda 47 does all of this and more. It would likely seek to prosecute anyone who supports transgender youth, including schools, doctors, teachers, and parents.

Obtaining a public education as a transgender person in the US will become functionally possible. Transgender-owned businesses are unlikely to get contracts with the government, and government contractors will be heavily pressured not to subcontract out to them.

Agenda 47 also declares, “President Trump will direct the US Food and Drug Administration to convene an independent outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression, and violence.”

This will deprive transgender people of access to medical care throughout the US, even though the drugs they take are the same as those taken by cisgender individuals. But, this is also step one of their intended final solution. 

Agenda 47 goes on to state, “for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.” 

This is an easy connection to make: hormones and transgender identity make people depressed, aggressive, and violent, and we will force these severely mentally disturbed folk into mental institutions against their will. Given the number of times Trump has talked about “transgender insanity” this reading of his policy is hardly a stretch.

All of this has strong historical connections with the run up to the Holocaust: forcing Jews out of the military, government, and academia. Banning them from sports and access to healthcare.

The final solution that we can see taking shape looks a lot like the Nazi rhetoric around “life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes leben). But, for the 1.5 million trans people in the US, it looks like reeducation camps where hard labour, renouncing your identity, and swearing absolute loyalty to MAGA is the only hope of smelling air outside the wires ever again.

In truth, the cake is a lie, and work won’t make you free. The only American trans people likely to still be free by 2030 are those who fled to the far ends of the earth and disappeared to places the US can’t intimidate or doesn’t feel like invading. And maybe Kaitlyn Jenner.

Fascists can always use a Quisling, useful idiots, or people to populate their own Theresienstadts with for the benefit of the Red Cross.

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Elections

In early 1933, the last major opposition party to the NSDAP (National Socialist Party, or Nazis) was the left leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Their attitude towards Hitler was that he was a ridiculous little Bavarian Corporal who was a know-nothing buffoon that would definitely screw up badly enough that his right-wing coalition would collapse, new elections would be called, and the SPD would swoop in and win the next election because the German public would finally see how competent they were by comparison.

The next election was not held in West Germany until 1946 when Hitler was dead and Germany lay in ruins. The SPD still lost to the Centre-right Catholic Zentrum (Centre) party.

The moral of the story is that the belief that there will be meaningful elections ever again after Trump wins is almost certainly a foolish one, and that no one will be invading the US and ridding us of our dictator, ever. Like Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Afghanistan: there will never be hope for peaceful political change again. Ever.

The only question is what means Trump and the GOP will use to ensure elections can only produce one outcome. They’ve already telegraphed that they intend to prosecute or imprison Democratic leadership. Maybe they’ll declare a state of emergency and cancel elections.

Maybe they’ll use lawsuits to get court rulings that rig the game for them. Maybe they’ll change the rules of elections such that the US House always decides the President. It really doesn’t matter.

Regardless of the exact methodology, I have zero doubt that part of their consolidation of power will include naked attempts to ensure that the public has no means with which to remove the GOP from office. Given their control of the DOJ, FBI, military, and court system, it seems unlikely that their efforts will fail.

Seriously, who is going to stop the squad of armed soldiers (or militiamen) from showing up and stuffing the ballot box?

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Conclusion

I’m sure many people reading this are thinking to themselves: it can’t happen here. It sounds too fantastical.

You would have to assume that all the guardrails would crumble. History has taught us, however, that when men such as Trump are handed the tools to tear down the guardrails of democracy, they almost always exploit them, and the guardrails themselves are almost never strong enough.

For this not to happen, Trump would have to not do the exact things he says he would do. He would have to refrain from using the tools he was not only given but went to court to demand.

You can see his inner circle shaping up, and it consists entirely of the people who crave this sort of power to remake the US from the ground up in their own image. You can also see how they have carefully laid the groundwork to do all of this with deliberate intent.

Not only can it happen here, but it is happening here, and we can see that it is happening exactly as they want it to happen.

There are only two things that can effectively thwart the outcomes described above, and both also represent the end of the United States as a Democratic Republic as we know it.

The first is states defying the federal government, rejecting its power, and inviting a civil war. The other is a military coup by the flag officers Trump intends to sack because they’re willing to say “no”.

Neither is likely to be attempted, and even if attempted neither is likely to succeed. Democrats will be inclined to take the line that the Social Democrats did with Hitler: He’s an idiot and we’ll win the next election handily.

In the case of the US, there is unlikely to be an election that could remove the incumbent party ever again: there’s no military coalition riding to our rescue. Dictatorships like Russia, the DPRK, Cuba, Belarus, and Venezuela are very stable, and the ones with nuclear weapons never have to fear invasion.

As for a military coup: it’s nearly unthinkable because it goes so firmly against 250 years of tradition of the military staying out of politics and respect for civilian authority.

For the US not to end up as a right-wing Christian theocratic Hell once Trump puts his hand on the Bible, we would have to defy all the history since the end of the Cold War. We are following the authoritarian handbook to a T, and 47% of the voting public actively craves it (or so they think).

But, for most of us who don’t want to live like this, we have but one option: to get as far as possible from the scene of the crash.

For most people left behind who can keep their mouths shut and a smile on their faces every time they talk about dear leader, however, life will be boring and tolerable.

Thus, they will be averse to anything that risks upsetting that status quo. And so it was in Germany, where most people were happy to keep their heads down, so long as it didn’t affect them. And if it does, they’ll know better than to complain about it.

The author is a senior US Defence analyst whose identity has been withheld to protect their position