"There will be no rebuilding": Bracing America for the implementation of Project 2025

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was an extreme failure for the United States as both a nation and a country. He is publicly promising and threatening to rule as the country’s first elected dictator on “day one.” Trump, like other such autocrats and authoritarians, means what he says both literally and figuratively. Be it a “shining city on a hill” or “the world’s greatest democracy,” Trump's return to power further undermines America's self-image of greatness. For many Americans — especially those White Americans who believed in the many lies of America’s inherent greatness and goodness, and that authoritarianism and fascism are something “over there” and not something with centuries of history in the United States in the form of such regimes as American Apartheid and Jim Crow, White on Black chattel slavery and other great crimes against nonwhite people — Trump’s return to power is shocking, unbelievable and a type of epistemic crisis. When Trump emerged as president-elect, a wave of horror swept over me, intensified by the moral cowardice of prominent liberals who capitulated to his orbit of oligarchs — trading resistance for complacency in a brazen betrayal of Timothy Snyder’s urgent warning: “don’t obey in advance.” Even more unsettling is the drift of self-proclaimed leftists toward the gravitational pull of right-wing populism, foolishly believing they could forge alliances with figures like Trump and the right-wing libertarians and techno billionaires who preside over a new feudalism in some shared crusade against “the establishment.” They seem blind to the destructive forces they legitimize in the process.