If Trump Wins: Why Republicans talk about Making America Great while planning to burn it all down

Following both speeches by Vance and Trump at the RNC, the future trajectory of America if they are elected is pretty clear.

First, it is important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money.

These men are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms. Think Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot, or Mussolini. They do not want to tweak government; they want to burn it down and start it over from scratch. Rebuild it as a completely different system of governance.

They are convinced that the post-1933 New Deal America is a mistake and, along with their allies on the Supreme Court, are dedicated to “deconstructing the administrative state” that came out of FDR’s reforms and the 20th-century reinvention of the American system.

And they have a couple of models they seem committed to following. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is probably the most prominent; he is already done pretty much everything on the list below, and what he has not done he is openly considered or will do to hang onto power.

Orbán has transformed his nation into what he calls an “illiberal democracy,” And Trump rambled at length about him in his bloated acceptance speech. Here is their plan, based in large part on Orbán’s model:

SILENCE THE NEWS: COMMAND AND CONQUER

Donald Trump, on multiple occasions, has called for a reform of America’s libel laws along the lines of Orbán’s Hungary. Right now, as a result of both a long American tradition and the Supreme Court’s 1964 NY Times v Sullivan decision, public figures who feel they’ve been attacked or insulted (like politicians) can’t sue for libel unless they meet the really high bar of proving the person libeling them knew their comments were lies and pushed those lies in a “reckless” way.

When Peter Thiel was outed as gay by Gawker, the online celebrity tabloid, he funded Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against that publication – they published one of his sex videos – and its senior people: the court action wiped them out. Trump wants to put this sort of thing on steroids.

Once the libel laws are loosened and ratified by at least 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court, Trump and his colleagues will be free to sue every newspaper, magazine, Substack writer, television station or network, radio station or network, and individual politician/writer/host/commentator/reporter he thinks has ever libeled or defamed him.

Orbán did this in Hungary and, as the traditional media went broke, one after another of his oligarch buddies bought them out of bankruptcy and continued to operate them.

As a result, the entire Hungarian media landscape, from the nation’s newspapers to radio, TV, and online publications, are today almost entirely like Fox “News”: full-time propaganda channels proclaiming the wonders and marvels of Orbán and his Fidesz party all day, every day.

Dissent has been silenced. Orbán told the American CPAC conference in Budapest last year they should do the same in America when Republicans next seize control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles. Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

POLITICAL PURGE: SILENCING THE OPPONENTS

Once the media is under control, Trump has already told us that he intends to use the Department of Justice and the FBI to harass or imprison the people he feels have wronged him, ranging from the Biden family to Merrick Garland and the head of the FBI to individual politicians and journalists. His hit list reportedly includes publications like The New York Times and Raw Story. As he told Sean Hannity on Fox news:

“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them…”

Those he doesn’t succeed in imprisoning, he’ll drive into bankruptcy by charging them repeatedly with crimes, launching IRS and other investigations, or stripping them of the professional licenses and credentials necessary to do their jobs: all that will require Trump’s victims to hire attorneys, which, Peter Navarro and Rudy Giuliani will tell you, can wipe you out if you’re not a billionaire.

Just this month, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court largely ruled in Trump v United States that he would be entirely within his rights to do such things, even if they clearly violate the current laws, so long as he calls them “official acts.”

AMERICA FOR SALE: CIVIL SERVICE SLASHED, CORPORATIONS UNLEASHED

In the last month of his presidency, then-President Trump issued an executive order (“Schedule F”) that essentially undid the traditional civil service and replaced career bureaucrats with political appointees singularly loyal to the president himself rather than their agencies, the law, or the country. (Biden reversed it.)

The Civil Service was a reform undoing the corrupt “spoils system” that President Andrew Jackson had put into place in the 1830s. Under the spoils system, the way to get a job with the federal government was to give the president or his friends a gift, do them a favor, or provide them with some other of the “spoils” of their position.

The spoils system led a frustrated speechwriter, Charles Guiteau, to assassinate President James Garfield in 1881 after Guiteau wrote a speech for him that Garfield not only refused to use but also refused to give Guiteau the speechwriting job he was seeking. As a result, in 1883 President Chester Arthur oversaw the implementation of the Pendelton Civil Service Act, which required government jobs be based on merit instead of political loyalty or bribes to the president and his friends.

Both Trump and Project 2025 call for dismantling the Pendleton Act and returning to Jackson’s spoils system via a new Schedule F. The result will be that every regulatory agency in America — the principle protection system for average working class Americans, along with our air, food, water, drugs — will be run purely for the interests of Trump’s and the GOP’s largest donors and their profits.

SAFETY NET SHREDDED: PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY AND “WELFARE”

Trump and Vance have pulled a Reagan, falsely claiming they want to “reform” rather than gut, kill, or privatize Medicare and Social Security. While Reagan wanted to privatize both programs, it was George W. Bush in 2003 who got the Medicare Advantage privatized Medicare scam into law. Trump’s Project 2025, however, is far more explicit.

Project 2025 calls for corporate for-profit insurance to replace Medicare as the default enrollment option when people turn 65 or otherwise qualify for the program and to voucherize Medicaid with work requirements and lifetime caps on the program (which will wipe out old people’s ability to use it for nursing homes).

Expect most federal “welfare” programs, from housing supports to food stamps to educational and tuition assistance for low-income people to be turned into block grants to the states, which will, over time, wither to nothing through repeated budget cuts and “reforms.”

COURT-PACKING COUP: REDEFINING JUSTICE IN AMERICA

If Republicans can take control of the Senate as well as the White House next year, expect a massive effort to encourage sitting judges to retire – including financial incentives, so they can further pack the entire federal court system with rightwingers in the mold of Aileen Cannon and Clarence Thomas.

COMSTOCK ACT REVIVAL: ABORTION BANNED, BIRTH CONTROL RESTRICTED

The 1873 Comstock Act, also known as “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use,” is, as Clarence Thomas, Josh Hawley, and Sam Alito have recently pointed out, still on the books.

It criminalizes transporting, via the mail or private carrier – like UPS and FedEx, any drug, instrument, or device that can be used to produce an abortion, as well as all forms of pornography. A strict interpretation could read it to also outlaw birth control – it was used for half a century to outlaw condoms.

While it has not been enforced for decades, both Project 2025 and multiple Republicans — including JD Vance — have demanded that the department of Justice enforce it, as The Washington Post documented in their article this week titled, “Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills.”

ROLLING BACK EQUALITY: THE END OF GAY MARRIAGE AND LGBTQ+ RIGHTS

The Obergefell decision, which legalized gay marriage, and the Lawrence decision, which decriminalized intimacy between same-sex couples, were both grounded in the same read of the Constitution’s protections for individual privacy as the one that animated Roe v Wade.

Sam Alito wrote the decision in Dobbs that overturned that interpretation altogether, leading Clarence Thomas to suggest in his concurring opinion that the Court’s next targets should include gay marriage and the right to possess birth control.

NATIONWIDE PAY CUT: THE RISE OF “RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS”

In 1947, overriding the veto of President Harry Truman, a Republican congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which gave individual states the authority to override union protections in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (aka The Wagner Act). Republicans claimed gutting union protections was a way of protecting “the right to work” and that label has stuck over the years.

Those states that have adopted right-to-work laws are almost exclusively GOP controlled, and rarely have fewer than 4-5 percent of their workers in unions – and most of those are federal government unionized workers or teachers. A top priority of the billionaires who own the Republican Party has been, for decades, the imposition of right to work for less laws at the national level, a new-and-improved version of Taft Hartley to finally destroy the union movement altogether.

MASSIVE NEW POLICE FORCE THAT’S FIRST DIRECTED AT IMMIGRANTS AND LATER AGAINST POLITICAL OPPOSITION

Donald Trump has promised to assemble a national police force of sorts that will go door-to-door across the country to hunt down an estimated 11 million “illegals” who are in the United States without documentation. For-profit prison companies will build massive detention facilities, and anybody who looks Black, Asian, or Hispanic but was born at home or lost their birth certificate and so can’t prove citizenship can expect to quickly end up in one of Trump’s new concentration camps.

After the 2025 version of Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback – which deported about 1.3 million people, including an estimated tens of thousands of Latino American citizens who couldn’t immediately find their documentation – is finished, Trump will have a massive armed police force that, like his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, that he can turn on Americans who he says are “unpatriotic.”

All he will need do is tweak our sedition laws to expand the definitions of actions that are “intended to overthrow the government of the United States,” which he has also already proposed, to begin throwing politicians and reporters in prison. Easy peasy.

THIS SUMMARY, OF COURSE, JUST SCRATCHES THE SURFACE OF HOW A TRUMP/VANCE PRESIDENCY WILL TRANSFORM AMERICA

The Libertarian tech billionaires who sponsor Trump and Vance believe these and other “free market” and “individual responsibility” changes to a newly-gutted American system will encourage “lazy” people to get off their butts and off to work while it gets “government interference” out of their businesses.

And if the government no longer has to pay “welfare benefits,” including Medicare and Social Security, then billionaires’ taxes can be further reduced as an extra bonus – as Trump has already promised.