U.S. 2025 dictatorship threat just got real | Will Bunch Newsletter

There’s no such thing as an off-year election. Here in Pennsylvania, voters are deciding a state Supreme Court race that could determine women’s reproductive rights and whether billionaires can buy an election. From Philly’s 100th mayor to Moms for Liberty targeting our school boards, this election matters. Please vote today.

📮 I don’t know about the wider Philly electorate, but likely next mayor Cherelle Parker’s idea for sending the National Guard into drug-plagued Kensington was universally panned by my readers, who said the neighborhood needs more social workers and drug-treatment options, not armed troops. “How’d that work out at Kent State?” Joseph Kraher asked pointedly, while Daniel Hoffman wrote: “Using military troops to address inner city problems has long been a poorly conceived idea from reactionary politicians trying to appeal to the ignorance and prejudices of middle class voters who see low-income, urban neighborhoods as irredeemable cesspools of crime and indolence.” I couldn’t agree more.

This week’s question: Democrats are starting to panic over President Joe Biden’s low poll numbers and his prospects for defeating Donald Trump in November 2024. At this very late date, should Biden step aside to allow the party to nominate someone else? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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It can happen here, after all.

Just ask Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist from upstate Pennsylvania, who told pollsters for the New York Times that after voting for President Joe Biden in 2020, he’s likely to switch next year to supporting Donald Trump, despite his qualms about the ex-president currently facing 91 felony counts. Like a lot of voters, Weiss just sounds tired of a chaotic time. “The world is falling apart under Biden,” he insisted.

Elaine Ramirez, a Las Vegas Democrat who is sour on the economy, is on the cutting edge of a migration of Latino voters toward the likely GOP 2024 presidential nominee. Ramirez all but said the quiet part out loud, that she’s ready for a kind of strongman. She told the newspaper that “Trump is also more dominating and aggressive and maybe we do need someone like that to fix our economy and our country.”

When future historians study the rise and fall of American democracy, they will likely circle Nov. 5, 2023, as a moment when things started to turn. Sunday marked exactly one year to go before the make-or-break 2024 expected rematch between POTUS 45 and POTUS 46 (with a likely gaggle of third-party distractions). And three important things became clear over the last 48 hours — things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. Yet they are happening.

First, Trump showed us who he really is for the umpteenth time Monday when he took the stand in the Manhattan civil fraud damages trial where a judge has already found that the Trump Organization cheated banks and insurers with wildly dishonest appraisals of property it owned. The alleged billionaire ex-president rambled, smirked, hurled outrageous charges, and, from time to time, lied during testimony that prompted the judge to say this is “a courtroom, not a political rally.” It was a sneak preview of the low-brow drama Americans can expect over the coming months as Trump is tried for mishandling government secrets, election interference, and trying to halt the peaceful transfer of power to Biden.

Second, Americans — the ones who are paying attention, anyway — learned stunning new details about Trump’s plans to assert aggressive and in some cases dictatorial powers if he is indeed inaugurated as 47th president on Jan. 20, 2025. The Washington Post reported Trump has a Nixonian enemies list of people who’ve crossed him politically that he wants the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute, and — more shockingly — has a scheme to invoke the Insurrection Act upon his swearing-in to call out troops to quell any street protests. It would be, in essence, the military coup that he wasn’t quite able to pull off on Jan. 6, 2021.

Third, it’s increasingly clear that a growing number of U.S. voters don’t really care. The political universe can’t stop talking about the shock poll from the Times and Siena College showing that Trump has moved ahead of Biden in five of six battleground states that are all but certain to swing the 2024 election. The survey found more voters trusted Trump than Biden on most of the key issues, especially the economy, and that the Democratic president is slipping with core voters under age 30 and in the Black and Latino communities.

Some 88 years after Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here — his novel about America lapsing into the kind of fascism that was occurring in real life in Germany and Italy in 1935 — America is on the brink of installing a strongman in the White House whose team has been surprisingly open about their plans for an autocratic, “Red Caesar” rule that would undo constitutional governance.

While Trump has performed well in several recent polls, the science of public opinion is still an imperfect one. Some raised good questions about the accuracy of the Times/Siena poll, while many noted the long history of incumbents — Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, even Ronald Reagan ― who trailed a year before their reelection before successfully getting the band back together.

But Democrats would be foolish to treat Trump’s 2023 support as a mirage. Yes, there’s an inner core that resembles the worst of what we saw at the Jan. 6 insurrection, who attend Trump rallies to cheer the cruelty-is-the-point rants against refugees at the southern border, or for locking up Hillary Clinton. But there’s a bigger outer circle of voters like Pennsylvania’s Weiss or Nevada’s Ramirez who aren’t highly political but hate the current crises and have nostalgia for the first three years of Trump’s presidency, when the Saudis kept gas prices low and the Russians weren’t terrorizing Ukraine.

They think a strongman can fix it — exactly what a lot of everyday folks thought in Germany in 1932, or in Russia in 2000. POTUS 45 will never lose the night-rider crowd, but I suspect there are millions of Americans who think they’d be voting for 2018 Trump — the rule-breaking oddball who lucked into an era of tranquility — and not the bitter and revenge-minded 2025 Trump, who is willing to embrace his inner autocrat.

One poll is not destiny. But it is a warning. As I wrote this weekend, journalists have an important role to play — if newsrooms can stop pulling their punches and tell the American people what’s really at stake next year. Biden and the Democrats have enormous work to do in bringing their core supporters back, and educating the small sliver of swing voters about what Team Trump is really planning to do. The first step is honestly telling folks not just that the end of democracy can happen here, but that it’s happening right before our very eyes.

We have to believe this, before it’s too late.

Question: Why don’t the two political parties produce better choices? Are the Sixers better than last year? (Yes) — Via Just Chill (@DawgsWillHunt) on X/Twitter

Answer: LOL, strong ‘yes’ on the second! (Nick Nurse for 101st mayor of Philadelphia!) On your first question, it’s something I’ve pondered a lot, and I think it’s for wildly opposite reasons. On the GOP side, a party where CEOs and hedge-funders and power brokers wanted political clout by manipulating the working class instead got hijacked by those white middle-class voters and their right-wing populism that embraces Trump. But while Republicans have been captured by their base, Democrats seem more beholden to elite donors and maintaining its gerontocracy than listening to its base, especially young voters looking for a progressive home. I think that this energy gap between the pro-base Trump and the (at times) anti-base Biden is why there’s a real danger of Trump winning.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, there have been numerous reports that rank-and-file diplomats at the State Department have been bristling under the pro-Israel tilt of the Biden administration. Some voiced fury — anonymously, of course — at an internal memo telling them to avoid peace-oriented terms like “cease-fire.” This week, there are reports that employees at Foggy Bottom headquarters are circulating a “dissent memo” that Israel should be called out by the U.S. government over violence on the West Bank. Yet only one State Department employee has actually resigned in protest: Josh Paul, an 11-year veteran involved in weapons transfers who wrote that more arms for Israel without preconditions is “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.”

So why haven’t more government employees — not just in State Department but other agencies, as well as congressional staffers — quit over the war? Paul gave a uniquely American response in a recent interview: Many are scared of losing their health insurance, in one of the few developed nations that doesn’t offer coverage to all citizens, including the unemployed. “I think if we had universal health care it would make it a bit easier for people to stand up on principle,” Paul told “Democracy Now!” last week. “I know I myself am trying to figure out what I’m going to do next on health care.”

Talk about truth-telling! The reality in America is that the lack of universal health coverage, such as Medicare for All, isn’t just a cruel commentary about prioritizing late-stage capitalism over a more egalitarian social-welfare state. It’s also the ultimate form of social control — knowing that taking a career-risking stand on a moral issue, or just trying to escape an unhappy job choice, can leave you unable to afford a doctor. (It’s the same, I’d argue, with the need to pay for your kids’ college education.) It’s the price we pay to keep those cubicles humming, and to keep people silent about the things that truly matter.

Ten years ago today, there was a rising star in American politics. His name was Chris Christie, and he had just won a second term as GOP governor of New Jersey, in a landslide. On Nov. 7, 2013, I wrote about how Christie’s alleged “bipartisanship” was not all it was cracked up to be: “How did Christie get such widespread support from Democratic bosses, mayors, and others? Was it his good looks and charm? Well ... I’m sure that helped, but mostly Christie won bipartisan support the old-fashioned way: He bought it.” Months later, the Bridgegate scandal — showing how Dems who refused to be bought off were threatened and bullied — ended a governor’s political climb. I wonder whatever happened to Christie. Meanwhile, read 2013′s “The truth that should destroy Christie’s White House bid.”

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