David Brooks nails it in his column today in the NY Times. (Gift link) It’s time for collective action.

What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

The charges levied by members of the Continental Congress in 1776 against the King of England, George III, sound like charges that could also be levied today against Donald Trump. Here are those charges, as they are enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. How many do you count that could apply today to Donald Trump?

- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
- He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
- He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
- He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
- He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
- He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
- He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
- He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
- He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
- He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
- He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
- He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
- He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
- He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
- For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
- For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
- For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
- For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
- For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
- For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
- For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
- He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
- He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
- He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
- He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
- He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
- In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

There is a through line from Senator Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump, and the connector is Roy Cohn. Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel during the senator’s anti-communism hearings. Cohn would go on to be a mentor and lawyer for Donald Trump in the 1970s. In his actions as president, Trump is following his mentor Cohn’s playbook and taking on the mantle of McCarthy, using similar strategies and tools that the Wisconsin senator used in his infamous investigations. It was Republican senator, Margaret Chase Smith who called out McCarthy and the weaker Republicans of her time who failed to stand up to him in her famous Declaration of Conscience speech “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”

Chase Smith’s observations should be a clarion call to the Republican Party today, but sadly, the truth seems to be no match for the lies Trump and his sycophants in congress prefer to tell. The crumbling of our independent and critical journalistic infrastructure has given way to a corporate media that cannot or will not hold the administration accountable to previously accepted national norms. Instead of speaking the truth and referring to Trump’s defiance of court orders as lawlessness, reporters split hairs and treat these actions as some sort of legitimate challenge to judges based on which president appointed them. When journalists refer to a judge as an Obama or Biden appointee they undermine public perception of the judicial independence, the implication being that a judge appointed by a Democrat is somehow incapable of judging Trump fairly. Journalists who report this way are “obeying in advance,” assisting Trump in his attack on an impartial judiciary.

The truth here is that the American people are being fed a steady diet of half truths and full blown lies. Terming the illegal transport of Americans to a prison in El Salvador “deportations” (as the Trump administration has persuaded the American press to do) is exactly the kind of smear that Margaret Chase Smith warned of. Bigotry, ignorance, and fear also rear their heads as Trump persuades a willing press to call the men kidnapped and trafficked to remote prisons without due process “violent criminals” and “alien enemies.” We are well into George Orwell territory these days. Orwell’s prediction that this would take place in 1984 was off by a few decades, but in that prescient book he almost perfectly captures the outcome of Trump’s Project 2025:

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
— George Orwell, 1984

What is today’s truth, and who will have the courage to speak it?

So many of us feel helpless in the face of the onslaught of the daily attacks on our democracy. That’s a primary goal of the authoritarian playbook — push us into a fetal position where we hide away in fear. But there are small steps each of us can take to reverse that fear, and take action to confront tyranny in ways that change the dynamics of the current political climate. Protests, of course are one way, but the Protect Democracy project has a list with 29 actions that you can take right now. Actions that build on top of each other to help create a growing movement to support our democracy.

Republicans have spent nearly 50 years, since the election of Ronald Reagan, trying to undo FDR’s New Deal, and create a plutocratic America shaped for the benefit of the wealthiest. Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory tried to pass off the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans would ultimately benefit everyone because the crumbs falling from the tables of the plutocracy would find their way to those with lesser means. Though this proved to be a fallacy, and Reaganomics led to a crippling recession, Republicans kept trying to find new ways to sell their plan.

Under Democratic presidents the American economy has proven to be resilient. Following Reagan’s recession, Republican President George H.W. Bush failed to restore the economy, and was defeated in the 1992 election after serving one term. Bill Clinton served two terms in office and finally managed to help the United States break free of the economic malaise brought on by Reagan and Bush. In 2000 George W. Bush was elected and over the next 8 years set the stage for his own economic crisis in 2008. Electing Democrat Barack Obama in November of 2008 put the nation back on sound economic footing, until the 2016 election when Republican Donald Trump was elected for the first time, and again drove the economy to the brink of disaster. In 2020 the election of Democrat Joe Biden was necessary to again right the ship and bring the economy back after Trump’s failed handling of the Covid Pandemic.

Trump was elected again in 2024 and despite the restored and growing economy that the Biden administration built, within a little less than 90 days, Trump managed to wipe out trillions of dollars of market value, destroy the global alliances that have kept the nation safe and secure since WWII, and with the help of the world’s richest neo-nazi, Elon Musk, destroyed the institutions that provide much of the social safety net that was put in place by Democrats since the great Depression of the 1930s.

The blueprint for Trump’s dismantling of our constitutional order and the fabric of American society was articulated in the Republican agenda called “Project 2025.” This project took the seeds planted in the Reagan years and grew them into a fully fleshed plan to decapitate our democracy and replace it with an authoritarian figurehead who could be easily manipulated by a plutocratic cadre committed to their selfish ideals. A compliant Supreme Court was also willing to do away with any checks on the power of the president, making this authoritarian takeover even more achievable. Unchecked by Congress or the Courts, Trump has moved to mimic his heroes Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Kim Jong-un, and Adolph Hitler.

So we are at the crossroads, facing the end of the democratic republic that was imagined by our founders. Our Declaration of Independence rings hollow as we now have a president who is as much a tyrant as the king from whom we declared ourselves independent. The principles and ideals of our government as expressed in the Federalist Papers, in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are being tossed aside as the concepts of due process, the rule of law, and the guarantees of the First Amendment are being ignored by the Trump administration.

We need a revival of our founding principles, and a restoration of our ideals. And so we propose a new plan, a new document, based on those principles and ideals, that beats back the plutocracy and authoritarianism of the current administration and Republican Party. We propose Project 2026, to be written and forged in the hearts and minds of patriotic American citizens. It is our sincere hope that leaders of both parties will recognize the call for a renewed commitment to our highest ideals.

Join us. Send your ideas to publius97520@gmail.com.