Let's Fix This Country | Articles on national issues, politics, foreign policy, and the culture

governing

Are We on the Brink of Fascism, or Is It Already Here?

Jan 24 2025

For over a year as he campaigned for the presidency, we have heard Donald Trump voice certain intentions that do not sound like the United States’ constitutional democracy. The liberal media filled with opinion pieces about the coming autocracy. We heard about Project 2025, a 920-page treatise prescribing the harsh measures needed to transform America into a Christian conservative nation.

Trump feigned ignorance of Project 2025, article illustration
even though several chapters had been written by members of his first administration, and many with likely roles in his second. A central tenet was the "unitary presidency" in which the president has direct control over the entire federal government. Hadn’t he quipped that he would be a dictator? Ah, yes, but only on Day One.

But few reporting Trump's plans for his second term or on the extremism of Project 2025 went so far as to apply the "fascism" label. With Trump now in office, they should re-think.

a definition

Fascism has no one definition. Its most succinct is from Mussolini himself: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”, and as dictator he could have added that he was the state. Fascism centralizes the government in the dictator who sets the laws. Fascists are not constrained by constitutions. It exalts the nation over the individual, the race that makes up that nation, the religion of that nation. Mussolini espoused doctrines of racial superiority, xenophobia, imperialism, and his own power. Hitler took the same manias further, ostracizing and then murdering those not of the German (Aryan) race.

trump law

Immediately he was inaugurated, Trump appropriated the law unto himself. Many in his blizzard of executive orders, although dreadfully mistaken, such as withdrawal (again) from the Paris Accords on climate and exiting… Read More »

equity

Trump Treasury Pick Says Keep Minimum Wage at Poverty Level

Jan 18 2025

Wall Street breathed a "collective sigh of relief", said Politico when President-elect Trump chose a traditional financial sort, Scott Bessent, to be the next Secretary of the Treasury. He is a "legendary stock trader who understands financial markets", said the Wall Street Journal. And surprise! The investor and hedge fund manager was once the chief investor for George Soros's fund.

But nothing rubbed off the left-wing philanthropist billionaire onto Bessent, as we just learned article illustration
They largely won. States have steadily raised the minimum
wage, but far from all of them.

from his appearance at the Senate confirmation hearings. Senator Bernie Sanders asked Bessent if he would join legislators "who want to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage to take millions of Americans out of poverty". Back came the standard, reflexive conservative evasion in this exchange:

Bessent: Senator, I believe that the minimum wage is more of a statewide and regional issue.
Sanders: You don’t think we should change the federal minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour?
Bessent: No sir.

The last time the minimum wage was changed — to $7.25 an hour — was 2009. The sixteen years since are the longest stretch without increase since the minimum wage was made law in 1938. And, of course, inflation has eaten away at even that low wage. For what $7.25 got you in 2009 you would need $10.60 today. Put another way, 2009's $7.25 has the buying power of only $4.96 today. And this way: A person working an eight-hour shift with no time off over 52 weeks would make only $15,080 for the year — the poverty level Sanders and cohort hopes to dispatch to a shameful past.

NBC's Kristen Welker asked… Read More »

the law

Chief Justice Doesn’t See Some Threats to Court Are Self-Inflicted

Jan 17 2025

”I feel compelled to address four areas of illegitimate activity that…threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”, was the subject of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual report on the federal judiciary including his own court that he published at year-end. He elaborates on four categories: “(1) violence, (2) intimidation, (3) disinformation, and (4) threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.”

article illustration
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

To be sure violence and intimidation “directed at judges because of their work” aren’t simply “unacceptable” – the weak word he uses – but must be met with the harshest of legal penalties. But he seems blinkered for his report’s complete failure to show a recognition that the Supreme Court itself has contributed at least to widespread criticism if not yet open defiance of “lawfully entered judgments”.

undercut by gaping ethics lapses

There is no mention whatever of the investigative reporting by Pro Publica that beginning in 2023 unearthed twenty years of scandalous ethics violations by Justice Clarence Thomas for accepting lavish cost-free travel and vacation benefits bestowed upon him and wife Ginni by billionaire Harlan Crow and by his never reporting any. Crow over the years had interests in many issues that had come before the court so there has been more than a whiff of corruption.

Further sleuthing found the same sort of violations by Justice Samuel Alito. Still more instances of "personal hospitality" accepted by Thomas and Alito were revealed just this Christmas-week by a two-year Senate investigation. And yet, responding in 2024 to the outrage that the court needed an enforceable code of conduct, the court refused any… Read More »

law

Turns Out He Did Nothing Wrong

The campaign to make Donald Trump's criminal prosecutions fade away

Dec 6 2024

Like a magician’s disappearing act, Trump’s attempt to take over the government and usurp the presidency from Joe Biden has vanished. In accordance with Justice Department practice never to prosecute a sitting president – an exemption nowhere found article illustration
in the Constitution — Special Counsel Jack Smith is closing his two federal cases against Donald Trump. He is doing so without prejudice, which means they can be brought again when (or should we say if) Trump leaves office, but that is unlikely.

We have been witness these last four years to how the propaganda of denial can successfully become the dominant ethos at the expense of both truth and justice. In what follows we trace the evolution of how the right-wing persuaded their millions to think of Trump as victim rather than villain.

Outrage

The stunning blow against the Constitution and its democratic process January 6, 2021, was originally met with outrage from all quarters, not least from Republicans in Congress. After all, their lives had been threatened that day by a violent mob of thousands, some with murder in mind. Speaking in the House of Representatives that night, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said,

“The violence, destruction, and chaos we saw earlier was unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”

In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke… Read More »

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miscellany

Year-End Clearance: Some News Items That Shouldn’t Be Left Behind

Jan 4 2025

In no particular order:

STOP THE CLOCK: The Supreme Court will on January 10th decide whether a controversial ban on the social media app TikTok, signed by President Biden in April of last year and about to take effect January 19th, violates the First Amendment. But Donald Trump’s lawyers have submitted a brief to the Court asking that their hearing be postponed until after Trump is inaugurated the day after, January 20th, so that the then-president can negotiate a compromise.

"President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government”

A baffled MSNBC host Christina Ruffini asked,

"Does the president even have standing to do this? And what kind of a motion is this? Is this an amicus brief, a writ? I don't know what this is. Can he just involve himself in a case that he is not, you know, a party to?"

But Trump appointed three out of the nine justices, so he thinks he, still just a citizen, has a right to special deference.

THE GREAT ONE: It rises majestically to its snow-capped peak 20,310 above the near sea-level Alaska tundra, the most rapid ascent of any mountain on Earth. It was unaccountably named Mt. McKinley after the 25th president until President Obama’s Department of the Interior granted Alaska’s long-standing request that the mountain finally be renamed Denali, meaning “The High One” or “The Great One” in the language of Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascan people who have inhabited these lands for thousands of years.

But now, as part of Trump’s campaign to reverse everything of the nation’s first black president, Trump wants the mountain restored to the McKinley name. In a speech before the arch-conservative group Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Trump obscurely said:

“They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what… Read More »

governing

Trump Taps Bhattacharya to Run NIH. Who?

Jan 3 2025

Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, Patel — The media loops through these controversial choices day after day. Certain of the less-noticed Trump picks are no less controversial but are overlooked. Here’s one of particular importance at a time when viruses pose an increasing threat to the human race.

settled opinion

The right has arrived at a widespread view that lockdown mandates and remote teaching in 2020 and 2021 were the wrong remedies for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hindsight that gives no quarter to the epidemiological “experts” – now spoken of with scorn — who had to come up with methods to combat a plague not experienced in a hundred years.

So it was deemed "karmic justice", said a full-page Wall Street Journal interview, when President-elect Trump tapped Jay (Jayanta) Bhattacharya to be article illustration
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The professor at Stanford University was much vilified for his contrarian views in the early months of the outbreak. The article is titled "The Man Who Fought Fauci—and Won" and tells us that his Bengali first name means “one who is victorious in the end.” The newspaper says, “Bhattacharya is as qualified as you can get to be head of the National Institutes of Health”, not least for his nomination being “a triumph of free speech”.

Dr. Bhattacharya is both a physician and economist, a combination that led to statistical conclusions first voiced in March and April of 2020 that made him a pariah in epidemiological circles. He co-authored an op-ed titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” that argued, followed by a study a month later, that the number of asymptotic and undetected cases vastly outnumbered those confirmed by testing, meaning that the death rate relative to all infections was much lower than the alarm sounded by the Center for Disease Control and… Read More »

china watch

I. Our Focus Elsewhere, the U.S. Neglects the China Threat

Mar 29 2024

The United States faces no greater threat than China, which Donald Trump would have to face come 2027. Let's Fix This Country put together this series to show how vastly unprepared the U.S. is to confront China militarily compared to our leadership's blind assumption of U.S. invincibility. Click the titles to read each of the subsequent installments:
I. Our Focus Elsewhere, the U.S. Neglects the China Threat
II. What Would War With China Look Like?
III. War with China: Could America… Read More »

media

We Could Be Down to One Party If Democrats Don’t Solve Their Media Problem »

Dec 20 2024

article illustration
After a crushing defeat at the polls, the Democratic Party is in a quandary, trying to find a way forward. It has seen its traditional constituency, the working class, usurped by the Republican Party – or should we call it the Trump Party — and must discover how to bring the flock back into the fold. The left espouses a host of programs that voters want, but there's a problem: How will Democrats make themselves known? How will they reach the public?

The Trump campaign emerged from the election well ahead of Democrats for having exploited every avenue to reach voters. They exhibited remarkable savvy about where all age groups go to form… Read More »