What if Donald Trump defeats President Biden and takes control of the White House in 2025? He has already announced his plans to become the country’s first dictator, and to launch a reign of terror and revenge against his so-called enemies. As detailed in documents such as Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere, the infrastructure is being created right now to put Trump's neofascist plans to end multiracial pluralistic democracy in effect on “day one." The so-called resistance will not have the courtesy of ramping up or mobilizing to stop Dictator Trump’s onslaught. It will be a “shock and awe” campaign visited upon the American people.
Dictator Trump’s reign of terror will be made even worse by the fact that as shown during recent speeches, interviews, and at other events he appears to be encountering severe difficulties in cognition, language, and memory.
In a series of recent conversations with me here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," has issued this warning: “Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing.”
If Dr. Gartner and the other medical professionals I have spoken to, both here at Salon and off the record, about Trump’s apparent mental and emotional challenges are in fact correct about how the corrupt ex-president will only get worse and not better, the American people will then be confronted by a horrible reality where Donald Trump will be both a dictator and a mad king. In total, there will be a horrific synergy between an American pathocracy and how the worst people seek political power and a leader who appears to have a diseased mind – which makes Trump easily manipulated by individuals and forces who are even more malevolent and dangerous than he is.
In an attempt to make better sense of Donald Trump’s obvious cognitive challenges and related behavior in the context of the country’s democracy crisis and the 2024 election, and what may happen next, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and suggestions.
Norm Ornstein is emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor for the Atlantic. He is also co-author of the bestselling book "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported."
Of course, it is increasingly obvious that Trump is facing significant mental decline. And we know from those who were close to him but are no longer, that this is not a new problem. But that issue is eclipsed by the other reality: this is a narcissistic sociopath who will stop at nothing to create a vicious, dictatorship built on retribution, racism, corruption, and sadism.
He doesn’t cushion it, or try to hide his motives, and neither do those he will clearly rely on if he were to assume the presidency. Invoke the Insurrection Act to put down demonstrations against him with violence and brutality. Blow up the federal government by firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with obedient flunkies. Create concentration camps to house millions before deporting them. Weaponize the Department Of Justice (DOJ), including the FBI, to go after his enemies and critics. Blow up every alliance and replace it with ties to the most vicious dictators in the world. What is especially unsettling, though, is how are key, mainstream, journalistic outlets, like the New York Times and the networks, shrug their shoulders at all of this, and treat him like he is a normal presidential candidate. It is no wonder that so many voters have no idea what a monster he is.
If this were a healthy democracy, we would have a healthy Supreme Court. We don’t. It is corrupt and not to be trusted when it comes to Trump. If this were a healthy democracy, we would have a press corps that would put a spotlight on what is real and not “both sides” everything while focusing on the horse race instead of the consequences of the election. President Biden needs to use the power of his bully pulpit to focus, over and over and over again, on the consequences of electing this monster for our democracy and the fundamental health of our country.
That the media are focused on Biden‘s age, while ignoring Trump’s infirmities is absolutely maddening. As James Fallows pointed out, in the New York Times there were headlines on Super Tuesday’s outcomes that Trump romped and Biden has trouble while Biden got a significantly higher percentage of votes than did Trump, which tells us all too much about media bias. Mainstream media may not consciously want Trump to win, but you wouldn’t know it from the frame of the coverage.
Darrin Bell is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, creator of the syndicated comic strip Candorville, and author of the graphic novel “The Talk." He is also a contributing cartoonist for the New Yorker.
Trump seems to be deteriorating quickly. I’m old enough to have seen several loved ones overcome with dementia at around his age, and it seems obvious he’s in the throes of that. The stress of the campaign, the court cases, and the civil judgments against him are compounding to make him a person dangerously unfit for office. Apparent dementia, plus sociopathy, plus a cult-like following, combined with vindictiveness, a persecution complex, a love of autocracy, and an entire far-right ecosystem bent on turning America into one, is a formula for the end of our democratic republic. That might sound hyperbolic if his cohorts hadn’t been inviting right-wing dictators to the Conservative Political Action Conference and issuing a manifesto called Project 2025 that details their plans to turn us into something akin to Russia or Hungary.
If we were a healthy democracy and society, Congress would impeach Clarence Thomas, and impeach (for lying under oath) every Supreme Court justice who said Roe v. Wade was settled law or a “super precedent,” and then voted to overturn it. The DOJ would prosecute at least three Supreme Court justices for bribery and corruption, for accepting lavish gifts and vacations from billionaires, some of whom had business before the court. Gini Thomas and several members of the House would be indicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The courts would declare gerrymandering to be unconstitutional.
We’d pass an amendment declaring “the right to vote shall not be abridged,” and throw everyone involved in voter purging schemes in prison. We’d pass a federal law against book banning in libraries and school districts, we’d make organizing to silence minority authors a hate crime, we’d pass laws rescinding federal funding from any school district that whitewashes the history of race in this country, or that eliminates civics courses.
President Biden and the Democratic Senate would read the damn Constitution and, upon learning that it says nothing about Congress being allowed to set the size of the Supreme Court and nothing about the limit being nine (it doesn’t even specify that a vacancy has to occur before a president can appoint a new justice), they would expand the Supreme Court to 15 members and appoint six new justices. We would eliminate every weakness in our system that contributed to the ability of an unhinged con man ever being in a position to overthrow our system of government. But because we’re NOT a healthy democracy and society, that’s not at all what WILL happen.
The Supreme Court and Judge Cannon will delay two of the most consequential trials until after the election, and Republicans in Georgia may use the travesty we just witnessed in a Georgia courtroom to remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis from the Georgia case whether the judge does or not — and replace her with a MAGA DA who’ll drop the charges or cut Trump a deal, avoiding a criminal conviction. Republicans will be energized, Democrats will be demoralized, some independents will begin to believe the lack of convictions means Democrats WERE persecuting Trump without good cause, and enough Democrats may stay home to hand Trump the election in November. At which point the insurrection and the documents cases will vanish, and Trump’s transition team will prepare for Inauguration Day, where they’ll be able to do what they’ve promised to do: use their power to punish everyone who’s “wronged” Donald Trump, from prosecutors to politicians to his critics in the media.
Eight years ago, Les Moonves said of Trump’s run, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.” Mainstream media is focused on Biden’s age for two reasons: The race being a dead heat is good for ratings, and they have a fetish for bothsidesism. That fetish often leads them to exaggerate Democratic politicians’ foibles and minimize or normalize Republicans’ treasonous or downright crazy behavior. The Republican Party has been committing treason on a regular basis ever since Richard Nixon persuaded the South Vietnamese to walk away from the Paris Peace talks, so he could prolong the Vietnam War in order to harm Democrats politically. The party’s been systematically denying Black people the vote for decades now, to maintain their power. They’ve bent the knee to a would-be tyrant with dementia, facilitated an attempted coup, became accomplices after the fact when they refused to convict Trump during his second impeachment and then promoted his Big Lie, and now they’re actively sabotaging Ukraine in its war against a tyrant they love, who’s clearly trying to win now a Cold War we thought his nation had lost generations ago.
The Republican Party is doing all that, yet the media continues to cover them as if they’re a political party and not an organized crime syndicate infested with fifth columnists that poses an existential threat not just to our democracy, but to the entire Western world. “But Biden is old” is a quick and easy way to make sure the polls remain as tight as possible and their ratings remain as high as possible, because if they were to honestly cover what’s going on, the race wouldn’t even be close. 4. As always anything else you would like to add given your specific concerns. If the left stays home and lets Donald Trump win because we’re unhappy with Biden’s failures, just wait until we see Donald Trump’s version of “successes.”
Rich Logis is an ex-MAGA activist and Founder of Leaving MAGA.
The presidential election in November is near-literally life-or-death for Trump. The mythology of business genius he has cultivated for decades is unraveling, and he knows that attaining 270 electoral votes could be the difference between remaining a free man or dying in prison.
We are observing with Trump, in real-time, how life-or-death duress accelerates one’s mental decline, and pushes one further into a “nothing to lose” corner.
Trump (allegedly) did what he did, on January 6, in Georgia and the purloining of classified information because he never (or minimally) feared legal consequences. He hedged a bet and lost; to keep up mythology appearances, he must continue to lie that he is innocent, has absolute immunity and, of course, that he’s being persecuted by President Biden and Fani Willis—which means it’s MAGA Americans who are being persecuted. Trump dismisses his legal problems because it is how he compensates for the sheer quantity of self-inflicted stress—stress that even the strongest-willed human being would rapidly wilt under.
Does Trump actually believe all this? Probably not. His lawyers are no legal eagles, but even they must know that their defenses are more than absurd. Deep down, Trump is more petrified than he’s ever been; I’m not qualified to make that assessment, admittedly, but I’m virtually certain of it. Why? Because if I was guilty of the crimes he’s alleged to have committed, my brain would overheat and go haywire, too; confusing Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, middle-of-the-night rage tweets and continually delving deeper into conspiracy abysses are symptomatic of his life-or-death realization.
As an ex-MAGA activist, my team and I are building a community for the Trump remorseful, or are having doubts, called Leaving MAGA. I respect that some may disagree, but both parties share culpability in creating the opening for MAGA and Trump (although, the GOP is far more responsible); and I continue to emphasize that frustration with our two-party system, and sentiments of being left behind, were valid reasons for originally getting behind Trump’s campaign. Those reasons, however, are no longer valid.
MAGA Americans are responsible for their own thoughts and actions; it would also behoove us to acknowledge that many of them have been exploited and manipulated into believing that Trump’s “last stand” is also theirs. Trump and MAGA continue to politically traumatize millions into states of desperation and panic—that Trump is all who stands between losing, or preserving, their/our country. This is a toxic martyrdom unlike any seen in American history.
The majority of MAGA Americans are good people, who have allowed themselves to be led astray. I don’t want to see them sacrifice themselves at the altar of the Trump golden calf. I try to avoid hyperbole; but when my personal and political epiphany resulted in leaving MAGA, I concluded that I permitted myself to become someone I’m truly not. Trump would burn down our nation to rule over her ashes because that outcome is preferable to a jailed twilight of his life.
For all the public debates and discourse over whether Trump should be barred from running for office, what has, somewhat surprisingly, been overlooked is that it’s the GOP that should have barred Trump from appearing on the ballot. As a private entity, the Republican Party can prohibit anyone from receiving the nomination.
The potential constitutional crisis facing the nation—a likely-imprisoned felon elected president who pardons himself, like a monarch, and is, possibly, affirmed in his decision by our U.S. Supreme Court—is a quagmire that the GOP is solely responsible for.
The Democratic Party would be well-served to ask—not tell—the American people if a convicted felon president will put their careers, businesses, children’s education, economic mobility, quality of life and future entitlements on upward trajectories. And do you think the political party who nominates that convicted felon has your, and your family’s, best interests in mind? People are moved and motivated by issues that affect their lives; MAGA is antithetical to a bruised and battered — but, I believe —still alive American dream. The health of our democracy is gauged by how many of our fellow countrymen and women feel invested in it; the fewer, the likelier Trump is re-elected.
The “liberal media” mythology is gospel in MAGA. I believed it until I left MAGA; and everyone I knew in MAGA did, too. We also used to mock polls. Pollsters and our national press—incestuous in their relationships—will never recover from the shock of so egregiously missing the 2016 grassroots appeal of Trump. Now that the national press has (as usual) been bullied by the right-wing into running myriad “Biden’s age” reports and punditry, the media is in its own sunk-cost fallacy, and will only intensify efforts to cast doubts on Biden’s ability to serve, with a well-meaning, but delusional, obsessive yearning to save the GOP. Stories about Trump’s age and cognitive confusion are far fewer and between, compared to Biden stories.
Polls are as useless as a winning lotto ticket on a deserted island; but a quick glance of the “liberal media” will show that the press and pollsters have a vested interest in reactionary, horse-race coverage. While in MAGA, I knew well a paid political director for the 2016 Trump campaign. On many occasions, we discussed that polls were political pablum, buttressed by the press to shape public perception, drive traffic to news and opinion sites and generate contributions to political parties. This was true then and is true now. If Trump were to be re-elected, the national press would say that it listened more to Trump voters than in 2016 and 2020. To the credit of The New York Times, they ran a piece earlier this week that featured Biden voters’ reasons for supporting him.
In the five stages of GOP grief, anti-Trump Republicans are in bargaining/depression; soon they’ll be at acceptance—the final stage. At acceptance, the vast majority of Nikki Haley voters will shuffle right back to Trump once he’s nominated. Maybe, then, our national press will, finally, resign itself to the fact that there is no messiah arriving to salvage the GOP. I pay for much of the media I critique because I believe it still produces a net-positive. But the wish to be liked by those who refer to them as the “enemedia” needs to be retired.
The U.S. is undergoing another historical transformation. We’ve undergone several in our history, ranging from our earliest days; our Civil War; women’s suffrage; World War 2; the 1950s and 60s; Sept. 11; former President Obama’s election and re-election; and, now, MAGA. The question is whether we continue our liberal democracy progress—the continued perfection of our Union—or, whether we regress illiberally. A second Trump presidency will irreparably damage our democracy; it will mean the right-wing has won. And reversing their win will not be so easy to do, democratically; I am not advocating for political violence, but right-wing tyranny has never, in world history, been diplomatically, and peacefully, resolved.
Americans must electorally mercy-kill the Republican Party; not because we should desire a one-party nation, but because one of America’s two major parties will nominate someone who helped orchestrate a coup d'état against the Constitution—which Trump swore to defend and protect—and the American people—whom he swore to defend and protect—to remain in power. Yes, I admit: I’m catastrophizing. I also did so in 2016, when I thought the Democrats and Hillary Clinton posed existential threats to our nation, and to my family, my livelihood and I. Ignorant I was; now, I’m clearer-minded, and acutely understand MAGA because I actually lived it.
No civic savior is coming; we are the stewards of our republic.
