What will Trump 2.0 do or bring to the United States and the world?
Traditional news outlets (i.e. Corporate Media, print and broadcast) have been following the well-worn path of expounding what they think is going to happen. But how often do those predictions fail to materialize.
Case in point: the US Congress, now in this last month of the lame duck presidency of Joe Biden, last night faced a deadline to keep the federal government funded/open by passing either a comprehensive budget or a short term CR (continuing resolution). Pundits got all freaky when those who control massive social media ("pseudo-president-elect" Elon Musk and for all intents and purposes, Musk's underling, Trump, threatened all Republicans in both chambers of Congress with being PRIMARIED in 2022 if they didn't do what Musk wanted done about funding the federal government.
From the Washington Post (gift article):
Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown, approving a last-gasp federal funding bill to cap a week whose events could reverberate throughout 2025 and Donald Trump’s second presidency.
The House on Friday agreed to a bipartisan deal to punt a funding deadline to March 14, send $110.4 billion to struggling farmers and natural disaster victims, and renew the massive agriculture and anti-poverty law known as the farm bill. The Senate quickly followed suit to pass it early Saturday, and President Joe Biden signed the bill into law late Saturday morning.
But the days it took to reach that agreement severely damaged the standing of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and forced GOP leadership in the lower chamber into a handshake debt agreement that could restrain Trump’s legislative ambitions. [Let's talk about those ambitions when they become more concrete]
Johnson on Tuesday unveiled a bipartisan bill to put off a shutdown that also included provisions to lower prescription drug costs and curtail private-sector investment to China. But House Republicans — egged on by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk — walked away from a deal on Wednesday.
That risked not only a government shutdown, but called into question Johnson’s standing within his party; he must run to retain his speakership on Jan. 3, when a new Congress is seated. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) earlier in the week declared he would not support Johnson to retain that office. Another lawmaker, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chair of the archconservative Freedom Caucus, said late Friday that he was “undecided” on the future of the House’s GOP leadership.
AS IF pundits, at this juncture, can predict anything with precision. Good grief.
And then there's the other corporate media freak out situation of December 2024: murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Corporate media, apparently because it fancies itself as the voice of the people (it isn't), played up the hunt for the shooter, later identified by various law enforcement entities as Luigi Mangione. A social media frenzy followed the hunt and lionized Mangione. Because the for-profit nature of health care insurance coverage underlies the sinister nature of access to health care and pervasive tragedies caused by denials of care understood to be enacted to save the health of stockholders' stakes in those massive corporations. Nevertheless, this quote is salient to our political times and the attendant polarization.
Violence often springs from a sense of injustice, inequality, and insecurity—and a sense that those grievances and fears will not be addressed by the current system. But systems can change.
Walter, Barbara F.. How Civil Wars Start (p. 197). Crown. Kindle Edition.
So, where will we go and what will we see happen in the US in 2025? Besides rampant corruption and kleptocracy we have come to expect because of Trump 1.0, we don't know with any degree of specificity.
Yet I'm less freaked out than I was in the days just after the November election.
American institutions held in the wake of our country's first less than peaceful transfer of power in 2020. They didn't work as quickly or smoothly as many of us had hoped. But we're not yet an authoritarian dictatorship. Maybe closer than we should be to Anocracy,
Anocracy, or semi-democracy, is a form of government that is loosely defined as part democracy and part dictatorship, or as a "regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features". Another definition classifies anocracy as "a regime that permits some means of participation through opposition group behavior but that has incomplete development of mechanisms to redress grievances." The term "semi-democratic" is reserved for stable regimes that combine democratic and authoritarian elements. Scholars distinguish anocracies from autocracies and democracies in their capability to maintain authority, political dynamics, and policy agendas. Anocratic regimes have democratic institutions that allow for nominal amounts of competition. Such regimes are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of armed conflict and unexpected or adverse changes in leadership.
We'll have to figure it out as we go. However, as former AUSA Joyce White Vance signs off on her nightly Civil Discourse Substack posts, "We're in this together."
