Kat Gale’s Reviews > Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America > Status Update

Republican senators had sacrificed democracy for power. The Republican Party was now the Trump Party.

Republican lawmakers stayed behind Trump so long as he was delivering their wish list. In addition to the 2017 tax cut, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Trump enabled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to decimate the judiciary. During Trump’s term, McConnell churned through judicial nominees, putting in place more than 1 out of every 4 federal judges and, crucially, 3 Supreme Court justices.

[Trump] "assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said, “and in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.” He committed to running for president to defeat the man he believed threatened our democracy. Trump was building a right-wing populist army. But Republicans still did not speak out.

[In 2017] the FBI, CIA, & NSA concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump...[his supporters wore] shirts that said “I’d Rather Be Russian Than a Democrat.” They also put slogans on FB & elsewhere that offered “free helicopter rides” to their opponents, a chilling reference to the Chilean dictator Nixon had helped empower whose goons murdered dissidents by tossing them from helicopters.

What no one outside the government knew was that Miller and his allies within the administration were already at work on separating children of refugees at the southern border from their parents. When career officials in the government protested that such an attack on American law and fundamental human rights was outrageous, the extremists in the administration simply excluded them from planning sessions.

Trump’s authoritarianism became clear immediately when he insisted, contrary to all evidence, that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s...this stupid lie was not only a way to get media coverage but also a demonstration of dominance...constantly trying to defend what's real from what isn't destroys their ability to make sense of the world...authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Republicans had been ramping up the rhetorical techniques of dividing the country and demonizing their opponents since the 1960s, but they did not want an apocalypse; they wanted an end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required.\n\nTrump had risen to the presidency thanks to their machinations, but he went far beyond them, making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism.

Donald Trump Jr., Kushner, & Paul Manafort‐who had deep ties to Russia-met in Trump Tower with Russian operatives who offered damaging material on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In exchange, the Russians wanted the U.S. to drop sanctions...& support a plan to create a Russian-allied republic out of the four eastern regions of Ukraine. The new leader would be Manafort’s former boss Viktor Yanukovych.

[The Supreme Court's decision on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission] ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they weren't formally working with a candidate or party. Corporations&billionaires promptly formed super PACs, political action committees that were allowed to take funds from “dark money” groups—nonprofits that don't have to disclose their donors.

[The Affordable Care Act] went into effect in 2014, and by 2016 the number of uninsured Americans had been cut in half, with twenty million newly covered.