Friday’s raft of U.S. Supreme Court rulings by the Trumpian supermajority begins the formal process of regime change in America. Call them the Roberts Rules of the New Order. Between these, the semi-official Trump regime platform “Project 2025,” and the state-level tyrannies taking shape from Florida and Texas to Idaho, we can now make out some of the broad shapes of the incoming dictatorship, at least in its first years and in what it is willing, even eager, to announce publicly. That will be the focus of this post and upcoming posts. This writer has zero inside knowledge, but as Yigal Carmon, the former Israeli intelligence officer and founder of the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, recently observed in the context of the current Israeli authorities overlooking signs of the impending Hamas invasion of Israel last October, the “open sources” will tell you just about everything you need to know, while governments, spy agencies, and militaries remain obsessed with the cloak-and-dagger ferreting out of “secrets.”
Thus, we can say with confidence that with Trump/MAGA control of the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court all but assured, and the House of Representatives also more likely than not to stay in their hands, November 5, 2024 will probably be the last free and fair election in American history. The new authoritarian regime will have Trump as its personalized dictator who putatively controls everything. The U.S. Constitution will be a dead letter, as Trump has already declared publicly, and may even be formally nullified. Schemes have been under way for years on the right to call a new Constitutional Convention that could start from scratch, a process that is allowed under the existing Constitution but has been thought impractical until now because it has to pass in two-thirds of the state legislatures. If Trump and his collaborators find it necessary, this can be arranged, but I suspect it will suit them better to leave the new regime’s legal foundations ambiguous.
In official ideological terms, the Trump/MAGA regime will be “Christian Nationalist,” with the old Constitution’s separation of church and state repudiated for good, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights except the Second Amendment, on which see below. The Supreme MAGA Court with the three Trump justices has already lit the way down this dark path, with recent rulings mandating taxpayer support for religious private schools and stamping its seal of approval all over a public high school football coach leading his team in a midfield prayer to defeat those infidels from Northside High in the name of JESUS CHRIST, a thing that respected Christian theologians of the past might have considered blasphemous. Ah, but who, I say who, is Saint Augustine of Hippo beside Justice Neil Gorsuch?
All previous history would suggest that Donald “Two Corinthians” Trump will establish a state church with himself as Great White Father, but given the unique American religious landscape and the sectarian diversity within the Trump/MAGA coalition, strategic ambiguity again seems his most logical course. Former U.S. Army General Michael Flynn, a close Trump ally and his likely pick for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in charge of overseeing the imposition of martial law or its equivalent the moment Trump takes power, infamously said on November 13, 2021, “If we can have one nation under God,” the current U.S. motto, “we should have one church under God” and “one religion under God.” It’s worth watching the whole four-minute-long clip in which he says this, to observe the energy and enthusiasm on display both from this retired military man and his audience. Goddamn, but fascism is fun!
But it’s serious business too, because Flynn warns the crowd that “the ground under us is shaking” and a final battle of “good versus evil” is under way. If you listen closely, however, what he’s actually calling for is some sort of Christian umbrella over all the American churches (he says “Judeo-Christian,” but that is only a vestigial remnant of post-World War II American ecumenicism, because his proof text is from the New Testament’s Book of Matthew). Perhaps there will be some sort of USA Official Church that all Christian denominations will be encouraged to join. There can be lots of wiggle room, and there will have to be given that Catholic clerico-fascists such as the convert Sohrab Ahmari are an integral part of MAGA/Trump. In the long and even medium term, though, there will be tensions and eventually open disputes that will be impossible to paper over. To take a current example, which Bible did the state of Oklahoma just declare that its teachers must instruct their students about? The Jewish Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, but with the books organized differently than the churches do and without the Gospels? Don’t make me laugh, “Judeo-Christians.” OF COURSE the Gospels are mandatory, because they are required for the salvation of all the public school students in the Church of Oklahoma!
Ah, but which Gospels and which “Christian Bible”? Blessed Sohrab’s Roman Catholic Church, for example, is generous in its inclusiveness of many Apocryphal books that other Christian churches would rather leave out altogether. So does the Pope in Rome get to decide, or Pastor Smith of Enid, Oklahoma’s Thirty-Eighth Baptist Church? Wanna fight about it? The Europeans sure as hell did. It was called the Thirty Years War, because it lasted from 1618 to 1648 and devastated much of what is now Germany, and that was only one episode in at least two centuries of troubles brought about by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. (This history was recent and vivid to the actual Founding Fathers, as opposed to the fantasy fundamentalist founders of the evangelical imagination, and helps explain their support for separating church and state.) Within living memory, American Protestant pastors of one denomination or another were routinely denouncing the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. It will be against the interests of the Trump/MAGA regime to have intra-Christian religious warfare raging as it consolidates control in its early years, although later, if it gains full totalitarian control, it may choose to target certain churches and their adherents as newly disfavored populations to be removed from America Great Again, and I’m looking at you, “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” Mormons with your two-thirds vote for Trump in 2020.
That will be some way down the road, however, because there are other population groups targeted for removal first. I refer, of course, to migrants and the homeless. Trump/MAGA is like its totalitarian precursors, Nazism and “Marxist-Leninist” Communism, in declaring that society’s main problem is the existence in its midst of certain “harmful elements” that must be destroyed. For the Nazis, of course, that was first, last, and always the Jews, although Gentile Germans with any kind of inherited disabilities, “Gypsies” (the Roma and Sinti peoples), and more were also killed en masse. For Marxist-Leninist and Maoist Communism, the target groups were “class”-based, meaning the former nobility, “bourgeois capitalists,” former landlords, and in Russia and Ukraine although not in China, “kulaks,” the better-off peasantry. It should be noted, however, that Nazi-style complete physical annihilation is not the only way to “remove” such disfavored groups. In his 2007 book, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen writes that “eliminationism” can instead entail mass expulsion, which is supposed to be the Trump/MAGA plan for the migrants.
Happily, the Supreme MAGA Court on Friday cleared the way for Dictator Donnie to clean up all those “Democrat controlled” big cities by removing the homeless to concentration camps (“tent cities” on “inexpensive land” is what he called for in 2023, there was no need for him to mention the barbed wire and watchtowers that would surround them), since the Court greenlit those selfsame cities to ban “outdoor camping” by those unsightly, unhoused unpersons. As Justice Gorsuch wrote for the six-justice supermajority: “The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities [to drive out the homeless] from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy.” Call it the Bill of Rights’ Magic Disappearing Act!
But the Supreme MAGA Court was much more ambitious than that in its rulings Friday, establishing another pillar of the incoming regime, namely that all material benefits under regime control are to be showered more or less openly on the Leader himself, his family, and a handful of other selected plutocrats. In doing so, the government cannot afford to be distracted by the concerns of the losers and suckers under its control, to which end Chief Justice John “The Smiling Face of Fascism” Roberts wrote for the supermajority that federal agencies have very limited power to protect consumers, the environment, or any other broad public interest, including even stock market investors, as he made clear in a separate ruling on Thursday. Given the Court’s rulings legalizing most forms of bribery and the MAGA-controlled House of Representatives’ repeated attempts to defund the IRS with the aim of preventing any collection of any taxes from the plutocracy, the final goal could not be clearer; but in case it wasn’t, the President-for-Life explicitly told his fellow plutocrats in April about all the goodies he will shower on them if they help him attain unlimited power.
Just in case there is any resistance to these master plans, the Court also legalized quasi-machine guns earlier this month, with Justice Clarence “Supreme Yacht Freeloaders’ Club” Thomas writing that travesty, and then ruled on Friday that their intended users, people like the Patriots of the Poo-Poo Putsch, cannot be prosecuted by the ancien regime for making a violent attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from the Leader, with Sunny John Roberts penning this smiling sanctioning of sedition. Heck, at this point the Supreme MAGAs might as well just lower the U.S. flag from in front of their great marble pile and run up one of Martha-Ann “MAGA Betsy Ross” Alito’s colorful banners instead.
As I mentioned earlier, the Second Amendment will be the only survivor from the old Constitution and Bill of Rights after the final American election later this year. It will remain in place as long as the revolutionary regime needs freelance fighters. Once things settle down, of course, all those proud gun collectors will need to register and cough up for a Trump Card or some such document, a price most of them will be happy to pay, at least at first.
Good night, America. Sweet dreams.
Emanuel Goldstein 