“I was saved by God to make America great again,” President Trump, in his inaugural address.h

“We shouldn’t be in a position where you have tumbleweed that’s dry as a bone. Even tumbleweed can be nice & green & rich & it’s not gonna burn. You don’t even have to remove it. It’s not gonna burn. But it’s just dry. So I hope you can all get together & say I’m so happy with the water.” President Trump at a firehouse in LA.

Mr. Hegseth, like many of President Trump’s nominees, represents a break from the status quo. His nomination directly challenges the internal culture, decision-making process, and politicization of the Department of Defense that the Biden Administration has propagated for the last four years. Horace Cooper in the National Center for Public Policy Research (which bills itself as a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think tank).

I don’t know what to make of Trump. I told myself I wouldn’t react like I did his first term. Then I watch a clip of him doing, almost anything, really, and it’s so full of casual assholery that I lose all objectivity.

However, I’m not as depressed as I thought I would be about Donald Trump winning the presidency again, but, listening to Trump bloviating every day, I’m getting there. Part of why I’m not that depressed, I think, is that I don’t think the Democrats are doing that great a job, and part of that is because I didn’t think Trump would be as bad as the New York Times thinks. Maybe the second part of my complacency is a pipe dream; Trump is undoubtedly a narcissist and a disrupter. But he has proven to be incompetent at almost everything he has tried. I think the last two personality traits will cancel each other out in a way.

Donald Trump will make a lot of waves, but he is not going to invade Canada (I don’t think). We liberals get hung up in what he says, and a lot of what he says is just filling space, just staying in the limelight. During his first term, Trump repeatedly said that he was going to release his Obama Care replacement in two weeks, strangely – it was always two weeks – and it never happened. This time around, he was going to end the Russo-Ukrainian War on day one; of course, he didn’t. He didn’t even try. It was all just talk.

Still, he is a disrupter, and he will be disruptive. All indicators indicate that he either doesn’t believe in Climate Change or doesn’t give a shit. Either way, President Trump will be terrible for the planet, but Vice-Presendent Harris wouldn’t have been appreciably better. Vice-president Harris might want to start reacting to Climate Change like it is a real threat, but the Democratic establishment does not want change the status quo. Harris would be better than Trump for sure, for sure, but still not what the world needs.

I do think that Trump will do a lot of damage to a variety of governmental agencies and a lot of people who work for them. He is a vengeful son of a bitch and it will not be pretty. Still, I don’t think he will turn us into a copy of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I don’t think he will for two reasons: one, Trump is not competent enough to pull off a coup, and, two, the only countries that have slipped from being democracies to being ruled by autocrats were democracies that had been democracies for a short period of time. The German Weimar Republic, even the idea of being a German democracy, actually was only about fifteen years old when Hitler destroyed it.

The United States has been a democracy for about 236 years, and democracy is deep in our blood and deep in our bones. OK, we aren’t really a democracy. We started with the vote being only for White Men who owned property, and it has slowly gotten better. I don’t know when the property qualification was dropped, but Black men were not allowed to vote until 1870 (and for a large portion of Black people, not until the mid-60s). Women were not allowed to vote until 1920.

However, our national myth is that we are a democratic country, and even people who are unable to vote are willing to die for that myth. People like the Tuskegee Airman during World War II. That makes it much more difficult to overturn the United States government compared to, say, Hungry or Russia.

I’m not trying to say that everything is going to be great for the next four years, it won’t be. I don’t think, however, that it will be the end of democracy.