Not surprisingly, Bernie Sanders was distinctly ahead of his time when it came to Donald Trump. Back in 2016, as Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington reminded us recently, Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination by saying “I alone can fix it.” And Bernie promptly responded by asking: “Is this guy running for president or dictator?” Eight years later, the answer, as Trump himself assured us in early December, is distinctly yes to dictator, at least for a day during which “we’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.” And it wasn’t just a passing Trumpian comment, since he’s repeated it more than once (“because I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill”). Oh yes, he would, of course, also be the most climate-change-denying president of all time, a man determined to ensure that this planet will someday be burned to a crisp. (Drill, drill, drill! Heat, heat, heat!) He’s also recently suggested that he would “order the arrest and prosecution of Mr. Biden and other top Democrats, [and] also told the assembled Iowa voters that he’d assemble a ‘deportation force’ to remove more than 7,000,000 migrants from the country without due process.”
And of course, that would only be “day one”! Let’s not even think about day two or three, no less year two or three. And don’t forget that we’re talking about a former president who now faces 91 criminal charges in four ongoing cases. (And then there are those civil cases, too… but don’t get me started!) He could even conceivably enter the Oval Office as a convicted criminal, facing prison time.
No wonder Sanders also added that a Trumpian victory in November “will be the end of democracy, functional democracy.” No, The Donald would be unlikely to immediately rule out future elections but, as TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino explains today, he would — with the help of various right-wing think tanks and the like — reorganize our less-than-all-American world “in his image,” which is the definition of a hell on earth. With that in mind, let Mazzarino take you deep into a possible future America undergoing complete Donaldization.- - -Tom
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