Letting Go of Denial
We’ve arrived at the moment when autocracy has become real. Up to now, we were in the possibility of it, or I was, until two days ago. But any vestiges of my denial are gone.
Trump, signing the first of Project 2025’s tsunami of planned Executive Orders
Note to readers: As I stated when I launched this newsletter, I began this as a private journal space to bear witness to how this political moment feels and what I think about it. I want to make sure I write to and for myself, first and foremost here, even if I’m sharing it with a public audience. So bear that in mind. This is a raw share, no editing back. We are at day 11 of the new administration. No more mincing of words or stepping carefully around it then: this is autocracy, just as we warned. And the start of a future American theocracy, if they succeed.
Everything about if feels disorienting and unprecedented, even though we endured an earlier Trump administration and we know Trump well. But that’s because Trump 2.0 is a very different beast: it’s a weaponized Project 2025, a radical blueprint to reshape America along the lines of the Orbán Hungarian playbook of illiberalism and corruption, with a long vision of remaking it as a Christian nation-state, run by a small coterie of true believers. A plutocratic theocracy, then, as many also warned.
Square waves are so dangerous you should get out of the sea immediately
This morning, like every morning of the past ten days, the words come the minute I wake. They’ve been gathering at the door of consciousness like children waiting to escape, to get out, to go explode somewhere. All the emotions and thoughts that got triggered by alarming news the day before and that I put away, in order to stay focused on working, on day tasks, on keeping the long view of this new regime in mind. Pace yourself, that’s a new mantra. Not just mine — ours. The big body of ours. There are so many people here in the US and globally who fall into that collective body. So many people who are waking now, feeling just like I do, with brains too full from the previous day’s and week’s events, feeling their denial falling away.
Bear witness, I thought, when my brain woke. That’s why you created a space to do so. Bear witness, because, while I felt very well prepared for every bit of the shock and awe that’s come to define Trump 2.0, I still absorb each new day’s attacks like a dull shock to my system, to my personal sense of what is right vs. wrong, what is decent vs. profane, what is cruel and criminal, and what must be stopped. It does matter that I was more prepared than many people for the soft coup, that I knew in granular detail the scope of that assault being planned with Project 2025. I was clear about the scope of the vision and the long-term impacts. But I still wasn’t certain about how far or quickly they would try to go in the opening salvo. They’ve gone further and faster and that says everything to me. They are going for broke, daring anyone to stop them.
For months, I’ve felt as ready as I might for a tsunami, proverbially watching the big waves forming like square lines on a far horizon, like those that form deadly riptides when they reach the shoreline. I knew the attacks would look like nothing we’d seen or I’d experienced before. The scope was and is sweeping. The minute I read about their plan — 17 months ago now, it was September 2023 — I reset my eyes on that horizon of what was to come. Trying to glimpse more about the kept- secret 180-Day Playbook of Project 2025, the instructional guidebook on how to implement change the minute Trump took office. That’s what’s been unfolding all week, via the hundreds of Executive Orders and presidential proclamations and agency memos. We’re only getting to see its contents now.
It's all there, the whole plan. I'm checking off the items, the by-department efforts to dissolve and reshape agencies and system of checks and balances and chains of command. All in service to a vision of an American government and country unlike anything we’ve known or could imagine. An authoritarian regime, a king-and-loyal-court structure, a plutocracy. The final shape isn’t clear but the elements of autocracy are being put in place, by the hour.
Autocracy. I roll the word around my tongue. A US autocracy. It's still a hard word to accept. Still unfamiliar, like something belonging to an earlier time, to Europe’s history, not ours. Still so clunky. My brain still wants to refute it. I’m still looking for words and descriptors that better fit. But I can’t deny we’re here. The enemy has taken power. We’re at war, we progressives. A true social war. Or as I think to myself, the wolf is in the house. The wolves, howling and out for blood.
I must have thought that knowledge would gird me from feeling moments of profound dismay. And fear, even though I’m relieved to see so much resistance emerge, and so quickly. Now I know better. Another chink in the armor of my preparedness has fallen away. I won’t be completely protected, mentally or emotionally, only partly. The hatred and deeply emotional intensity of their attacks will get past my armor, anyway, as it has all week.
I can take in a day’s worth of awful attacks, of Executive Orders and directives, and emails from colleagues that indicate it’s worse than what’s being reported, and I’ll put that away, mentally. In practice, as a journalist, I take each bit of news and I cut and paste the essentials into the Notes feature of my phone. I note it, and I put it away, so that I can take better stock of it all with a cooler head at a later moment, and write about it with greater perspective, and some assessment of how it all looks together, instead of allowing each hourly attack or development to take up too much room in my brain. That’s how I’m managing the daily trough.
But I misjudged how such attacks work, how they feel. How could I not? This is America; we’ve never had a true soft coup takeover of our government by forces who seek to do us harm. It’s the richest irony that the wolves were elected, in this case, by a slight majority of the country’s citizens who voted. They’re a rogue bunch but they’re sitting in the White House. That detail does matter, because we’re being forced to consider their actions as legal, while they shred our actual laws and mock our Constitution.
All this to say, I am taking in the dull shocks by day and they arise at night, when I’m sleeping, to knock loudly at the door of my inner brain when I wake.
The day before yesterday, this thought arrived, cutting through the deluge of bad news: This is the moment. We are in it now. No more waiting.
Up until then, everything was in a language of possibility: it could be this, it might become this, we expect this, we should anticipate this. But after many days of steady assaults, I let the thought surface and settle and stay fixed, front and center, in my brain. This is it then. This is the face of autocracy, no doubt about it. It may appear different from a violent military coup on the surface, but the vision is the same. A complete takeover, a consolidation of power into the hands of a small group. It doesn’t feel like Hitler or Mussolini, but I bet it feels the way it did to my parents, living in Europe, as the Nationalist Socialists rose, and the Black Shirts appeared to march in Rome. They probably felt the same dismay and disorientation and shivers of fear, and worry that no one was stopping the bully.
What’s changed, in just over a week, is our acceptance of this new reality. We are watching it reshape our lives hour by hour. We have to accept it, even as we refuse it. And it may be an administrative coup, but it has all the power of a violent one. We can feel the threat of the bullet and the threat of arrest behind the Executive Orders, too. All of us feel that. Some orders appear to have been hastily conceived or written, others well thought out. But they all bear the stamp of the wolf, gnashing his teeth.
It frustrates me that the newspapers keep writing about the barking orders as if Trump came up with them, as if they are his idea. This is a coup by a hidden small knot of people; he is the face. We know, in fact, that the Heritage Foundation and a small group of people who developed Project 2025, including OMB head Russell Vought and Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation and Stephen Miller, who dreamed up the mass deportation vision under Trump 1.0, are the true architects of this bold takeover. We even learned this week via press reports that members of the Heritage team hooked up their computers to the White House server to send out some of the ghastly EOs: the digital footprints remained on the documents, as tech sleuths discovered. Racing to release the next missive of their 180-Day Playbook. They appear rabid with the joy of destruction.
It's also frustrating that the media is not writing more about Catholic activist and dark moneyman Leonard Leo, who has played a key role in this coup, just as he bought and shaped our Supreme Court. He’s not alone, but he’s the major hidden player. He’s sinking big money into nominees, eyeing future judicial picks. He helped created the Silicon bro tech Teneo network, bringing wealthy players like Peter Thiel to help fund the Trump campaign in exchange for expected favors. Thiel’s aides now serve as the recruiting center for DOGE, calling for volunteer engineers tasked to deregulate our government and embed AI across the government and assure big slices of the money pie for themselves and their companies.
Then there is Viktor Orbán’s clan: his minions at the Hungarian think tank Danube Institute, who’ve acted as consultants since 2022 to Roberts and the Heritage team on the finer points of how to implement Project 2025. They’ve given tips on how implement the three key ingredients that make up Orbán’s recipe of illiberalism and how to adapt the formula to America’s government. A steady stream of Trump 2.0 nominees and key Project 2025 architects also visited Hungary and met Orbán and other European far right populists to study their illiberal playbook.
In exchange, Orbán has championed a MAGA remake for Europe and the European Parliament, under the MEGA banner: Make Europe Great Again. He’s a big fan of Trump’s, and the strongman bromance goes both ways.
Point being, we need more investigative journalism about this. We need a lot more Americans to be told about Orbán and how Hungary’s Fidesz party has paved the way for Trump and Co. and Project 2025. How Hungary first criminalized immigrants and sealed its borders, then demonized and targeted transgender and LGTQIA+ people, while imposing a Catholic anti-choice agenda, outlawing abortion and promoting abstinence, and all the while recruiting and awarding billionaire cronies to be in charge of government agencies and help take control of the media. How disinformation is key. How the model of privatization, and deregulation and DOGE mirrors what Orbán has done in Hungary. And what other far-right populists are also doing, including Catholic autocrats like Argentina’s Millei, who’s moved very quickly to impose his war on woke and gender. He's taken his own cues from Orbán to target immigrants and transgender rights and abortion. Millei is loudly cheering on Trump and Co, saying, keep going, don’t hold back. Go as far as you can.
We need our media coverage to provide more context for this moment, more look ahead to what the big picture goals aim to be.
It's also frustrating that the major media are not engaging in a more critical consideration of what it means for America, a secular nation, that an extremist political movement masking as a Christian religious one has taken power. The Christian nationalists, led by many followers of the Pentecostalist New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A fast-growing evangelical branch that views its members as living apostles tasked with a holy duty to take control of all spheres of our society and lives – the so-called Seven Mountains Mandate. They espouse intolerance of anything or anyone who does not share their radical beliefs. The NAR are in the Cabinet, filling the vacancies being created as Biden officials are being fired.
Where is our media, writing about the ramifications of this? They’re caught up in his hour’s Executive Order, not looking past it to the bigger picture. Not all journalists, but critical ones. Rachel Maddox continues to shine on MSNBC. Substack has a lot of terrific reporters. But the big media? We need more of them to be reporting on this, and instead, the legacy media is in retreat, their owners bending a knee to Trump, their editors often presenting Trump’s actions as nearly normal - albeit a chaotic, period of presidential transition.
No, I say. It’s autocracy. Can you please get it right? Cover it squarely and fairly, as you might the regime of another country?
Pressing some holy MAGA flesh on the campaign trail
I find it worth noting that major US media outlets seem to have little difficulty writing about Islam in negative ways, and discussing Islamic theocratic regimes with an understanding of how religion has been weaponized to become a holy war for political gain, for pure social control. We understand that patriarchy is key to the Islamist jihadist vision of maintaining power and we see how they weaponize gender. But they are not writing about the incoming government as a form of Christian jihadism. Some make popular culture references to The Handmaiden’s Tale, but they still aren’t ready to say Pete Hegseth is equivalent to an ayatollah or mullah waging sharia war.
Why, I’m not sure. Maybe the mullahs we tend to spotlight as America’s enemies on television read foreign, wearing different clothes, including traditional robes and turbans, and with long beards, while Hegseth looks like the steroid-pumped born-again gym bunny who had his glory days in Iraq and found God and tatted up his body and expects to impress women with his biceps. With his ‘masculine energy,’ as Mark Zuckerberg has famously put it, wanting more of that, apparently. The mullahs are Other; Hegseth is the guy to avoid at the bar who can’t hold his liquor and has been deemed a sexual predator. He’s familiar and handsome and looks good in a suit, so fit. It’s hard for people, including the media, to imagine him or others as dangerous holy warriors, somewhere. Is that it? I’m not sure.
The same holds for mild-looking Mike Johnson and wonky Russell Vought. Johnson looks like a cartoon Dilbert, the ultimate office nerd. How do we square a Dilbert with a living apostle wielding a bible like a machete? With a soft coup? With autocracy? It’s not an easy public conversation, even if it’s real and what we absolutely need and what the media should be helping to broker.
The newspapers are writing correctly about the fast-moving round-ups of immigrants, and the stripping away of rights of transgender people — the first wave of undesirables. They are doing a good job there. They are reporting correctly that the regime is flexing its muscle with maximum effort to maximum impact, seeking to sweep up as many unwanted in its maw. They are noting that the arrests and detentions of those without papers are also spilling over, catching some with papers, too. And that some 30,000 deportees may soon be locked up now at Guantanamo, in a planned military internment camp where, for decades, we kept the worst of America’s enemy jihadists. They are also correctly writing about the dehumanization that is the hallmark of fascism, designed to strip transgender individuals of their social protections and sense of gender identity, and criminalizing that gendered self. But they are not talking much about religion, and the radicalization of this group of American officials, and what it portends for our county.
The Trump Defense department memo listing events that it will no longer honored by the DIA
I’m going to share one example of something that pierced my protective shell yesterday. It’s not even the worst of attacks; far from it. But it got through anyway, and I felt a small shock. Shock and dismay, then anger, then sorrow. A typical domino scale of managing grief. I’m not at acceptance yet, and hope never to be.
The attack was labeled as a pause. It was issued as a Dept. of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memo with the subject line, “A Pause on Special Emphasis Programs and Activities and Events.” It’s part of a growing list of scorched-earth directives against DEI -- diversity, equity and inclusion – and part of Project 2025’s plan to eliminate the social gains made by women, non-whites, gay, disabled, and indigenous people, among others. Another flexing of power by white Christian conservative men. But make no mistake: it’s not a pause; it’s a Go button. It’s a calculated attack on American plurality and diversity.
The memo lists holidays that will no longer be honored by employees in the Defense Dept. It takes aim at women, Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gay people, the disabled…. That’s the list so far. No longer will we honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the life and struggles and vision of one of our greatest civil rights leaders. Civil rights are viewed as a threat to the second Trump administration. A mistake. A course of history that must be reversed, starting with elimination of any mention of its advances. The pause is a crude, dramatic historical corrective, or seeks to be. A seemingly mundane, bureaucratic memo, one with a weight of antebellum America’s slave history behind it, seeking to reverse course, seeking historic erasure. It’s another statement of white power, a declaration of whiteness as the legitimate social force and narrative of America to be celebrated and taught. It’s the Master’s call, using a pen, not a whip, to wield power.
Consider the list of holidays to be struck down: not only MLK Jr’s birthday and Juneteenth and Black History Month, but National Hispanic Heritage Month, too. Lest the brown people of America think their struggles for equality deserve to be honored. Add to that list Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and National American Indian Heritage Month. The erasure aims to go back to the origin story of America, and revise our understanding of how we got to where we are today. The DEI orders are about excision and revision, in order to promote the lie that America is now color blind, that racism is an artefact of our history. Project 2025 put this forward clearly, calling America a post-racial society. Again double-speak and gaslighting, by any other name.
I was almost surprised to see the inclusion of the Days of Holocaust Remembrance on the list. That’s because Hegseth and Vought and others like Pam Bondi are Christian Zionists as well Christian nationalists who share an end-times prophecy belief that Israel, and thus Jews, must exist in order for Jesus to one day return. But then again, scratch the surface of the Christian nationalist movement and deep currents of antisemitism and Islamophobia quickly surface, as well as white supremacy and patriarchy. So maybe that won out here.
There’s more. National Disability Employment Awareness Month made the list. That’s because people with disabilities who seek equal treatment are also being lumped into the basket of undesirables by this regime. Project 2025’s anti-DEI proposals spell that out: no preferential treatment, no special education, no accessibility ramps in public places for people living with disabilities. They, too, are Othered.
We can’t forget gender. The memo calls for eliminating Women’s History Month and Women’s Equality Day, on top of Pride. While we witness the avalanche of attacks on transgender and nonbinary identity and rights, let’s not forget that the Christian white patriarchs are going after women’s bodies too, including abortion and contraception, with a clear goal of asserting their dominion over our reproductive capacity and sexuality and agency and social identity. All that is not white and male must be controlled. That’s what underlies the DIA memo. I want to mention that, among the many excellent journos covering the gender war, Jessica Valenti’s Substack is a great, daily resource. (I culled both memo excerpts from an entry this week – thanks Jessica.)
Trump has gone so far as to proclaim that only two genders can exist and will be recognized by the federal government: male and female. A conflating of gender and sex and human biology, for starters. A deliberate misstatement of what science has long showed us: we are diverse, in our mutable and immutable makeup, in our brains, and at a basic cellular level, in our DNA. A law on gender, as if he or his circle truly believe they are God or can act in God’s name —meaning, some divine way. By now, we all realize that transgender individuals and non-binary identity are just the low-hanging fruit of the autocrat’s playbook — the most socially vulnerable, thus easier to target, of undesirables. They’re also going after the other stripes of LGBTQ+ identity and the gains of our progressive queer movement.
Any day now, I tell others, we should expect EOs or presidential proclamations ending the federal recognition of same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, protection against same-sex discrimination in employment, and other hard-won LGBTQ+ rights …. that’s just a partial list, easily gleaned from Project 2025. We should expect all references to LGBTQIA+ identity, like trans, to be removed from federal rules and policies. That’s a priority of Project 2025. And we should expect future efforts to further criminalize transgender identity and homosexuality, because that’s all in the playbook too. You can read all about this in the briefs on Project 2025 if you aren’t familiar with that list. Here’s a priority list of summary by-department proposals I wrote with my colleague Sally O’Driscroll very early on. I’m checking off our list as each day’s EO’s are announced. So far, very close matches. I’ll be posting on that in the other ‘stack soon.
So don’t be caught flat-footed. That’s my take-home message today. Whatever vestiges of denial you may have, push through. Try to see clearly where this is going and accept it. We are here, now, or will be there, tomorrow, or soon.
We need to be even more prepared than we are right now with needed pro-active counter-legal measures, but also psychologically – in ourselves, as individuals, and in our communities. The attacks will aim at those who are gay-married and queer parents, including those with adopted children, and blended families, and will move to criminalize trans members. We need to prepare for even greater defense. We need to look back at what worked in the past to fight and win similar attacks on gay marriage and other fronts.
What we can’t afford is any more denial. That, and media stories labeling the attacks as confusing and chaotic when what is unfolding is actually a clear master plan to dismantle our system of democratic government. The more we can see it as a clear plan, the more we discuss the Orbán recipe of illiberalism, the more Americans will realize they don’t support this vision of our future, that they are being hurt by the new policies. The more we expose who’s behind the EOs – who wrote them, and what billionaires and dark money funded the work, and who’s paying the lobbyists for nominees and judicial hires, and who of the DOGE and tech bro network is likely to profit from the deregulation of federal rules and policies – the better.
Photo: Buenos Aires Times
A closing note: tomorrow, thousands of Argentinians are expected to turn up in front of the Congress in Buenos Aires for a Federal Pride March called by a collective of LGBTQ+ and human rights groups and activists. The march was called in response to Millei’s latest anti-gay salvo, where he equated social justice with socialism, which, he declared, “always end in misery,” and also equated feminism, gender expression and human rights issues to “the mental virus of the woke ideology.” His administration is drafting a bill to lower the number of transgender government employees, repeal femicide as an aggravated crime, and eliminate a non-binary identity marker on national ID cards.
Is Trump 2.0 taking notice? Of course, and we must too. We need to make our protests here just as visible. And be ready for that playbook.
Next week, I’m happy to report, our seasoned colleagues at Housing Works are leading a federal protest rally in DC on February 6th to call for public support of funding PEPFAR, the global HIV program, after the Trump regime moved to freeze federal global money and programs, ending a 90-day review. As I write, the White House issued a waiver of the global freeze order after massive protests. But it’s still unclear if the actual funding for PEPFAR is back on, or if it’s more administrative double-speak. There are also new lawsuits that have been filed to counter the odious anti-trans EOs, and other ones.
As it stands, legal teams from the ACLU and others in Democracy 2025, the hub for anti-Trump 2.0 litigation, aren’t backing down. They plan to be in court Monday and any days after that, as needed for the global aid EO waiver, until it’s clear that PEPFAR will remain funded as a proven weapon against the epidemic. They’re already readying their challenge to the Guantanamo internment plan and the DEI attacks. In other words, they aren’t in any denial about both the threat and reality of what’s at stake now.
All eyes on Argentina then, and on the DC PEPFAR rally next week, on our growing protests and resistance here and across America.