A few days ago, the New York Times published a description of the policies envisioned by Trump’s inner circle. The goals is to take control of independent agencies and to strip the independence of federal civil servants. Thom Hartmann wrote here about those plans and their danger to democracy.

Earlier this week, The New York Times published a partial exposé of Trump’s plans for his second administration. It involved basically turning America into Russia or Hungary, where the president becomes the singular center of federal power, eclipsing Congress and the Courts.
For example, the Times writes:

For example, the Times writes:

“Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.”

How would this play out? The FCC has power over the internet, as well as all broadcast media in America; it’s how the Trump administration killed Net Neutrality and gave the giant Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the legal right to track everything you do and sayon the web right down to the last keystroke of your posts and your every email.

Thus, President Trump could mandate that any media critical of him — including online media like Daily Kos, Raw Story, or Common Dreams— must be heavily “regulated,” just like in Russia and Hungary. And he could do this in the first weeks of his presidency, to tamp down the ability to organize protests around his other fascist policies.

Taking over the Federal Trade Commission would allow him to do all kinds of favors for his CEO and billionaire backers, bringing industry behind his Fascism, just as happened in the early years of Nazi Germany.

In addition, Trump has already proclaimed his intention to turn the FBI, IRS, and DOJ into weapons against his political enemies. Just like Putin and Orbán.

Lest you think Trump doesn’t have plans to take on the “fake news” media and “liberals” he regularly lambasts, consider what he reposted on his Nazi-infested social media site just three days ago:

“If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”

They have been done before, just not here in the US.

And the fact that not one single currently elected Republican stood up and called this fascist rhetoric what it is tells us that the next GOP president need not be Trump for this nation to fall from democracy to fascism: strongman authoritarianism is now the governance model the Republican Party and the “conservative” movement have fully embraced.

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