By James Moffatt

I read that recent piece in “The Atlantic,” I believe, about how Hitler seized power in 53 days.  I thought I knew that history, but I was shocked when I read how quickly everything fell into Hitler’s lap. Trump gave Musk and his DOGE-bags–as Jon Favreau dubbed them–access to the entire American population’s data in the first two weeks he was in office.  Last week, I saw a former Treasury official being interviewed about the data theft: she said everyone she has spoken to at Treasury is totally freaked out.  Gee, I wonder why.  Meanwhile, the media wants us to worry about Trump annexing things.  Please. Focus, people!

The point of Trump’s audacious attack on all things governmental is to overwhelm the opposition.  There are so many illegal attacks on things of substance going on that there is no way, outside of legal actions, to respond appropriately.  What scares me most is seeing the faces of the television legal commentators, with whom I am familiar, when they are trying to explain what is happening, and what possible means of opposing Trump exist.  “Grim” doesn’t begin to tell the tale; they remind of Raymond Chandler’s “old men … with faces like lost battles.”  With the best Supreme Court that Leonard Leo and the Heritage Foundation could buy in place, the fix is in.

This is beyond frightening and surreal.  But whenever people start succumbing to paralysis by analysis about how bad things are–and they’re really f*ing bad–I am reminded of the Civil Rights movement in the late 50s/early 60s.  I began studying that history in 1968.  It’s easy to overlook or to have forgotten the reality of black people’s lives in the South during those years. 

In all of the apartheid Southern states, blacks were de jure and de facto second class citizens, who were denied the right to vote, effectively denied the right to any legal recourse for even the most heinous violations of their person and their rights, and without any voice in any media outlets outside of their own communities. 

When activists began to organize to oppose living under state terror, they were beaten, jailed, raped, tortured, lynched, and murdered. Their houses were burned, their families were threatened and attacked, and they were methodically terrorized in every way imaginable.

And yet … against all odds and reasonable expectations, the resistance triumphed.  People died to win those victories; there was nothing easy or, at any point, guaranteed that “we shall overcome.”  But they did.  So, that’s my counter to even the tacit suggestion that ‘resistance is futile.’  This is Donald Trump, not the f*#king Borg. 

There are lower courts, the states, the cities, and the power of ‘ordinary people’ simply standing up to Fascism in numbers.  The majority of American voters aren’t down with this at all.  Happily, there is no evidence whatsoever of Donald Trump ever successfully running anything.  Unfortunately, the dick standing beside him, with his hand up Trump’s coat, has a more nuanced record. 

Nevertheless, they’re both criminals, and they are both represent further and better proof about the enduring wisdom of Dorothy Parker’s proposition: “If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gave it to.”

Photo: Adolf Hitler and his cabinet, January 30, 1933, the day he became Chancellor of Germany. (Everett Collection / Alamy)