Dictator on day one

Trump is making clear what his plans are, while he and MAGA move rapidly.

It’s only been a week since the election, but we can see Donald Trump and the GOP moving rapidly in their efforts to take sweeping authoritarian control of our government and give enormous power to the president.

Let’s be clear first, and just completely vaporize the media narrative: Trump didn’t get a mandate, much less a landslide.

He will, according to estimates, win the popular vote by 1.5% after all votes from California are counted. Kamala Harris will have won more of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton (who of course won the popular vote against Trump). Winning the seven battleground states Trump won by narrow margins—and with just 50% of the popular vote—doesn’t come close to President Obama’s 385 Electoral College vote win and 53% popular vote win.

And yet, Republicans said Obama had no mandate, and no one called it a landslide.

So we need to emphasize that, even as Trump claims a mandate and grabs for absolute power. And grabbing he is.

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Trump this week demanded that the Senate allow for recess appointments of his cabinet members—basically, thwarting the advise and consent rule and having nominations subject to a Senate vote. The three senators vying for leadership (the secret ballot will be held Tuesday night), all publicly complied with Trump’s wishes.

This is just pretty much ditching the Senate—dictator on day one.

Democrats can keep Congress from going into recess, but they’ll need to use the filibuster. Does any of us think the GOP, responding to Trump’s rantings, won’t then consider getting rid of the filibuster?

MAGA minions are violently angry, railing on X at anyone in the media who says something that seeks to keep Trump in check.

Trump named his long-time white supremacist aide Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, a pick that doesn’t require Senate confirmation and which elevates one of the most racist Nazi emulators we’ve ever seen in government.

Trump is putting anti-immigration hardliner Tom Homan in charge of the border, naming him “border czar.” Homan, who vows mass deportations, had already worked in Trump’s administration the first time around, carrying out its most brutal actions as ICE director.

Homan helped write Project 2025 and attended a white supremacist conference, which he claims was an accident, telling HuffPost he didn’t know what it was about. But then, fearing that distancing too much from the conference organized by Nick Fuentes might put him in political peril, he called Huffpost back to say, “I’m not saying this is a bad group. I’m saying I don’t know.”

Homan recently said on “60 Minutes” that if deporting undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for many years—and who have children who are American citizens—means deporting whole families, then whole families, including those citizens, “can be deported together.” On Sean Hannity’s program on Fox this week, he tried to backtrack, saying they will be starting with convicted criminals who are undocumented.

But that’s only a fraction of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and most are serving time in prison and will be deported upon release, as has been happening for many years. Trump is talking about deporting 11 to 20 million people, and the vast majority of those people aren’t criminals by any stretch of the imagination. They’re law-abiding people who are contributing to our communities—they’re our co-workers, friends, and families—and they are propping up entire industries, filling jobs because of labor shortages.

Trump has also named the MAGA-crazed puppy-killer Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, as his Homeland Security director. Putting this woman, who has little experience but who’s shown her brutality—which is the most important qualification to Trump, after loyalty—in charge of not only immigration but of thwarting domestic terrorism and overseeing FEMA and disaster relief is pretty horrifying.

Elise Stefanik, the upstate New York MAGA warrior for Trump, has been chosen by Trump as ambassador to the United Nations, while Marco Rubio is his pick for Secretary of State. The fact that Stefanik and Rubio—two bulls in a small china shop—are the closest MAGA can come to “diplomatic” shows just how devoid of any talent there is in the MAGA ranks. I mean, it almost makes you nostalgic for the days of Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley!

The former Republican House member from New York, Lee Zeldin, will be in charge of stripping the Environmental Protection Agency for the big oil companies, while MAGA loyalist and conspiracy theorist Rep. Mike Waltz has been tapped as Trump’s national security advisor. As of right now, there’s also talk of putting Florida Rep. Byron Donalds into the administration.

And this is just the very beginning, folks. It’s going to be very bad; let’s not sugarcoat it. But advocacy groups like the ACLU are gearing up for the fight on all fronts. And Democratic governors in states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois are vowing to block Trump’s deportations and many other actions. Democrats in the House and Senate have to steel themselves too.

And there are signs of the typical Trumpian screwups that only benefit Trump’s opponents. Republicans are now worried that Trump—who could care less about anyone else—is choosing too many members of Congress for his administration when the GOP will have a very narrow House majority and hold the Senate by a few seats. As the Washington Post reports:

If Republicans only have a one-, two-, or three-seat margin in the House, the vacant seats could jeopardize their majority or put it dangerously close to a de facto Democratic majority if a Republican is absent, giving them the power to block legislation and push through legislation. It’s a scenario that came close to happening several times in the current Congress.

That also means there will be vacant seats and special elections that Democrats can win. And nobody should think that Democrats can’t win special elections in even the reddest places, since they did just that after Trump took office in 2017, went to the extremes, and horrified people.

Democrat Conor Lamb won an open seat in 2018 in a district in Pennsylvania that Trump won by 20 points. We even won the open Senate seat in Alabama when Trump backed his buddy Roy Moore for the Senate, and Democrat Doug Jones won the race.

Beyond special elections, we’ve all got to start planning right now for the 2026 midterms, with the goal of taking back the House and Senate. Ditto 2028. We’ve grieved, and talked about the hate and racism which the majority of voters were fine with bringing back into the Oval Office, something that stunned us all.

Now it’s time to begin organizing and focusing on the fight as Trump and MAGA move quickly to consolidate power.