Opinion: Trump always showed who he is

Donald Trump kept telling us he’d be a threat to democracy if re-elected president. Now he’s showing us.

Several months ago on his Truth Social website, Trump threatened to “expel” and “cast out” government workers who oppose his radical views, describing them as a “sick political class” that hates the country. The 2024 election, he wrote, “is our final battle.”

He is wasting no time acting on his promise.

Trump, who has endured his own accusations of sexual harassment and election interference, appears to have no qualms concerning the backgrounds of his Cabinet selections and has not indicated any intention to reconsider his current picks, apart from Matt Gaetz dropping out. Trump has dug in his heels and remained steadfast in his decisions as is his modus operandi providing his candidates unambiguous support, praising them as the sort of individuals who will implement the radical sort of change he desires.

The allegations against some of Trump’s picks makes the real consequences of past failed political nominees seem quaint.

Douglas H. Ginsburg, a Harvard law professor, had to withdraw his name from consideration as President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 1987 once it was revealed he had used marijuana as a college student during the 1960s and sporadically throughout the 1970s as a faculty member at Harvard Law School.

A few years later, the first two attorney general nominees of President Bill Clinton, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, were disqualified from consideration due to their employing of undocumented immigrants.

Compare those allegations to Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and Fox News personality whom Trump nominated for defense secretary. Hegseth reached a settlement to avoid a lawsuit by a woman who accused him of sexual assault at a conservative conference in California in 2017.

The checkered pasts of the president elect’s nominees have elicited little outrage among one of his most loyal constituencies: white evangelicals. Trump is astute at the fact that these communities, particularly the older members, harbor beliefs deeply etched in the right-wing anti-communism of the Cold War era.

Differing political ideologies – communism, socialism, and Marxism – were seen as not only anti-American, but also anti-Christian. Trump’s solid support from white evangelicals reveals how much they embrace his desire to abolish democracy and reconstruct a xenophobic, white ethnostate in their own image. Anyone heard of Project 2025?

For the past several years since Trump was elected, leaders of and subscribers to this political segment of American politics have engaged in the most destructive rhetoric publicly expressed by paranoid citizens since the days of the early McCarthy era.

The fact minorities have managed to secure Supreme Court seats and live in the White House has driven a number of these “Leave it to Beaver” fans mad with paranoia. In the idolized post-World War II suburbia they pine for, non-white people were absent from the top echelons of power in the U.S.

Trump’s acidic rhetoric is seen as a license by his followers to demean and disregard others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything his MAGA base admires about America. It signals to his supporters that disregarding basic human restraint and destroying your perceived enemies “by any means necessary” is permissible.

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. Contact him at:

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