I foresee two possible scenarios.  In one, Trump will continue to do whatever he wants.  Although his margin of victory was very narrow, he still proclaims that he “won big.”  This hubris has been compounded by the Supreme Court’s outrageous decision that a president is immune from prosecution for any acts performed while in office.  (The founding fathers would have denounced this decision, since they did not want “another king,” but rather that “law be the king,” as Thomas Paine wrote.)  Trump will continue to use Elon Musk to eliminate departments he wants gone and to fire whomever he wishes.  He will ignore court opinions condemning his actions.  So far, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have completely supported him.   If this success continues, Trump may well serve a third term, as he has said he wants.  The rule of law will be overthrown as will the Constitution.  The United States of America will become a true dictatorship, with the army gunning down those who disagree with the government.  Police forces will act the same way.  The goal is to “Make America Great Again,” as the MAGA forces proclaim.  This means eliminating women, Blacks, gays, etc. from all public life and authority.  White men, especially old white men, will rule.  Recently, to give just one horrible example among many, Ira Hayes, one of the two soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in the famous 1945 photograph, has been purged from the government website because he is Native American.

     However, I don’t think all this tyrannical success is a likely scenario.  Right now, members of Congress are on leave, going home to face their constituents.  There is already tremendous opposition to their and Trump’s corrupt and self-serving policies.  These politicians have been denounced and booed.  Some refuse to hold meetings or insist that all those who oppose them are Democrats.

     I don’t think these tactics are going to succeed.  Too many well-established and supported groups oppose them, from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to Indivisible, to people who oppose making abortion illegal.  To give just one example, states outlawing abortion have seen doctors and businesses leave their states and increasing numbers of women proclaiming their injuries.  I believe that opposition to dictatorial, high-handed policies is growing.  Recently, courts have ruled that the government can’t just ship immigrants to Central America, expel anyone who supports Palestinian rights, or deny funds for health care and research to both government bodies and universities.  As Trump’s government continues its outrageous policies, I believe that this opposition will grow. 

     Much rests inevitably on the Supreme Court.  Chief Justice Roberts just proclaimed that Trump’s desire to impeach the judge who ruled against his policy on immigrants is wrong.  The only legitimate way to change this decision is to go through the courts.  Will Americans support overturning our entire judicial system?  I don’t think so.

     Of course I might be wrong.  As a historian, this era reminds me most of the United States just before the Civil War.  Then, a large minority of the nation opposed basic liberties and rights.  It took a bloody war to stop them.  I don’t think this struggle will come to war in our own day.  Here’s hoping I’m correct.

This blog is based on a wonderful essay by Masha Gessen, published as the main opinion piece in the New York Times for February 17, 2025.  In it, Gessen argues that Trump has floated a series of “terrible ideas,” and claims, I think correctly, that this tactic is “standard autocratic fare.”  “Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy,” the piece continues, “by forcing us to engage with them” they not only dumb down discussions, “they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult.  That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.”  Gessen, who was raised in Russia, concludes that the solution is not to debate these horrible ideas, but instead to present our own beliefs about democracy.  We should portray our vision of how a democracy can and should work to create a genuine government for the “demos” –- the people-- rather than a king, which is what Trump aspires to be.  (Most recently, when he attempted to overturn congestion pricing in New York City, he concluded by proclaiming “I am the king.”)

     These sentiments were of course at the fore during the creation of this nation.  The men who founded our government were keenly aware that they opposed a traditional monarchy which would execute them for treason if they lost.  One of their best defenses of democracy comes from James Madison.  Writing in the Federalist Papers to convince his fellow citizens to ratify the Constitution, Madison wrote “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

     The chief means of getting government “to control itself” was the system of checks and balances.  By dividing government into three branches –- legislative, judicial, and executive –- government would be forced to work collectively, rather than for an individual monarch.

     Most of us learned these basic American lessons in school.  Trump has currently thrown them overboard.  Claiming government “waste” and “disfunction,” he has commissioned the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, to fire and hire, to ax government departments and agencies, to do the work of a tyrant for him.

     There is of course waste and disfunction in our government –- no system is perfect.  But those facts should not allow democracy to be curtailed or discarded in favor of the president’s tyranny.  Gessen concludes that this will not be easy: “because it calls for clear thought and inspired vision just when the onslaught of bad ideas, and the anxiety they engender, make it so difficult to think clearly and envision a future.”

     But that is exactly what we must do now.  A few nights ago, I attended a meeting of the Brooklyn branch of the progressive group Indivisible.  It was wonderful.  We broke into small groups and discussed what we could and should do now.  There have been a number of recent, powerful demonstrations in New York: a large march in Manhattan on President’s Day, a big gathering outside Sen. Shumer’s Brooklyn residence to urge him to combat Trump more vigorously.  At the meeting’s end, we were told to phone our representatives rather than email them, as they count phone calls and that matters.  It helps a great deal to join with others in this endeavor.  Please join me and many others in doing so to help to save our democracy.

My title is attributed to Mark Twain, but there’s no evidence that he actually used it. This ambiguity reflects the saying’s meaning: that although events never repeat exactly, they often resemble each other. I’m working with that concept in this blog. There are events in the past that I believe enlighten happenings today and I’m going to use them to understand contemporary politics.

First, I want to return to the fourteenth century. By that era, the republic of Venice had become an empire, controlling the eastern Mediterranean. Venice was ruled by a Doge – a leader from the reigning oligarchy, that is a government by a small, select group. He (and all officials then were of course male) was elected by a committee of 41. The Venetian oligarchs had great wealth. Their currency prevailed throughout the region and all trade had to be conducted in Venetian ships. Politics and financial power went hand-in-hand. “They were about all money people,” writes Jan Morris in her history of Venice, “Pride and profit were inevitably mingled.”

This system reminds me of the new government dominated by billionaires. Trump’s cabinet collectively owns 3.2 billion dollars. (In contrast, Biden’s had 118 million.) Moreover, Trump has designated two of his closest associates: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man with 425.2 billion dollars, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who has “only” 1 billion dollars, to head a new government branch that they’re calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The entity is supposedly named after Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that enables people to pay each other directly through an online system. It bypasses all national currencies. Trump intends to create his DOGE as a “presidential advisory commission,” rather than an actual government department, as that would require the approval of Congress. DOGE plans to severely reduce both the government’s workforce and its spending. No one knows exactly what will be cut, but Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have been mentioned. All this is supposed to be done in a single year. We are about to be governed by a new oligarchy.

This system was caricatured by Ann Telnaes:

The relatively new owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, the head ofAmazon who has a personal fortune of 241 billion dollars, prevented the paper from publishing this cartoon. Earlier last summer Bezos refused to let the newspaper endorse Kamala Harris and also fired hundreds of employees. Musk did the same on Twitter, which he re-named X. The site has done poorly under his ownership.

Oligarchies succeed when the majority of a population supports them, as voters did by electing Trump in 2024. They fail when the general population turns against them. We can see a similar happening in Germany of 1933. After Hitler was elected by gaining the largest percentage of votes (but well under half of those cast), the big-money boys clustered around him. They figured that they could control him and have him act in their interest. We all know how that turned out.

But what can we do now? To begin with, although Trump claims to have won by a landslide, he only gained 1.5% of the vote over Harris. We need not only to keep such facts in mind, but to proclaim them. I also think we need to publicize how the Republican party conducts itself. So far, it hasn’t done well. It was going to shut the government down and failed. The MAGA faction and more traditional Republicans are vying with each other. Most commentators argue that Trump won primarily because of economic reasons: many voters thought they were poorly off. If Trump succeeds in gaining two of his stated goals – creating tariffs and kicking out immigrants — our economy will plummet. Those of us opposed to his government need to keep on keeping on: by emphasizing reality, criticizing their actions, and acting when we can. I believe that Trump’s new government will fail spectacularly and so will lead to Democratic successes in ’26 and ’28.

Perhaps then we can then replace this new oligarchy with a democracy.

     For Americans like myself, who are old enough to remember when abortion was illegal, having to fight this battle again is both dismaying and unnecessary.  Every poll insists that at least 60% of Americans believe abortion should be legal.  30% of anti-abortionists believe it should be legal in some instances, like rape or incest.[1]  And yet the Supreme Court seems ready to overturn it.

     This last statement is based on Judge Alito’s leaked opinion, which is supposedly supported by four other justices.  Alito’s arguments are ludicrous, especially to a historian.  He asserts – correctly – that the Constitution does not mention abortion.  It also does not mention women – does that mean that women should not exist?  It does not mention slavery by name, yet slavery both existed and was protected by the original Constitution, which called slaves “other persons” and forbade ending the slave trade before 1808.

     The so-called “originalist” position, which Alito’s holds, makes no sense to me.  The brilliance of the Founding Fathers was to acknowledge that they did not know what the future would bring.  They put the power to amend in the Constitution, only limiting it to not creating a new monarchy.  Article IX of the Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would not have been ratified, states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  This seems pretty clear to me.

     The Court which hopes to rule against abortion is profoundly undemocratic.  All the justices who want to reverse Roe v. Wade were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote (Bush and Trump).  A number of them lied during their confirmation hearings about this issue.  Finally, such a ruling would overturn the legal doctrine of “stare decisus,” which holds that long-established law should not be overturned.  Pro-abortionists cited Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned segregation, as their precedent.

     But overturning legal abortions will bring about terrible conditions.  We know that outlawing abortion does not end the practice, it just ends safe abortions.  When abortions were illegal, hospitals had what were called “septic abortion wards.”  In the 1940s, 1000 women died each year from infections received from abortions. 

      One-third of those opposed to most abortions agree that they should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.  But the states which hope to make abortions illegal do not make such exceptions.  What about the eleven-year-old raped by her father?  Such cases are exceptional, but they do occur.

      Most abortions in the United States are now caused by medication which can be ordered online.  Are states willing to interfere with people’s right to buy such products?  They object to the “right to privacy” which underlay Roe v. Wade.  How far are they willing to go to undermine all privacy?

     Now is the time to oppose such views.  I’m marching this Saturday, May 14, along with at least 700,000 of my fellow citizens.  Groups like the old Jane Collective, which enabled poor women to receive abortions are coalescing already.  Join us!

[1] Pew Research Center, May 6, 2022