( Tomdispatch.com ) – This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.
We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the “Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group’s latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.
Finally, I thought: If I can’t talk about him with these women I’ve known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, “Do you think we’ll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?”
I didn’t even need to say the end of what: of American democracy, the rule of law, and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? “The end” alone signified all of that and so much more.
“Absolutely we will,” was my partner’s instant response. The other women agreed that Trump’s second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it’s as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important — say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.
The expression “paradigm shift” derives from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s pioneering analysis of the way scientific disciplines change over time. As he saw it, a paradigm is a shared fundamental understanding of how a complex phenomenon (physics, biology, a nation) works. A paradigm shift represents the abrupt replacement of one theory (like Newton’s theory of gravity) with something profoundly different (Einstein’s theory of relativity).
The point is that a paradigm shift in this country wouldn’t just be a tweak to business as usual like a change in the way the filibuster works in the Senate. It would be a wholesale upending of the constitutional balance of powers. In this case, it would potentially mean relocating the power to make, assess, and execute the law (powers now resting in three distinct branches of government) all in the person of the president. It would be a change from democracy to autocracy, or as President Donald Trump has implied, to dictatorship. And it’s happening now, in front of our very eyes.
Moving toward dictatorial control is the fundamental purpose of issuing a seemingly endless series of executive orders that clearly violate existing laws — for example, those governing the firing of inspectors general. It’s certainly true that Donald Trump doesn’t like the very idea of inspectors general. We should remember that from his first term. He wants a free hand to run all the federal departments and agencies without watchdogs getting in the way. But far more importantly, that executive order violated the 2022 Inspector General Act, as a former Pentagon inspector general under Trump told National Public Radio:
“Well [Trump’s order] didn’t follow the Inspector General Act, which requires the president, if he wants to remove an inspector general, which he’s allowed to do, but he must give Congress 30 days notice before the removal, and the substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for each removal.”
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make — and break — the law by fiat. Similarly, he has used executive orders to attempt to freeze funds already approved by Congress under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As the Senate Committee on Appropriations has pointed out, it is Congress, not the president, that holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. In its 1975 decision in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court denied presidents the power to impound funds Congress has appropriated.
The same logic applies to Trump’s order, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to impose a 90-day halt to all U.S. foreign aid, civilian and military, except to Israel and Egypt. Again, this is an arrogation of congressional power by the president, and its point was undoubtedly as much to assert presidential power as to effect some as-yet-undefined foreign policy goal.
And that logic will undoubtedly apply to a flood of other previously unimaginable actions Trump will most likely take between the writing and the publication of this article.
The Great Trumpian Litany
The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contains a long prayer known as the Great Litany. A litany is a ritual petition to God, a list of actions congregants “beseech” God to take. The Great Litany is most often recited during Lent, a 40-day period of reflection leading up to Easter. If you’re standing or kneeling, it can seem to go on forever. And just when you think you might be nearing the end, along comes a whole new section requiring a whole new response. As time passes, you may find yourself covertly glancing at your watch. It’s hard to stay focused through it all.
English speakers also use “litany” in a secular sense, as a metaphor for a long list of anything, especially when recited or recorded. We speak of “a litany of grievances,” “a litany of excuses,” or even “a litany of gripes and grudges,” which was how Vanity Fair described some of Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks.
In the single week since that inauguration, observers have already produced excellent litanies of his many distressing actions. Although lists of these are available online, there is no space to catalog them all here. In fact, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because the list grows by the day, even the hour. Since I sat down at my desk this morning, Trump or his appointees have fired attorneys who worked with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on criminal cases against him, rescinded job offers to 200 bank examiners who were to have been employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC, which insures our bank accounts), and launched an investigation into the prosecution of the January 6th rioters. And that’s just in the last six hours.
The Episcopal Great Litany, a long list of human concerns, leaps from topic to topic, petitioning for benedictions ranging from protection from “lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine” to a request that God “illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly.”
Some might argue that this last request was at least partially fulfilled in the sermon of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the first woman elected to her position, who, at the ecumenical service held on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, had the effrontery to address the new president in these words:
“Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
“And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.”
Trump, of course, instantly demanded an apology.
In another bit of the Great Litany that seems particularly apt at the moment, supplicants plead with the Divine, “so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United States, and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth.”
If only.
Flooding the Zone
The list of Trump’s post-election actions is its own kind of litany — not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:
- The nominations to positions of power of the manifestly unfit (remember Matt Gaetz, the ethically-challenged), or the frankly vicious (Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer), or indeed of candidates combining both qualities (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabard).
- A spate of executive comments, orders, or presidential decrees displaying an imperial greed for territory that would have seemed like so many jokes just a few weeks ago. (Watch out, Panama, Canada, and Greenland!)
- The fulfillment of the Israeli fascist right-wing’s dearest desire: a proposal to cleanse Gaza of its more than two million Palestinian inhabitants, in order to make way for the development of what Trump has labeled “a phenomenal location,” where “some beautiful things can be done.”
- First steps in keeping his vow to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States, including a Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operation, which included an “embedded” Dr. Phil — further proof, should we need it, that the strategy is to enforce the authority of any decree, no matter how bizarre.
- Elon Musk’s seizure of access to the records of all federal employees and control of the Treasury Department’s disbursement process
Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that’s now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), the Washington Post reported that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order — for the moment.
The Cambridge Dictionary offers an additional definition of litany: “a long list spoken or given to someone, esp. to someone who has heard or seen it before or finds it boring.” Taken together, this apparently endless flood of outrages reflects the infamous observation of Trump’s advisor (and exoneree) Steve Bannon during his first administration: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
And indeed, the litany of Trump’s autocratic actions has already flooded the zone with shit. The question is: How are we to navigate all that excrement? Can we do more than simply hope to stay afloat? Is there any way we can actually dam the floodtide? Or will we sigh and say we’ve seen it all before and find it boring?
Fools for Freedom
At least we can try to build that dam. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some national organizing we could join or support, efforts that are crucial because — yes! — we have to think big. But we also have to think small. I’ve been surprised by how many writers have responded to Trump’s reelection by urging people to strengthen their own local connections with friends, neighbors, and family, while focusing on those among us who are most in need of protection from immediate attacks. In a way, that’s exactly what the members of my group of lesbians have done for each other all these years. It’s what the members of my own household of chosen family do for each other daily, when we leave gifts of food or books, when we plan together to protect immigrant friends at risk of being scooped up on the way to work.
All of that effort, big and small, must be sustained by hope. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?
I now ponder that question daily. This morning, one answer arrived in a newsletter by email, from a group called the Faithful Fools. The Fools live in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where they accompany the other residents in their daily lives in a neglected and despised neighborhood. Being Foolish, they don’t ask whether they can be of any use or recognize the puniness of their efforts compared to the edicts of a president who would be king. This morning’s newsletter brought me these words:
“Plenty of people have asked the question, ‘After all these years, what keeps you going?’ And we say, ‘Well, we keep going because we are Fools, of course.’ This isn’t to say that our work is ridiculous or without foundation. It’s to say that we understand how uncertain the future is and we can’t lose our way when the road gets rocky and tiresome…
“We aren’t foolish enough to believe that hope alone carries the day or soothes the soul. No, we believe it’s the other way around; we believe that actions driven by justice, solidarity, and compassion are what sustain hope. Small gusts of good will are acts driven by justice and compassion and solidarity, and they are what soothes our broken hearts.”
In short, in the age of would-be King Donald Trump, we sustain our own hope by doing the small, essential things that sustain the hope of others.
Copyright 2025 Rebecca Gordon
Via Tomdispatch.com
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