The second Trump term in office has followed the program of the notorious “Project 2025” document very closely. This document was prepared by a team led by the right-wing think tank known as the Heritage Foundation, and by Russ Vought, founder of the Center for Renewing America, an organization dedicated to attacking progressive social values, cutting off most immigration into the country, and dismantling the federal bureaucracy. (Vought has since been appointed as Director of the US Office of Management and Budget.) Before Trump’s reelection, a number of voices warned that the Project 2025 plan of action appeared as a prescription for authoritarianism and the destruction of American democracy. Indeed, in the first nine months of Trump’s presidency, the intent for authoritarian destruction of our democracy and the imposition of totalitarianism has become crystal clear.

Reflection on this situation led me to review Erich Fromm’s 1941 book Escape from Freedom and Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Both Fromm and Arendt were keen observers of Stalin’s rise to absolute power in the 1920s and Hitler’s similar rise in the 1930s. I first used these sources extensively in chapter seven of my 2016 book One World Renaissance in which I tried to show why and how the democratic world government envisioned by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth could never become totalitarian in nature. The “checks and balances” there are far more sophisticated than those in the US Constitution.

In the cases of both Stalin and Hitler the result was a totalitarian society in which individual rights and freedoms were reduced to zero with absolute power in the hands of one person, resulting in unspeakable suffering and destruction of those designated as “enemies” of the absolute ruler (who was said to embody the true essence and meaning of the state, the party, and its insane ideology). This rendering is not meant metaphorically, for fascism and its progeny (totalitarianism) are indeed forms of collective insanity.

Fromm was a great psychologist and social thinker who pointed this out, and Arendt was a great political scientist and theoretician of democracy. They agreed that the purpose of government and all organized society is the empowerment of individual persons to actualize their life potential. It was in this respect that Fromm (especially) was a strong critic of capitalism. The great abundance that capitalism made possible for the well-being of a whole population was derailed, Fromm argued, by the concentration of wealth in a few hands and the increasing political power that these few accrued at the expense of the majority. The result of this failure to actualize the potential of democracy for the well-being of all is that individuals feel helpless, paralyzed, and insignificant.

The attempt to escape this denial of their life-potential leads many to escape freedom itself into mass movements, submerging their alienation into group emotions and ideologies. This “helps him to forget his being as a separate entity,” Fromm states, but at the same time it “leads to a new bondage” (257). In a similar vein, Arendt declares that “totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals….Their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional loyalty of the individual member. The demand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power” (323).

In the USA today, the Project 2025 plan explicitly intends to transform democracy into a totalitarian society through precisely this method, a plan that has actually been in place for several decades and only now has crystallized in this document. In the three “separate but equal” branches of the government, there has been a conversion from institutional accountability to personal loyalty to MAGA ideology and its embodiment in Donald Trump. There has been a systematic attempt to create high court judges loyal to Trump and his plan to create an authoritarian society. The majority of the US Supreme Court is now on board with this plan. The legislature, structured according to a two-party system, has replaced membership in the former Republican party with loyalists intent on the ascendency of the one party now defined, not by traditional conservative principles, but by loyalty to the “Führer or Leader.” The purpose is absolute, one-party rule, and hence the death of American democracy, such as it is.

And now that the Executive branch has come under their “MAGA” control once again with the election of Trump, the federal bureaucracy dedicated to serving the American people equitably with an eye to the US Constitution and the well-being of the population is being systematically replaced by loyalist hacks who have little competence to perform their duties (as heads of agencies or branches of government) but who unquestioningly do the bidding of the Leader. As Arendt puts it: “The goal of one-party systems is not only to seize the government administration but, by filling all offices with party members, to achieve a complete amalgamation of state and party, so that after the seizure of power the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for the government. The system is ‘total’ only in a negative sense, namely, in that the ruling party will tolerate no other parties, no opposition, and no freedom of political opinion” (419).

This explains the rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA supporters who use the word “Democrat” as a symbol of evil, of everything wrong with America. “The Democrats” are no longer a political opposition with different views on how best to serve the people and the Constitution. They are now vilified as something that must be eradicated. They are the cause of violent crime, of the country’s illegal drug problem, of its endless “foreign wars,” the high cost of living, the destruction of gender identity, the trashing of America’s former “greatness,” and the blurring of its white, Christian identity.

Already, Trump has colonized the formerly independent FBI with loyalists and has turned that organization from genuine law enforcement to his personal police force dedicated to harassing and prosecuting his perceived enemies (like former FBI Director James Comey). In a totalitarian state, the national police become the enforcers of the will of the Leader and the repressors of those who speak against or resist the one-party propaganda system. The key institutions, therefore, become the enforcement systems, including the secret police and the military.

Arendt observes that, along with the creation of concentration camps, “The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty” (447).

We see here again a parallel with the USA in the creation of an “army” of ICE agents and other “border patrol” police who round up all those (millions of persons) who look like they might be immigrants in an endless militarized dragnet without accountability (these police wear masks to conceal their identity), and without juridical restraint. The concentration camps created by these secret police are not open to inspection by members of Congress, who have a constitutional “oversight” duty to monitor all such activities. They are places where the criminalized elite are empowered to do what they wish, free of visibility, whether by courts or other legitimate officials.

Arendt argues that the lawless round-up of the Jews in Nazi Germany was not an incidental feature of the totalitarian system: “Without concentration camps, without the undefined fear they inspire and the very well-defined training they offer in totalitarian domination, which can nowhere else be fully tested, with all of its radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire its nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in complete apathy” (436).

Not only is the totalitarian ICE police spectacle in full swing within the USA, but the National Guard and the US military are also being co-opted into the totalitarian scenario. Civilian protests against the illegal and unaccountable ICE raids have allowed Trump to call in the National Guard as an excuse, claiming the cities are experiencing a crisis of violent crime. But his speech to the assembled top brass of the US military early this month revealed the deeper meaning of these actions: he stated that the “rules of engagement” should be abandoned by the military in any war and that the goal of “winning” must be absolute, superseding all such rules. The “Department of Defense” has now become the “Department of War,” and the meaning of “war” here is simply violent, lethal power without restraint. In fact, the US military has already been engaged in blowing up small civilian boats from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean Sea without any knowledge of who they are or what they are doing.

The rules of engagement, of course, come from international law: the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and the Genocide Convention. They state that civilians are not to be targeted, and they outline the ways in which prisoners and other victims of the conflict must be treated. Abandoning such rules equates to using sheer power for domination alone, abandoning any moral restraints or guidelines for the use of lethal power. In his speech to the US military, Trump also stated that the military needs to use US cities as training grounds. The implications are vast. The US military, supposedly for the defense of the country and its Constitution, must now be used to fight what Trump called “the enemy within,” that is, to solidify the totalitarian one-party rule through military force directed against whatever portion of the US population resists the imposition of this totalitarian rule.

The powers behind this move to totalitarianism are vast: from multi-billionaires who buy elections and have legions of lobbyists in Washington, DC, to corrupt think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, to the weakness and self-interest of universities, corporations, and even the legal profession in the US, many of whom are capitulating to the authoritarian demands of Trump. The super wealthy and big capitalist corporations also own much of the means of communication, from social media to the “legacy” news outlets, CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC, etc., so it appears unlikely that much resistance will come from these sectors.

The New Deal in the USA, in which capital shared some of its profits with labor, resulted from the foresight of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the great depression of the 1930s. This compromise has been in the process of being trashed at least since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, which began in 1981. The highest average income of the American worker in relation to inflation took place in the mid-1970s. Since that time, the disparity between rich and poor has accelerated and today stands at levels never before seen in the USA. The world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, paid out 270 million dollars to get Trump elected, and Trump’s White House events and Presidential dinners have attracted many of the billionaires who govern the country behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, the USA of 2025 is not the Russia of the 1920s nor the Germany of the 1930s. Thinking people have a much better understanding of the dynamics and dangers of totalitarianism, some of them producing perceptive books such as On Freedom by Timothy Synder (2024) or Lawless by Leah Litman (2025). Some large civic organizations like Indivisible, MoveOn.org, Our Democracy, Bold Progressives, and the American Civil Liberties Union are working to defend freedom and organize online for mass impact, and some Democrat leaders in Congress, some governors in states, and mayors in some cities are organizing to resist the onslaught and restore the authority of constitutional government. In addition, both Trump and the appointees in his administration are limited in both intellect and competence, unlike Stalin and Hitler, who were both very clever while they were also very evil.

Trump and his lieutenants wield tremendous power. This is largely because of the help of a corrupt Congress that has pledged loyalty and a Supreme Court complicit in this attempt at a coup d’état. But this Leader is, in fact, more of a clown than a ruthless dictator. And this truth may lead to the failure of the totalitarian project even though much damage has already been done and the earmarks of a totalitarian society have already been put in place, as described above. If we want a democratic future for the USA, it will be up to, not the government, but WE THE PEOPLE.