The five points below were written the day after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in a bitter and bizarre election campaign in the eleventh month of 2024:
- Most of what and who we voted for in local and state elections passed/won, and that’ll have a greater daily impact on us anyway. More than the overarching rule of Donald J. Trump in his second term.
- Trump’s win in both the popular and EC or Electoral College votes, while not at all anything close to a landslide, is nevertheless clear & decisive in a free, fair, and secure election. That means our system, however in need of reform, still works. It worked well enough the once imminent threat of mass violence and civil war among us Americans has quickly receded. The Right sees the system work so a rebellion isn’t necessary, and the Left is too stunned at its loss of power to do anything violent. These are good things.
- Any attempt to actually go beyond rhetoric to set up a real dictatorship takes time, and will be vigorously contested in the courts, by both the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, and state, territorial, and local governments as well as by Congress.
- Trump is an isolationist. He won’t go to war with Russia and China, but he will allow them and others to do whatever they want. Which means a nuclear world war is ironically less likely now, but the US will likely be forced to intervene once again down the road somewhere.
- We are still a very divided nation; tho not necessarily in the way we all thought we were.
As a reminder, those words were written on Wednesday 6 November 2024, the day after the Election. And nearly a year later on Tuesday 30 Sept 2025: OMG! How WRONG I was, LOL! How WRONG!
Yes! Now it’s Tuesday again, but the 7th of April 2026, and am clearly wrong yet again. The USA is once again stuck in yet another “forever war” in the Middle East with Iran where collective stupidity and individual fear trump individual courage and collective wisdom.
The Supreme Court of the United States, dominated by Republicans all lambasted and cruelly mocked by Trump, nevertheless proved to roll over belly up for the most part. The GOP, dominated by MAGA mafia cultists, however splintered, still dominates Congress and many of the states even tho it is actually in the minority. There was indeed violence in the wake of Trump’s second presidency, especially with the actions of ICE and CBP. Trump even had the US Army and the National Guard enter American states and cities. Other than numerous loud and raucous protests, there was little mass violence in the US on the scale Tehran launched against Iranian protesters where tens and thousands massacred in the streets and more in the dungeons. Sadly, maddeningly, two peaceful protesters were shot and murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis-St. Paul, others shot and injured elsewhere, and untold numbers died in US detention centers, tho probably less than a hundred. We do not, however, know for certain.
So the dreaded Second American Civil War did not happened after Trump’s defeat of Harris as so many once dreaded. It doesn’t mean such violence may still occur. Imagine if pro-Trump government forces or an armed terrorist militia of any stripe had gunned down or blow up large numbers of people peacefully protesting. So far we have had three No Kings! Day demonstrations, each one larger than the previous. They are the largest demonstrations in American history. For the most part they were loud, peaceful, drew from across the political spectrum, and involved elders as well as children. What violence there was proved small and easily contained. With the country on edge, we do not know what the morrow shall visit upon us all.
Trump also had the US Military attack numerous countries multiple time, downplaying such actions were still part of either the Drug War or the Global Long War on Terror despite such a campaign officially ended some years back (actual fighting never stopped). Trump may be an isolationist, but he likes to grandstand upon the world’s stage. He’s an extroverted projectionist of force rather than an introverted conservator of power. He denies the ugly, wicked, gutchurning horrors in the Epstein Files, still to be fully released and unredacted. Trump dismissed the worldwide drone flap of 2024-25 upon returning to the Presidency, and with chuckles and fanfare claims to order the release of the UFO Files, but he’s throwing breadcrumbs into the shade to distract people from his disastrous handling of the economy and his wars. His tariffs are still a burden and drag us all down. The super wealthy oligarchs from tradcon industries to the billionaire tech bros continue to get richer while the middle class continues to decline into poverty. The working class is fractured.
One of the biggest things I got wrong regards the integrity of the election process. Why did I forget the so-called “Bloodless Republican Coup” of the Election of 2000 where the Supreme Court stopped the vote count in Florida where Democrat Al Gore was pulling ahead to hand the presidency on a platter to Republican George W. Bush? Or historically Republicans have interfered in numerous elections around the nation? There is a growing mountain of evidence gathered by multiple investigators and researchers the US Republican Party engaged in concerted efforts to suppress voting in the Election of 2024. Most of the voter suppression and voter intimidation campaigns, backed by large amounts of resources, was concentrated in the so-called “Battleground States” and not elsewhere in the country. Those campaigns proved successful in turning the tide away from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
In hindsight our nation was numb with shock on both sides while the rest of the world played, “let’s wait and see.” Maybe it’s the lull before the really big storm or the calm eye in the center of the hurricane, but the truth is all of these metaphors fail. We’re an empire crackling with distress. We’re overstretched with imperial overreach. Our economy is cracking with the weight of its own corruption and inequality. There are practical solutions, and even they feel utopian at the moment. Here’s an example: our species, now thought to be hundreds of thousands of years old, is long, long overdue to have moved beyond greed and violence to build a peaceful, united Planet Earth. We’re long overdue to be living in a constitutional democratic world republic with an economy based upon cooperative sharing, environmental protection, and equitable distribution of energy. The morass of overlapping regional and global wicked problems converged long ago, and our failure to confront them as a united species sets us up for own own extinction and Earth’s biosphere for omnicide. So we must find ways to come together and work together here to build out creative, workable solutions to intractable local-global challenges, many of our own making.
William Dudley Bass
Tuesday 7 April 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.