2016 Trump was relatively incompetent, the checks and balances of government stymied his bossy style and it really gummed things up for him to learn his way around.
He was also fairly uneducated in specifically ruling power, which overlaps with but functions differently from organizational power in general. An autocrat can make threats even a bossy CEO can't. An autocrat can give orders that aren't in job descriptions and they will be followed for reasons disconnected from career path, not subject to regulatory oversight and concerns of legality.
And most of all, longstanding threats like the Heritage Foundation who have been salivating for decades for a moment like this have given him a blueprint for gutting the administrative state and replacing it with loyalists willing to act in ways that max out the power of the executive, bypassing the other branches. So not only is he less incompetent personally, most of the visionary work has been done for him. All he has to do is give the orders.
And all of this is happening in a context of having spent the past eight years gutting support for things like basic civil rights and democratic norms. So it's a *lot* different now. We need to become very familiar with the guardrails the Constitution offers us, especially with regard to our state level governments, and form connections with local ACLU and similar organizations so we can rapidly respond from the start.
I know it's not a popular document among radicals, I hear and feel that, and I'm not saying we hold it up as a shining beacon of all that humanity can be. I am only saying it exists right now as a tool that was designed with foresight of something like this happening, and if we can stall off the worst for two years, we *might* get a chance to flip congress, and if we can do that, we *might* get a chance to replace the executive in 2028.
Beyond that, the most important and radical thing you can be doing is the work I hope you were already doing every day, and if not please hear me urgently when I say start now, and that is building bonds of solidarity in your chosen community. Whether that's you're collective, or your faith center, or your d&d group, don''t underestimate the power of community. We will get through this the way we always have - together.
