by James E. Garcia, Arizona Mirror
April 9, 2025
If there’s a through line to the first months of Trump 2.0 it’s the president’s penchant for trying to disappear his critics, enemies and the fast-multiplying targets of his disdain.
It’s classic authoritarian behavior.
Donald Trump is a dictator at heart, and like all “good” dictators, he relishes the idea that he can banish anyone he thinks could get in his way.
Don’t like brown immigrants? Snatch them off the streets, deport them and do all you can to keep them from coming here in the first place.
Don’t like a free press? Claim, without evidence, that it’s fake, do all you can to muzzle it, and prop up pliant members of the news media — like Fox, Newsmax and One America.
Don’t like the fact that women and minorities have had greater access to job opportunities in recent decades? Attack labor and civil rights laws under the guise that you’re dismantling DEI programs.
Don’t like that historically disenfranchised communities are allowed to vote? Suppress, or block outright, their access to the polls — and if they win elections anyway, falsely claim they cheated and the system can’t be trusted.
Don’t like people with disabilities, Muslims, veterans, the poor, environmentalists, public schools and universities, foreign aid, people of color, park rangers, student loans, scientists, academics, asylum seekers, Social Security and Medicaid, unions, the LGBTQ+ community (especially trans people), public broadcasting, artists, people with AIDS, people with COVID, fluoride, accurate historical accounts, kids who get the measles, or the president and people of Ukraine? (And, no, this is not an exhaustive list.) Do all you can to cripple or shut down federal agencies and illegally slash congressionally mandated funding that supports these groups and programs.
Why? Because that’s what dictators do. That’s what oligarchs do. That’s what fascists do.
It is not what presidents of the United States of America have normally done.
It’s one thing to be the most powerful man on earth, but quite another to expect that a critical mass of this country’s 330 million citizens are willing to abet their own demise.
When the most powerful man in the world openly dismisses the principles that undergird the rule of law, including the core precepts of our Constitution and our courts, we are not living in normal times.
Trump’s goal is as simple as it is dangerous: to erase anyone and anything he considers a threat to his quickly expanding stranglehold on power.
But if the reaction to his agenda by a growing and diverse contingent of Americans in the past few weeks is any indication, including by people who voted for him in November, Trump will not erase us.
Last week, millions of people across 50 states and around the world took to the streets to roundly and courageously condemn the chaos, cruelty and corruption of Trumpism in action.
As the Arizona Mirror reported, it was all part of “a national day of protest” called Hands Off “that saw more than 1,300 events across the country — many in heavily GOP areas that backed Trump by a large margin in the last election.”
“In many locations,” reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy wrote, “crowds dwarfed expectations: A march in Washington, D.C., saw five times more than the 10,000 that were anticipated, while the New York City protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks and overwhelmed city streets.”
At the protest in Sedona, one of roughly 30 in the Grand Canyon State, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told a crowd of nearly 1,000: “We are fighting back with what I call the three Cs: courage, crowds, and the courts.”
Mayes has been partnering with other Democratic attorneys general across the country to file a slew of lawsuits challenging Trump’s most egregious executive measures.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told the more than 2,000 people gathered at the Capitol in Phoenix that they embodied the true meaning of the First Amendment: the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. “Those grievances are growing larger and larger,” Fontes declared.
Alicia Van Driel, part of a “Hands Off” march in Salem, Oregon, said, “I knew Trump was dishonest before he got voted in. I didn’t vote for him, and everybody that has voted for him needs to take a look at what’s really going on.”
Demonstrators in Connecticut, like Jim Chapdelaine, a volunteer with the grassroots group Indivisible, gathered in a cold rain outside the Capitol building in Hartford.
“A little rain is not going to stop us from saving democracy,” Chapdelaine told the crowd of between 2,500 and 3,000.
Facing a flood of what judges and legal scholars have labeled as unconstitutional executive orders issued by the president since taking office, millions of us are rising up to defy his naked power grab.
The president, meanwhile, has met loss after loss in the courts over his initiatives.
Oblivious to the depth and breadth of the growing resistance movement, Trump is still expecting us all to cower at his feet, fearful that the thugs he’s been ordering to disappear his critics in the immigrant community will come for us next.
Or worse, that he’ll call out the troops to silence dissent.
The trouble with dictators, however, is that they always overreach.
Hitler was doomed once he decided to wage war on the Allied powers; Iraq’s Saddam Hussein should have thought twice about invading Kuwait, given the U.S. addiction to low gas prices; and Vladimir Putin will rue the day he convinced himself that Russia could conquer Ukraine with little or no resistance.
Blinded by narcissism and enabled by spineless sycophants, autocrats eventually start to believe the self-fabricated myth of their own omnipotence.
In Trump’s case, it’s one thing to be the most powerful man on earth, but quite another to expect that a critical mass of this country’s 330 million citizens are willing to abet their own demise.
No, Donald, you will not erase us.
James E. Garcia is a Phoenix-based journalist, playwright and communications consultant. As a journalist, he has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and foreign correspondent. He was the first Latino Affairs correspondent for KJZZ, and the first Latino editor of a major progressive news weekly in the U.S., The San Antonio Current. James has taught creative and non-fiction writing, ethnic studies, theater, literature and Latino politics at ASU. The founder and producing artistic director of New Carpa Theater Co., James is the author of more than 30 plays, including the upcoming “The Two Souls of Cesar Chavez.”
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.