Editors' Note: They say that daily journalism is the first draft of history. As America faces the most critical election since 1860, we thought we'd get a real historical perspective, since the first drafts we are reading every day are frankly pretty sh***y. Therefore, we had to peer into the future and read what real historians wrote with the benefit of hindsight. Today we offer an excerpt from the standard reference work, The Decline and Fall of the American Democracy 1968-2024 by the esteemed Professor of Western History at Harvard University of Korea, Prof. Dong Geura-Mi, published by The Consortium of American University Presses in Exile in 2065.
Chapter 24
Those who were young in the autumn of 2024 will tell you that it was a golden time. The weather, except for two serious hurricanes caused by climate change and its denial by the Republican Party, was warm and sunny from coast to coast. Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration, the American economy was humming, with real income growth, low inflation, and low unemployment. In many cities, gasoline (the primary source of automotive energy then) fell below $3.00 a gallon.
On those fall weekends, hundreds of thousands flocked to America's gigantic pro-college football stadiums to thrill to the spectacle of young men crippling themselves for the entertainment of millions. In baseball, the World Series featured the marquee match-up of the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
If you lived in one of the 43 U.S. states whose votes did not count for the Presidential election because they were not closely divided under the peculiar rules of the American Electoral College, you might have been able to ignore the election. Almost one-third of Americans did, failing once again to vote, as turnout reached about 68%.
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| Feb. 2025: Immigrants are rounded up and detained |
The actual electoral count failed to lead to a clear victor. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, won the popular vote by over 3,000,000 over Republican Donald Trump. But it availed her not. In a shock, she lost the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina by a mere 20,000 votes each.
The first complete count in Georgia gave Harris a 12,000 vote lead. However, the Republican Governor and Legislature of Georgia moved quickly to purge voter rolls of those they claimed might not have been U.S. citizens. In some counties, Republican election boards and operatives selectively challenged mail-in ballots on the grounds of alleged mismatches between the signatures on the ballot and on the registration cards. As a result, Republicans invalidated some 40,000 ballots and called into question the reliability of the vote count.
Claiming that it was impossible to declare a winner based on the popular vote, the Georgia Legislature certified its own slate of Trump electors to the Congress.
The furor was tremendous. For all of November and December, lawyers maneuvered to challenge electors in Georgia and other states. However, the Democrats had failed to capture the House by one vote and lost their Senate majority.
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| June 2025: SG Giuliani urges the Court to ban abortion medication |
As was the case in 2000, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court decided that Trump had won a majority of the electors and even if he had not, he would nonetheless win a House vote, which under the Constitution was decided by a majority of the states. Therefore, in a 6-3 vote, Chief Justice Roberts declared that in the interests of “finality,” Trump had won a second term.
Trump's allies on the Republican right had prepared well. Even as Trump gave an angry speech to a sullen crowd on Inauguration Day, his aides promulgated a series of executive orders and commands.
By the end of day on January 20, Trump had called out the Army and National Guard units to begin rounding up the 400,000 undocumented immigrants with unexecuted removal orders. He stripped civil service protections from millions of federal workers. He reinstituted his immigration bans.
Most shocking to the benumbed populace, he announced a ban on the sale and distribution of abortion medication under the Comstock Act, and used the National Guard to raid health care facilities and impound stocks of the drugs.
The reaction was immediate. Close to a million descended on Washington to protest the attacks on abortion rights. But Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Stephen Miller had mobilized thousands of heavily armed troops and paramilitary forces and told them to use whatever force was needed to keep the streets clear. The show of force intimidated the marchers, who remained peaceful.
It was a harbinger of much worse to come. Acting Attorney General Jeff Clark ordered all U.S. Attorneys and staff-level lawyers to prioritize prosecutions of abortion pill providers and those giving sanctuary to noncitizens without immigration status. When hundreds of Justice Department lawyers refused, they were summarily fired and replaced by new hires working directly for Acting Deputy Attorney General Alina Habba.
Soon the number of noncitizens subject to deportation grew by the millions, as Trump revoked all TPS and DACA designations, taking away legal status from those who had lived in the United States for years, and in many cases decades.
The Supreme Court's reversal of the right to gay marriage in 2025 and upholding of state bans on medical gender transitioning ushered in a new era of oppression of LGBTQ individuals, many of whom left the United States for Canada or Europe.
Trump's imposition of 100% tariffs on imports from China and 20% tariffs on all other imports caused economic chaos. As the cost of those tariffs was passed on to consumers, inflation spiked to 8%. The retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and the EU led to disastrous falls in farm income and higher unemployment in export-driven industries.
Trump moved with similar dispatch in foreign policy. With Michael Flynn returning as his National Security Adviser, he immediately terminated US aid to Ukraine and withdrew the United States from NATO. Although the European NATO members tried to make up the shortfall, Ukraine was forced to accept a humiliating peace which led to its full absorption by Russia in 2030.
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| Nov. 2026: unarmed and defenseless, Ukraine sues for peace |
Impulsively, Trump agreed to fly to Moscow to celebrate with Putin the Ukraine cease fire deal. No details emerged from their meeting, but shortly thereafter Putin transferred his exhausted but victorious troops to new positions bordering the Baltic States. The results of the Baltic War of 2033-37 are outside the scope of this volume, but it is not too much to say that the map of Europe was remade for generations.
In the Middle East, Trump approved the Israeli plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank, but backed down when Saudi Arabia threatened to boycott US businesses and awarded Trump a lucrative contract to build a luxury golf resort on the Red Sea.
But the American home front was seething. The families and friends of immigrants began to resist the National Guard roundups of newly-undocumented noncitizens. In some places, they armed themselves with assault weapons and faced down the Guardsmen. Some of the troops backed down, but others, principally from the Texas and Florida National Guard, shot and killed armed and unarmed resisters alike.
As out of state federal forces invaded so-called blue states such as California and Massachusetts, their governments tried to resist and frustrate the roundups of immigrants and abortion providers. Generally they were unsuccessful, especially after the Supreme Court upheld Trump's use of the Insurrection, Alien Enemies, and Comstock Acts.
Trump's massive and near-fatal 2026 stroke was regarded by his opponents as a chance for a fresh start. They were wrong. New President JD Vance, installed under the 25th Amendment, and his Chief of Staff Elon Musk continued the clampdown and even extended it. Vance won re-election in 2028 and held the Senate after easing the pain of inflation with $10,000 checks bearing his picture, and the pattern was set.
Over time, the new Republican regime consolidated its power. Justices Alito and Thomas were replaced by Aileen Cannon and James Ho, keeping a reactionary Republican majority in firm control of the Supreme Court. In the 2030's the Court remade the administrative state by holding that independent agencies like the SEC and the NLRB violated the concept of a “unitary executive.”
The toll these antidemocratic changes took on once powerful American institutions was immense. Independent media outlets like The Washington Post and the liberal-leaning MSNBC network were closed down by their frightened proprietors, while others, like CNN and The New York Times, limited their criticism of government policies under the rubric of “occupying a neutral ground.”
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| March 2027: Florida college students seemingly not bothered by loss of academic freedom |
American universities were hard-hit by new regulations tying government aid, including federal student aid and loans, to compliance with vague guidelines intended to assure representation of conservative views. Between those laws and others limiting medical and biological research in accordance with hard-right Catholic metaphysics, many simply found themselves unable to function.
The richer schools opened satellite campuses in cities like Berlin, London, Tokyo, or Seoul, where academics out of favor with the American regime could teach and write without fear of persecution. Some in deep red states actually picked up and moved to less oppressive states, like Houston's Rice University, which built a new campus in Los Alamos, New Mexico and sold its impressive Texas facilities to the newly-formed Musk University.
The economic stagnation and restrictions on liberty made living in the United States stultifying. Before she left America to reside permanently in France in 2040, diarist Malia Obama recalled how even her parents were no longer optimistic about the future of their country....
Just a reminder that the last day to vote is Tuesday, November 5. It could be your last one ever.
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