​With Labor Day imminent, it is fitting to examine what a second Trump administration has in store for American workers. The best place to unearth this information is, of course, from within the deep recesses of the increasingly infamous, 920-page Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint for transforming America into a totalitarian state.
 
Project 2025 would largely eliminate child labor laws (page 595). If a child wants to work in a factory, slaughterhouse or coal mine, that’s fine with the drafters of a document infused with cruelty. Some deeply red states have already gotten a head start on this odious initiative (see Rant 738, April 28, 2023).
 
Federal child protection laws have been in place for almost 100 years. They were enacted at a time when injuries and deaths were all too common among children who went to work to help support their families. Incidents of limb loss and respiratory illness were legion. The Fair Labor Standards Act succeeded in mitigating this societal travesty (which a Supreme Court, almost as horrible as the current one, upheld) and orienting children’s focus from working in dangerous environments to getting an education.
 
This provision is arguably the worst anti-labor proposal the Trump cabal has in store for workers, but wait, there’s a lot more (space does not permit citing the entire Project 2025 anti-labor program. What follows is a selection):
 
Tens of thousands of non-political federal civil service workers would be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists (page 80). The 140 year-old merit system would be deep-sixed. This would in fact create a “deep state.”
 
Public employee unions would be banned (page 82).
 
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program would be eliminated (page 354). This highly successful program attracted thousands of highly qualified young people to public service in return for having their student loan debt forgiven after 10 years of government service and 120 direct loan repayments.
 
Labor and Wage Protections for Workers on Federal Projects would be repealed. (page 604). One effect of this would be to allow contractors to pay less than the prevailing regional wage.
 
Companies could stop paying overtime (page 592). Instead, employers could authorize time-off (compensatory time) on their schedule.
 
States could seek a waiver to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws (page 605). This when the federal minimum wage is set at a piddling $7.25/hour.
 
Bosses could eliminate unions in the middle of a labor contract (page 603).
 
Also, the Project 2025 team urges Congress to pass Sen. JD Vance’s bill to let employers create their own bogus company-run unions (page 599).
 
There is a great deal more in Project 2025 to shock the conscience and make life even more miserable for workers, but you get the drift. If Trump manages to steal his way back into the White House, the malefactors who cobbled together this dreadful collection of medieval torments will not be far behind.
 
Project 2024 must be to keep these abominable haters and aspiring autocrats as far away from the levers of power as possible.
 
Dick Hermann
August 30, 2024

“Piety, Domesticity and Motherhood”
--Mid-19th Century American Male Attitude Toward Women
 
“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche” (“Children, Kitchen, Church”)
--The Nazi Party Program for Women
 
“Faith, Family, Fertility”
--The Republican Party Program for Women (2024)
 
Apple, meet tree.
 
Project 2025, the Trump/Vance/Republican master plan to transform America into an autocracy, reads like a dystopian, gothic horror novel. It is a right-wing fever dream made real, even though they deny its obvious connection to them now that the public has discovered it. Among many other appalling things, it is intended to suppress any and all aspirations to equality that women might harbor. An approximation of what it would mean for more than 50 percent of the U.S. population can be found in the status of women in mid–nineteenth century America, when women had no rights and were considered the property of their husbands.
 
Ladies, welcome to what a second Trump presidency has in store for you. The cult that has replaced the Republican Party even wants to establish a pregnancy monitoring system. It has come a long, long way from the party that, virtually since its founding, advocated that government must not inject itself into individual’s lives. Cat-lady disparager, James David Vance, even wants to get rid of no-fault divorce.
 
Big surprise: the authors of this section of Project 2025, the neo-fascist playbook, were almost all men. They yearn for the days when men were men and women loved it.
 
This most recent manifestation of the Republican program to subdue women could have come straight from: (1) the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, who view all women as a fifth column and not even second-class citizens; and/or (2) the Nazi gender laws that viewed women as nothing more than procreation machines, provided the products of same were racially pure “Aryan” children. The Bund Deutscher Madel (League of German Girls), the female equivalent of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), was intended to prepare German girls for “careers” as wives and mothers. The Lebensborn program (1936) established birthing facilities throughout the land where young women, often teenagers, were mated to SS men in order to increase the Aryan population.
 
There was one exception: Several thousand women were allowed out of the home to serve as concentration and death camp guards.
 
Resisters were branded “biologically inferior” and hundreds of thousands were forcibly sterilized while thousands of others were incarcerated in the camps. Others were shot.
 
It was The Handmaid’s Tale come to life.
 
If Trump and Vance win this election, women will lose many of their rights. They will face being rounded up and imprisoned for crossing state lines for medical help. Young women will be trained in schools for their roles as wives and mothers. A special tax will be imposed on women who opt out of motherhood. Rape and incest will be just other means of procreation. Birth control could become illegal. The same for in-vitro fertilization.
 
Republicans have already signaled their intentions:

• They want to ban abortion without exception. Surely you are not gullible enough to believe Trump’s lies as he runs away from the consequences of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade now that he sees how deeply unpopular it is.
• They voted against renewing the child tax credit extension. Being mired in poverty is a positive in GOP circles.
• They oppose funding for daycare, pre-school, kindergarten, and free breakfasts and lunches for children. Meanness and cruelty for their own sake.
• They oppose paid maternity leave and pre- and post-natal care.
• They want to end Obamacare.
• They oppose any controls on guns despite guns being the leading cause of death of children.
• And so on….

 
Yet, they claim they are “pro-family.”
 
Trump and Vance appear to be direct descendants of the earliest proto-humans who came down out of the trees into the African savannas. These distant ancestors made their women sleep at the cave entrance so that when a cave bear approached and disemboweled them, their shrieks served as an early warning that the men best take cover deeper in the cave.
 
Trump wants to grab women by the p**sy. Vance and Project 2025 want to grab them by the throat.
 
Vote Republican, ladies, if you enjoy being held in bondage. This may in fact be your last chance to vote. Trump just told us that at a recent Nuremberg-style rally.
 
Dick Hermann
August 26, 2024

​“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
--H.L. Mencken
 
North Carolina is the state where the MAGA movement has achieved its apotheosis. This election cycle, it is showing us what Trumpism carried out to its alarming reductio ad absurdam will look like if the crazy-cult MAGA acolytes who have committed themselves absolutely to the Trump train wreck ultimately prevail.
 
The all-star cast of weird, malevolent people they have put up for statewide office is the stuff of nightmares and unequalled anywhere else:
 
Governor–Mark Robinson is an anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-woman and anti-science extremist. He is a consistent Holocaust denier who recently said that there are “Some folks [who] need killin.” He wants transgender women to go to the bathroom outside. He said that we should be reading the works of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro, a rogue’s gallery of supremely horrible monsters. The list goes on. Shockingly, this repulsive madman is polling very close to sane and sober Democrat, Josh Stein.
 
Lt. Governor–Hal Weatherman is, in fact, a meteorologist! He is also an extremist, a right-wing zealot who once worked for the infamous and discredited Madison Cawthorn, a wretch who made House colleague and supreme scoundrel, Matt Gaetz, look like a statesman (I exaggerate). He is an anti-abortion book banner who opposes raising the minimum wage and has bought into virtually every conspiracy theory advanced by Trump and his lunatic fringe.
 
Attorney General–Dan Bishop is best known for authoring the “bathroom bill” which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms other than those of their biological sex at birth. The bill prompted companies and other organizations to withdraw their investments from the state. Undeterred, Bishop has continued to advocate extreme positions in line with the MAGAverse.
 
And that brings us to…
 
School Superintendent–Michelle Morrow who, if elected, would control the $11 billion state schools budget. Morrow makes her statewide office-seeking colleagues look almost normal (again, I exaggerate). She champions positions that would have made both the Nazi hierarchy and Hungarian Countess and Iron Maiden aficionado, Elizabeth Bathory, proud: the televised executions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden; the executions for treason of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer, as well as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. She calls public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers.” She is a big fan of QAnon conspiracies, including that celebrities harvest and drink the blood of children to prolong their own lives. Morrow gives new meaning to crazy, creepy and weird.
 
I thought for the past four years that no state would ever outdo Arizona’s recent cast of extreme Republican candidates from an alternate universe. But along comes North Carolina to disabuse me of any notions that the Trump cult could not possibly go this far off the deep end. Should this cast of out-there whackos and dangerous lunatics actually prevail in November, then Mencken’s quote at the beginning of this piece will have resonance befitting the occasion.
 
However, since North Carolina Republicans have nominated the greatest collection of bizarre kooks in history, Democrats should have a great opportunity to continue the bluing of this purple state. Moreover, this could be one state where down-ballot races could influence the presidential contest positively for Kamala Harris. Just this week, she inched ahead of Trump in state polls.
 
Keep your fingers crossed that North Carolinians will massively reject this malign band of evildoing fiends and restore the state to sanity. Prove the Bard of Baltimore wrong.
 
Dick Hermann
August 19, 2024

Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate punches a lot of important tickets: 

• Walz is a white male, which balances the ticket.
• He is a Midwestern, small-town farm boy.
• He is quintessentially working class.
• He is a very successful governor.
• He represented a rural, Republican district in the U.S. House of Representatives which flipped immediately back to Republican when Walz was elected governor. 
• He is highly articulate, as evidenced by his complete undressing and exposing of “weird” JD Vance and his even weirder running mate, Donald Trump. 
• He is a veteran.
• He is a gun owner who once had an “A” rating from the NRA. 
• He was a high school teacher and football coach, who turned around a winless program and won a state championship. 
• When a student group wanted to form a gay-straight student alliance, he volunteered to be its faculty advisor. 
• He offends no Democratic constituency. 
• He can unquestionably serve as a highly competent and able governing partner to a President Harris.
• He is avuncular in the best sense, as opposed to crazy Uncle Donald.
• He compares favorably to his Republican, hedge-fund, faux-hillbilly counterpart in every conceivable way.
• He actually cares about people who feel left behind, as opposed to Trump and Vance pretending to care.
• He is NORMAL!

 
Trump and Vance will try to paint him as a radical leftist. However, when you see him and hear him talk, he comes across as anything but.
 
The other two finalists–Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Sen.Mark Kelly of Arizona– while both exceptional leaders with stellar credentials–would have brought with them some uncomfortable baggage. Shapiro may have been too much of a centrist for the Democrats’ progressive wing to swallow. In addition, he is an unabashed supporter of Israel, a position that could have jeopardized Democratic chances in crucial Michigan with its large Arab population. His presence on the ticket might have generated massive protests at the imminent Chicago convention reminiscent of the chaos of 1968. Finally, a Harris-Shapiro ticket would have meant that three quarters of the first and second families would have been Jewish. America may not quite be ready for that. And you could have bet the mortgage that Trump’s just-below-the-surface anti-Semitism would have had a field day with that. Kelly is suspect among the labor unions for some of his Senate votes.   
 
The downside of the Walz pick is that he does not hail from a swing state that Harris will need to win the election. Of course, the conventional wisdom is that VP picks have little if any impact on the outcome of presidential elections. Pundits point to Lyndon Johnson in 1960 as the last VP candidate to make a difference, LBJ being credited with putting Texas in the Kennedy win column. 
 
My historical take on the impact of VP candidates is a little different. In 1980, Reagan’s choice of George H.W. Bush helped unify Republican support as it brought together the two major GOP constituencies–the traditional conservative Eastern establishment and the hard-right Goldwater wing. In 1992, Clinton’s pick, Al Gore, emphasized the ticket’s youth and solidified its appeal to sunbelt states. In 2008, McCain’s surprise selection of Sarah Palin, a woefully inexperienced and inept loose cannon, arguably hurt him, voters questioning both his judgment and his seriousness. In 2016, Mike Pence reassured Evangelicals that Trump, despite his singularly non-biblical past, was palatable.
 
And that brings us to John David Vance who, after only several weeks as Trump’s VP choice, is already proving to be a train wreck of Palinesque proportions. He has already forfeited the “childless cat lady” vote and cemented the public’s perception of him as both weird and creepy, not the best adjectives to shoulder moving toward November.
 
The contrast between Walz and Vance could not be starker. Bizarre and conspiracy theory-prone, fake hillbilly shtick vs. rock-solid mainstream, salt-of-the-earth American. Given the contrast, Walz could actually boost Harris’s chances.
 
The Democrats now have two people at the top of their ticket who contrast sharply with their Republican rivals: competence vs. incompetence; normal vs. anything but normal; forward-looking vs. past-obsessed; supporting policies favored by the majority of Americans (e.g., women’s health; guns; privacy, inequality); high cognition vs. deeply impaired; youth vs. age; other-directed vs. self-consumed; and so forth.
 
Getting back to Walz vs. Vance, who would you rather have “a heartbeat away”? Speaking of hearts, it is clear that Walz has a big one. Vance (and Trump) have already proven that they are heartless.
 
Dick Hermann
August 11, 2024