Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working-class people ahead of the oligarchs.

This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief is taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

First, some background.

While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

But there were real oligarchs in America in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.

In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:

“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”

It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.

In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.

Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.

By the early 1850s, they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.

In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the Gilded Age known as the Roaring 20s.

President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy, leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”

With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate, he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.

So here we are now, 81 years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me 10 years ago on my radio program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.

Since taking office, Trump has:

— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
— Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
— Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
— Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
— Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
— Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
— And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.

Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov in the Philippines; Trump’s been having hour-plus-long phone conversations with Putin on average every two weeks since his inauguration; and FBI director Ka$h Patel is planning a trip to Russia a month before the election.

Russia, of course, intervened massively in the 2016 election, Trump’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempts at minimizing their role notwithstanding.

The Mueller Report identified 10 specific instances of Trump criminally trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Robert Mueller’s two-volume report found that Russia had attacked the 2016 election in what he called a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” through the Internet Research Agency’s social media operation and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation's hacking of Democratic emails, and that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit from the stolen material.”

The second volume laid out roughly 10 episodes of criminal obstruction of justice committed by Trump, and Mueller only declined to prosecute Trump because Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president, writing that while the report doesn’t conclude the president committed a crime, it also doesn’t exonerate him.

Along the way, his team criminally charged 34 individuals and three Russian companies, including 26 Russian nationals and six former Trump advisers, and won eight convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Richard Pinedo, with five of them sentenced to prison. Trump later pardoned five of those eight.

The problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy — including the oligarchy they’ve reestablished here, where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins — is always a transitional form of government.

Throughout centuries of modern history, oligarchy has rarely lasted more than a single generation. When people realize that the oligarchs have taken over their government and are bleeding average working people dry, they push back hard.

Which forces the oligarchs and the government they control to choose one of two options: give in and revert back to democracy, keeping some or much of their riches but allowing a middle class to re-emerge, or come down hard on the people with an iron fist and crush the opposition.

In Hungary this year, that oligarchy chose the former path, as did the oligarchs in America in 1933. In Russia, Putin chose the latter path, as did Egypt’s el-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdoğan (among others).

In apparent preparation, Trump is building a massive masked secret police force worthy of the Shah’s SAVAK, he’s building detention centers as fast as humanly possible, he’s identified people who “oppose” “traditional American views” as “domestic terrorists” along with anybody he labels “Antifa." He is now openly calling Democrats communists and has suggested some should be deported or imprisoned.

Yesterday, Republicans (with the help of 13 turncoat Democrats: Reps. Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Josh Gottheimer, Marcy Kaptur, Susie Lee, Jared Moskowitz, Chris Pappas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Darren Soto, and Derek Tran) passed legislation out of the House that would make it wildly more difficult for millions of low-income Americans and married women who’ve changed their names to vote.

Reporter and statistician Greg Palast has documented — using nothing but official government figures — that the 2024 Republican voter suppression efforts prevented around 4 million American citizens from either voting or having their votes counted; had that GOP effort been unsuccessful, Kamala Harris would today be president and Democrats would control the House and probably the Senate.

This time, it appears, they’re trying to disenfranchise millions more and, given the flaccidity of Democratic leadership’s response, it appears they’ll pull much of it off. Those same Dem leaders, after all, allowed all that suppression to happen in 2024 — over loud objections by people like Stacy Abrams who were documenting it in real time — with nary a peep in the press.

Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if the documentary evidence actually showed Democrats had stolen a national election from them!

Which leaves it to us. The only way out of this will be for us to show up this fall in massive numbers, to refuse to be intimidated or frightened away from the polls, and to support folks like Marc Elias who are fighting voter suppression every step of the way.

Pass it along. This may be America’s last chance to preserve the democracy we’ve shed so much blood and treasure to gain and keep these past two-and-a-half centuries.