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On January 20, 2025, Everyone in America Lost
Your vote will not protect you.
Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America, which unfortunately coincides with Inauguration Day this year. What’s worse, this year, 2025, Donald J. Trump will assume the office of President of the United States for the second time.
Right now, a lot of people are celebrating his ascent to power for the second time in the past decade. He won with a plurality of the vote, marking the first time that a Republican came out ahead of the Democratic candidate in total vote count since 2004, and only the second time since 1992. He still managed to not win a majority of votes, meaning that more people voted for someone other than him than voted for him.
That doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme, aside from the fact that he’s claiming a huge mandate to do whatever he wants when he doesn’t really have one. His electoral college margin was slimmer than most in the past few decades, and while Republicans won a majority of both chambers of congress, that majority in the House of Representatives is vanishingly small.
Still, he’s got control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government, and the Supreme Court has shown an incredible willingness to give Trump whatever he wants — mostly, anyway. Basically, he’s got a blank check to…
