On November 6 last year, the day after the big election, I wrote about the “so-serious situation we are now faced with in not just the USA but the world because of the MAGA victory. I remember a very similar feeling after the November, 1972 runaway Presidential victory of Trump-similar Richard Nixon over George McGovern. But 21 months later Nixon was gone from DC, resigning in disgrace before he was impeached.

“What was Nixon’s vote total compared to Trump’s?

“Nixon had a 23% margin of victory in the popular vote and won every state except Massachusetts and DC. As far as Trump, when all the votes are counted It looks like he’ll either be ahead by a couple percent or pretty much tied. And Harris will have won a lot more states than Massachusetts and DC.

“History sometimes develops in unexpected ways. Who would ever have thought after Nixon’s overwhelming landslide victory in 1972 that he would be disgraced and gone from the White House 21 months later?”

Nixon’s fall from power was completely a result of what became known as the “Watergate crisis,” the revelation of a secret plan to illegally disrupt the 1972 Presidential election. It began when four pro-Nixon burglars were arrested late at night inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters housed in the Watergate building in DC.

There are a lot of similarities, as well as differences, between this early 70s Republican Party crisis and the one they are dealing with today because of the all-of-a-sudden exploding into public view of Trump’s long-term friendship with corrupt child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The fact that it was MAGA people who brought the grassroots pressure leading to this state of affairs for Trump is definitely something different compared to what Nixon went through in 1973 and 1974.

Another difference is that the Epstein crisis is about much more than an illegal effort to steal an election, as big as that is. This one is about criminal depravity, the apparent years-long sexual abuse of teenage girls by Trump and other rich and powerful white men to satisfy their twisted sexual desires. It’s sick, sick, sick at the most fundamental human level.

Also of significance is the allegiance so far to Trump of the vast majority of Republican Senators and House members, as well as MAGA-related, conservative religious leaders, despite how clearly despicable Trump’s conduct was over the many years he and Epstein were close buddies in sexual criminality.

Finally, there is the important difference that in 1973-1974 the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. This meant that as the extensiveness of Nixon Administration efforts to illegally seize political power were revealed, public Congressional hearings educated the US population about them in a way which dramatically affected Nixon’s political support. Just before impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives were about to begin, and just before he resigned, Nixon’s approval ratings were at about 25%.

This has some similarities to what Newsweek reported just two days ago:

“According to the latest Wall Street Journal/Fabrizio, Lee & Associates poll, 76 percent of voters believe the Justice Department is hiding important information about its Epstein investigation, with nearly half saying they have ‘no confidence’ in the department’s handling of the case. Another 21 percent say they have little confidence, while fewer than one in four expressed any real trust in the probe.”

What does all of this mean for the independent progressive movement in the US which has been publicly demonstrating in every state in the country since early February, the millions of us who are “taking it to the streets,” as well as the many more US Americans who support us?

We should clearly be supportive of the efforts to get out the truth about Epstein’s connections to Trump and other political and corporate rich white men and which of them, because of those connections, engaged in personally corrupt and criminally abusive, illegal conduct toward teenage women.

We should also be more knowledgeable and active than many of us are, myself included, on the issue of child sex abuse. Two weeks ago I was astounded to read a story in The Guardian which reported that “Florida records more than 700,000 people as victims of human trafficking in 2024–Report from University of South Florida says total includes 100,000 children targeted for sex trafficking in state.”

This political crisis for Trump is bringing into the open a dirty, despicable underside of US society that is rarely visible to those not experiencing it. While keeping up the pressure on him and those who continue to support him, while demanding that Trump Must Go, we can never forget that, as big a victory as that would be, our problems in the US are profoundly systemic and will only be solved by a massive movement of tens of millions of us rising up in a sustained and organized way.

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21^st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.

My first years of progressive activism and organizing took place during the presidency of Richard Nixon, who, without a doubt, led one of the most repressive presidential administrations we have experienced in the United States in the modern era, prior to this Trump regime. It was under Nixon that the Republican Party, with its “southern strategy,” began to move toward becoming the kind of regressive entity that allowed pathological liar, racist, and convicted sexual abuser Donald Trump to be elected president in November 2016 and again in 2024.

During Nixon’s first term, from 1969 to 1973, he oversaw the use of government agencies to attempt to destroy groups like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and the Young Lords, including armed attacks by police that resulted in deaths. Newly enacted conspiracy laws were used to indict leaders of the peace movement and other movements. An entirely illegal and clandestine apparatus was created to sabotage the campaigns of his political opponents in the Democratic Party, leading to the midnight break-in at the Watergate Hotel that eventually led to the exposure of this apparatus and Nixon’s forced resignation from office in 1974.

I learned several things during those Nixon years about how to deal with government repression. Unfortunately, given Trump/MAGA’s attempts to replace US democracy with a fascist regime, those are very relevant lessons for today.

One critical lesson is that there is a disparity in the government treatment of people of color—Black, Latino/a, Indigenous and Asian—compared with the treatment of people of European descent—white people. The historical realities of settler military aggression, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, assumed white dominance, and institutionalized racism continue to have their negative, discriminatory impacts.

We are seeing this play out right now with the Trumpist arrests of Brown and Black immigrants, over 90% of whom, according to AI, have no criminal record. There can be little doubt that the intention is to use this racist campaign to establish a wholly new “justice” system which will increasingly come after not just immigrants but anyone who is consistently resisting their efforts to overturn democracy and install an authoritarian, repressive regime.

Those of us of European descent must be conscious of these realities and act accordingly, prioritizing right now the defense of immigrant rights. Very big numbers of us are stepping up, demonstrating and engaging in nonviolent action, risking and getting arrested, in opposition to what is happening with ICE in particular.

Government repression can’t be allowed to paralyze or divide organizations or movements. This is one of the objectives of an unjust government trying to repress those who challenge its policies and practices. That is one of the reasons why we need to be about the development of a movement culture that is respectful and healthy. Such a supportive cultural environment can help us weather this storm we are in and emerge from it stronger and better both as individual activists and organizers and as a mass progressive movement.

This is one of the necessary elements for successful resistance to government repression.

When I say “successful” I don’t mean that there won’t be casualties on our side, people behind bars, some for months or years, or people physically attacked and injured or worse, or deportation, job losses or greater economic hardship. It is clear that under a Trump/MAGA regime this is already happening and will continue and likely get worse, particularly for immigrants, people of color and low-income people generally.

Other things which can defend our rights and our movements are these:

-effective legal representation in court. It is good to see the way that many lawyers and progressive legal organizations are stepping up to defend immigrants and challenge the Trump executive orders issued so far;

-broad community support when repression happens. There are instances when ICE has attempted to arrest people and, on the spot, neighbors and others have prevented those arrests or, by their actions, have brought media attention to what is being attempted and, over time, have gotten people released from jail. It is a fact that there is a strong and extensive network of organizations nationally which is having an impact.

All of this can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the Trumpists, strengthen our justice movement and hasten the time when the power of the organized people overcomes them on the way to the worldwide social, economic, environmental and cultural changes needed for humanity and all life forms to avoid ecosystem and societal breakdown.

Ultimately, what I have learned is that government repression can have a disruptive impact on our work, but we can turn a negative into a positive. The extent to which we can creatively, intelligently, and fearlessly demonstrate the truth of what we are about when responding to what they are doing to us is the extent to which we can have confidence that yes, we will win. Si, se puede!

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21^st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.