A slim majority of voters picked Donald Trump for a second presidential term. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a president has almost total immunity while performing the duties of his office. Fortified by those two mandates, Trump has proceeded to deploy the vast powers of the presidency to radically restructure the federal government.

The critics are many and a few federal judges have blocked some of his actions, but he remains largely unchecked. What he has done in only his first month in office already makes him one of the most consequential presidents.

He launched his promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He is closing federal agencies and will take away the jobs of probably hundreds of thousands of employees. He uses federal funding to pressure prestigious universities to adopt his concept of higher education. He is at war with some top media organizations and the federal judiciary.

A set of fortuitous circumstances has helped the president advance his agenda, including Republican control of Congress. The Republican Party allowed itself to be repurposed to serve his interpretation of the national interest, which, to him, is the same for his Make America Great Again (MAGA) political operation. To some supporters, he is a savior, or the Messiah returned, or at least he is imbued with divine authority.

His political base is strong enough to enable him to force potential rivals to toe his line or be “primaried” out of office. His affection for people who are “not losers” has seen him allied with some of the wealthiest Americans and his orbit also includes known neo-Nazis and “white nationalists”

His shock tactics have turned Democratic Party leaders into the proverbial fish out of water gasping for the oxygen which he is sucking out of the political air. They obviously did not prepare for a possible Trump second term. Their reactions have ranged from petulant disrespect, such as booing the president as he spoke to a joint session of Congress, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, the putative party leader, cobbling Democratic support for a spending bill endorsed by Trump, arguing that blocking it would have further enabled Trump’s policies.

It is as if they believe that it is Trump’s fault for winning the election.

The obvious vacuum at the top of the Democratic Party is being partly filled by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is not even a Democrat but an Independent. Sanders has been joined on a national speaking tour, “Fighting Oligarchy,” by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at 35, is less than half his age of 83. The alliance bridges the generational gap that plagues the party hierarchy and could finally boost its progressive wing.

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are “Democratic Socialists.” They are among those the party brass has kept at arm’s length. Sanders was blocked twice in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, most likely thanks to the moderate/center-left ideology which the Democratic Leadership Congress, with Bill Clintion as its flag-bearer, injected into the party. The leadership snubbed Ocasio-Cortez’s recent bid for a key House Committee seat.

Trump has long demonized such politicians as “Marxists and Communists” and “liberal left radicals.” He claims – wrongly – that they and their allies have taken over the Democratic Party. But it is really not they who are the targets; it is the party itself.

The Trump plan is to so reorder the political system that there will never again be a party such as the one which enabled President Lyndon Johnson to create his Great Society with its social safety net that includes programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and free public school education.

It is doubtful that Trump is really committed to any ideology besides the imperative of capital and, more recently, pursuit of vendetta against perceived enemies. If he is as successful as it appears, it is most likely because he had one of the best teachers of agitation and propaganda politics in Roy Cohn, who was a close adviser and who worked with Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin to terrorize Americans with the “Red Scare” anti-Communist witch-hunt in the 1940s.

New York Times journalist Clay Risen’s book “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America,” published on March 18, leaves little doubt that many of Trump’s policies echo those of the Red Scare. Beverly Gage, a Yale University professor of history and American studies reviewed it in The New Yorker.

Risen estimates, according to Gage, that, during the five and a half years of the Red Scare 80 years ago, “authorities conducted almost five million background checks on federal employees, seeking evidence of views or associations that seemed too far left. The FBI followed up with in-depth investigations into more than 26,000 federal workers; 560 were fired and another 6,800 resigned or withdrew their application. About 0.1 percent were fired for ideological reasons.”

President Harry Truman launched the Red Scare with an executive order establishing a “loyalty program.” McCarthy, in Senate hearings, capitalized on it and his “fame and his influence was the spectacle of arbitrary power. Alone among rivals, he demonstrated that a single loose-cannon senator could do and say whatever he wanted – nobody could stop him. To speak out against McCarthy was to invite his scrutiny and intimidation. But remaining silent was no guarantee of safety either, He created a no-win situation that left enemies and critics, year after year, at a loss.”

Image, then a “loose-cannon” president who governs by executive orders. But Trump has his own McCarthy, sort of, in Elon Musk, whom he appointed to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which also serves to take the heat off himself.

Gage notes that Risen does not draw any comparison between the McCarthy and Trump eras. But she does: “The unfortunate truth is that most of the mechanisms of the Red Scare, including congressional hearings and loyalty investigations, would not be especially hard to revive. Indeed, recent developments have indicated that they might be deployed with genuine glee.”

The Trump administration, Gage notes, has begun asking for lists of people such as “federal workers who attended Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training, of FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6 cases, of scientists engaged in now suspect areas of work. Trump himself has openly announced his intention to deploy the Justice Department and the FBI against his personal, political and ideological enemies.”

Gage acknowledges that Trump may not necessarily be launching a new Red Scare but that does not mean he will not try. “And in this sort of politics,” she adds, “the trying is part of the game. As long as the nation’s ‘cultural Marxists’ feel vulnerable to random accusations of secret investigations, they’ll likely be more careful about what they do and say. As Roy Cohn once instructed a young Donald Trump, much can be accomplished by attacking first and dealing with the consequences later.”

But the possibility of another Red Scare was raised just a few days before the Nov. 5 election by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin. He predicted that, if re-elected, Trump would use a super-sized antisemitism campaign as the pretext to go after the opposition party. He cited “Project Esther,” a document prepared, like Project 2025, by the Heritage Foundation. The ultimate objective of Project Esther, Mercetic claims, is not anti-semitism but “what Trump has called a massive, vicious, criminal radical Left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party.” Why stop at the Left when the party itself is grievously wounded, with some polls pointing to a national favorability of less than 30 percent?

It will take more than Sanders to turn it around but he is not alone. Failed VicePresidential candidate Tim Walz and California Rep. Ro Khanna also went on town hall tours and the Democratic leadership is being confronted by a rankand-file rebellion. A headline on a report in The Independent asks, “Is the Democratic Party having its Tea Party moment?” The story notes that, at one meeting in Las Vegas which 3,000 people attended, Ocasio-Cortez, using a Trump favorite promise, declared, “We’re gonna take our country back.”