The END OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA is coming...

Why some people think fascism is the greatest expression of democracy ever invented: political philosopher

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/fascism-right-wing/?cx_testId=2&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=2&cx_experienceId=EXDEXBKK1F00#cxrecs_s



by Mark R. Reiff and The Conversation November 07, 2022

Warnings that leaders like Donald Trump hold a dagger at the throat of democracy have evoked a sense of befuddlement among moderates. How can so many Republicans – voters, once reasonable-sounding officeholders and the new breed of activists who claim to be superpatriots committed to democracy – be acting like willing enablers of democracy’s destruction?

As a political philosopher, I spend a lot of time studying those who believe in authoritarian, totalitarian and other repressive forms of government, on both the right and the left. Some of these figures don’t technically identify themselves as fascists, but they share important similarities in their ways of thinking.

One of the most articulate thinkers in this group was the early-20th-century philosopher Giovanni Gentile, whom Italian dictator Benito Mussolini called “the philosopher of fascism.” And many fascists, like Gentile, claim they are not opposed to democracy. On the contrary, they think of themselves as advocating a more pure version of it.

Unity of leader, nation-state and people

The idea that forms the bedrock of fascism is that there is a unity between the leader, the nation-state and the people.

For instance, Mussolini famously claimed that “everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the state.” But this is not an end to be achieved. It is the point from which things begin.

This is how Trump, according to those around him, can believe “I am the state” and equate what is good for him is by definition also good for the country. For while this view may seem inconsistent with democracy, this is true only if society is viewed as a collection of individuals with conflicting attitudes, preferences and desires.

But fascists have a different view. For example, Othmar Spann, whose thought was highly influential during the rise of fascism in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, argued that society is not “the summation of independent individuals,” for this would make society a community only in a “mechanical” and therefore trivial sense.

On the contrary, for Spann and others, society is a group whose members share the same attitudes, beliefs, desires, view of history, religion, language and so on. It is not a collective; it is more like what Spann describes as a “super-individual.” And ordinary individuals are more like cells in a single large biological organism, not competing independent organisms important in themselves.

This sort of society could indeed be democratic. Democracy is intended to give effect to the will of the people, but it doesn’t require that society be diverse and pluralistic. It does not tell us who “the people” are.

Who are the people?

According to fascists, only those who share the correct attributes can be part of “the people” and therefore true members of society. Others are outsiders, perhaps tolerated as guests if they respect their place and society feels generous. But outsiders have no right to be part of the democratic order: Their votes should not count.

This helps explain why Tucker Carlson claims “our democracy is no longer functioning,” because so many nonwhites have the vote. It also helps explain why Carlson and others so vigorously promote the “great replacement theory,” the idea that liberals are encouraging immigrants to come to the U.S. with the specific purpose of diluting the political power of “true” Americans.

The importance of seeing the people as an exclusive, privileged group, one that actually includes rather than is represented by the leader, is also at work when Trump denigrates Republicans who defy him, even in the smallest ways, as “Republicans in Name Only.” The same is also true when other Republicans call for these “in-house” critics to be cast out of the party, for to them any disloyalty is equivalent to defying the will of the people.

How representative democracy is  undemocratic

Ironically, it is all the checks and balances and the endless intermediate levels of representative government that fascists view as undemocratic. For all these do is interfere with the ability of the leader to give direct effect to the will of the people as they see it.

Here is Libyan dictator and Arab nationalist Moammar Gadhafi on this issue in 1975:

“Parliament is a misrepresentation of the people, and parliamentary systems are a false solution to the problem of democracy. … A parliament is … in itself … undemocratic as democracy means the authority of the people and not an authority acting on their behalf.”

In other words, to be democratic, a state does not need a legislature. All it needs is a leader.

How is the leader identified?

For the fascist, the leader is certainly not identified through elections. Elections are simply spectacles meant to announce the leader’s embodiment of the will of the people to the world.

But the leader is supposed to be an extraordinary figure, larger than life. Such a person cannot be selected through something as pedestrian as an election. Instead, the leader’s identity must be gradually and naturally “revealed,” like the unveiling of religious miracle, says Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

For Schmitt and others like him, then, these are the true hallmarks of a leader, one who embodies the will of the people: intense feeling expressed by supporters, large rallies, loyal followers, the consistent ability to demonstrate freedom from the norms that govern ordinary people, and decisiveness.

So when Trump claims “I am your voice” to howls of adoration, as happened at the 2016 Republican National Convention, this is supposed to be a sign that he is exceptional, part of the unity of nation-state and leader, and that he alone meets the above criteria for leadership. The same was true when Trump announced in 2020 that the nation is broken, saying “I alone can fix it.” To some, this even suggests he is sent by God.

If people accept the above criteria for what identifies a true leader, they can also understand why Trump claims he attracted bigger crowds than President Joe Biden when explaining why he could not have lost the 2020 presidential election. For, as Spann wrote a century earlier, “one should not count votes, but weigh them such that the best, not the majority prevails.”

Besides, why should the mild preference of 51% prevail over the intense preference of the rest? Is not the latter more representative of the will of the people? These questions certainly sound like something Trump might ask, even though they are actually taken from Gadhafi again.

The duty of the individual

In a true fascist democracy, then, everyone is of one mind about everything of importance. Accordingly, everyone intuitively knows what the leader wants them to do.

It is therefore each person’s responsibility, citizen or official, to “work towards the leader” without needing specific orders. Those who make mistakes will soon learn of it. But those who get it right will be rewarded many times over.

So argued Nazi politician Werner Willikens. And so, it appears, thought Trump when he demanded absolute loyalty and obedience from his administration officials.

But most importantly, according to their own words, so thought many of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, when they tried to prevent the confirmation of Biden’s election. And so Trump signaled when he subsequently promised to pardon the rioters.

With that, the harmonization of democracy and fascism is complete.The Conversation

'Authoritarianism will be on the ballot': Experts recoil at Trump’s 'plans to centralize more power'

https://www.alternet.org/authoritarianism-on-the-ballot/?utm_source=123456&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15199





Political and legal experts are sounding the alarm after a New York Times deep dive details how Donald Trump and his top allies are planning to massively reorganize the entire executive branch to hand him unprecedented power and decimate the constitutional basis of checks and balances should he win re-election next year.

“Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands,” The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman report.

With the assistance of entities like the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that was transformed during the Trump years, The Times reports several of Trump’s well-known associates have been working on plans for his second term.

Among them, John McEntee. Swan last year at Axios described McEntee as a “young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah” who Trump had enlisted after his first impeachment acquittal in early 2020 to “activate the plan for revenge.”

“Baby-faced assassin,” is how The Guardian in February of 2020 described McEntee, “the 29-year old at the heart of Trump’s ‘deep state’ purge.”

McEntee rose through the ranks of the Trump White House, starting as the president’s body man and personal aide. He was terminated after failing to pass a security clearance background check and was “under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes,” CNN reported in 2018. Despite his past, Trump later rehired him as his Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, where he initiated loyalty test interviews in the hope of ensuring executive branch employees across all agencies were entirely loyal to Trump.

“What part of candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” was one question potential political appointees were reportedly asked under McEntee’s leadership, CBS News had reported in 2020.

In November of 2021, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl penned a piece for The Atlantic calling McEntee, “The Man Who Made January 6 Possible.”

“McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible,” Karl wrote. “They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.”

The New York Times’ report on Monday reveals Trump and his allies’ “plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”

Trump, for example, would bring what Congress created to be independent agencies, like the “Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.”

He would “impound” taxpayer funds Congress appropriated and refuse to spend them, a practice outlawed under disgraced President Richard Nixon.

As he wanted to do before the end of his first term, Trump would eliminate civil service protections from “tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.'”

And who would Trump enlist in this fascistic effort?

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said McEntee, “who is now involved in mapping out the new approach,” The Times reports.

“Our current executive branch,” McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Russell T. Vought, who lead Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, told The Times: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Others The Times mentions are “two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington.”

And Stephen Miller, a white nationalist who The Times notes was “the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.” That agenda included the intentional separation of children from their parents, and some siblings from each other – to send a message to other families not to travel to the U.S. southern border in hopes of applying for asylum or entering and staying unlawfully. Miller’s efforts separated approximately 3000 children from their parents, but he had a plan, never implemented, NBC News reported, to separate an additional 25,000 more.

Experts across the spectrum are responding to The Times’ report with grave concern.

“In 2024, authoritarianism—unchecked, unembarrassed and undisguised—will be on the ballot,” wrote Bill Kristol, the longtime neoconservative commentator.

“Anyone who opposes a Presidential autocracy in America should read this closely,” urged NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

“Read this piece,” also urged MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “Be afraid. This is on the verge of happening 18 months from now.”

“Now ask yourself this question,” he continued, “are cautious, in-denial, business-as-usual establishment Dems equipped, or even willing, to address this anti-democratic, autocratic threat?”

Award-winning retired White House correspondent Peter Maer tweeted, “ELECTIONS MATTER. If #Trump wins the #Republican nomination, autocracy will be on the ballot.”

Attorney Charles Kuck, an immigration law expert and adjunct professor of law warned, “Trump and his minions want America to be a dictatorship. Be aware.”

Former Republican and former Tea Party U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh noted, “Deciding how to vote in the 2024 election will be super easy & super straightforward: If you want a dictator in the White House, vote for Trump. If you don’t, vote for Biden.”

Veteran journalist Brian Kareem wrote: “Read. This is the elimination of democracy and the plans of a despotic regime.”

international relations professor and senior editor of Arc Digital, Nicholas Grossman writes: “If Trump conspiring [to] stay in power after losing reelection didn’t convince you. And his team’s plan to purge the civil service of non-loyalists didn’t. Nor did his call to terminate the Constitution. Here’s more evidence of explicitly anti-democracy intent.”

Retired U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, the expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security who is now at The Atlantic, balked at The Times’ title: “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.”

“Well, that’s one way to put it,” Nichols wrote. “Another would be ‘to establish an autocracy.'”

Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term: ‘I am your justice’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/04/21/trump-agenda-policies-2024/





The former president is proposing deploying the military domestically, purging the federal workforce and building futuristic cities from scratch

Mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce and charging leakers.


Former president Donald Trump has steadily begun outlining his vision for a second-term agenda, focusing on unfinished business from his time in the White House and an expansive vision for how he would wield federal power. In online videos and stump speeches, Trump is pledging to pick up where his first term left off and push even further.

Where he earlier changed border policies to reduce refugees and people seeking asylum, he’s now promising to conduct an unprecedented deportation operation. Where he previously moved to make it easier to fire federal workers, he’s now proposing a new civil service exam. After urging state and local officials to take harsher measures on crime and homelessness, Trump says he is now determined to take more direct federal action.

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Tex., a few weeks later. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s emerging platform marks a sharp departure from traditional conservative orthodoxy emphasizing small government, which was famously summed up in Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Trump, by contrast, is proposing to apply government power, centralized under his authority, toward a vast range of issues that have long remained outside the scope of federal control.

Experts called some of Trump’s ideas impractical, reckless, self-defeating, potentially illegal and even dangerous. Some of Trump’s specific proposals are admittedly underdeveloped, such as a plan for building futuristic cities from scratch on unused federal land, which has been compared to projects in repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

But Trump has a track record of floating ideas that stoke widespread outrage or confusion, then roiling government and legal institutions to realize them, such as banning citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from coming to the United States and imposing trade barriers. Trump is currently facing federal and local criminal investigations arising from his unsuccessful efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, which ultimately inspired a deadly riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

“As with so many things Trump, it’ll be sticky to sort out where what he’s proposing is literally unlawful, which some things would be, and where what he’s proposing would fly in the face of well-established and deeply principled norms,” said Steve Vladeck, an expert on constitutional and national security law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Trump campaign advisers said the former president will continue rolling out new policy ideas, with the goal of being upfront with voters about his agenda and letting them vote based on policy, similar to how he released a list of his potential Supreme Court nominees during the 2016 campaign. They identified Trump’s top priority as public safety and law enforcement, while stressing a commitment to collaborating with state authorities and working within the law.

“Together, we are going to finish what we started,” Trump said at the Waco rally last month. “With you at my side, we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.”

Supporters have cheered Trump’s continued turn away from longtime conservative orthodoxy, such as free trade and foreign interventions, and credited him for ushering in a larger shift in the party. In articulating a vision of a more coercive right-wing government, Trump is finding common ground with his leading rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor has laid out his own doctrine of asserting more government power, exemplified by his flagship bills restricting classroom instruction of diversity, gender and sexual orientation; his moves to punish Disney for opposing him; and his suspension of a Democratic prosecutor.

The shared positioning on executive power by Trump and DeSantis, who lead early primary polls, underscores how much Trump has reshaped the Republican base in the mold of his “Make America Great Again” movement.

“The Reagan limited-government conservatism and emphasis on federalism is being displaced by a new muscular, nationalizing cultural conservatism, with a lot of anger,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who studies democracy. “One thing we’ve learned about Trump and authoritarian populists like him is not to dismiss what they’re saying as just idle language and toothless roar. We need to take it very seriously.”

The rise of a more activist view of right-wing governance has sparked a wider debate within the conservative movement. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, another potential presidential aspirant, has criticized Trump and DeSantis as not conservative.

“The reality is we have to meet the government where it is presently,” said Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an effort by the conservative think tank and other conservative groups to develop policy proposals, personnel recommendations, training and transition plans representing a consensus of the conservative movement. “That’s really where the more activist leaning is coming from in this project, that we need skilled operators to start taking this battleship and pointing it in a new direction.”

The Trump campaign’s policy development is being led by Vince Haley, a former White House aide who previously worked for former House speaker Newt Gingrich. As the current Trump campaign’s policy head, Haley has been coordinating with Heritage and partner organizations the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Center for Renewing America, as well as the America First Policy Institute and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, to consider policy ideas and potential personnel picks for an administration-in-waiting. One adviser likened the collaborative spirit to the legendary weekly meetings of conservative minds convened by the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

Heritage and partner groups, which are unveiling their full policy book at a conference outside Washington on Friday, say they’re laying the groundwork for a future Republican president without picking sides and have been in discussions with DeSantis’s team as well, led by policy aide Dustin Carmack. The Center for Renewing America is officially neutral; its president, former Trump budget director Russ Vought, has endorsed Trump, while senior fellow Ken Cuccinelli is leading a pro-DeSantis super PAC.

“I guarantee the stuff we’re putting forward is not going to get thrown in the trash,” said Vought, who contributed the transition project’s chapter on exercising authority through the Executive Office of the President, akin to a playbook for a White House chief of staff. Some of Vought’s ideas have found their way into Trump’s proposals, such as a recent announcement on bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission under White House supervision.

“There’s a glove of power needed to beat back the administrative state or deep state,” he said, “and if you’re not willing to put your hand in that glove you will fail, regardless of how much credibility you have with the base.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has acknowledged the advantage of having more allies to help him prepare to operate the vast expanses of the administration more immediately than after his surprise win in 2016.

“When I went there, I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs and others to give me some recommendations, but I know them all now,” he said in Iowa last month, referring pejoratively to “Republicans in Name Only.” “I know the good ones, I know the bad ones, I know the weak ones, I know the strong ones.”


‘Freedom Cities’


The new cities proposal consists of a national contest to charter up to 10 D.C.-sized metropolises on undeveloped federal land. Administration officials discussed the concept toward the end of Trump’s term, but he did not campaign on it in 2020. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed the idea in White House meetings after it was initially brought up by Haley and another speechwriter on Miller’s team, Ross Worthington, who is also now on the 2024 campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Trump has discussed the new “Freedom Cities” in utopian terms, with flying cars, manufacturing hubs and opportunities for homeownership, promising a “quantum leap in the American standard of living.” The campaign has provided few details on how the plan would work in practice.

Trump acknowledged that the idea needed more work over a Sunday dinner in mid-March, according to economic adviser Stephen Moore. “He said, ‘I’m still trying to figure out how it’s going to work,’ something like that,’” Moore recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘How do you think we should make that work?’ And I’m going to help him with the idea.”

Moore said the cities could be designed in part by offering tax incentives and creating a “super police force that keeps the place safe,” reflecting GOP allegations that Democratic-run cities are awash with crime. It’s not clear how that will prove more attractive than similar measures already enacted by GOP governors. Even some of Trump’s allies have been skeptical of the plan.

“I hate this thing,” one outside economic adviser to Trump said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations with campaign officials. “The economic problems facing the nation are so severe, and we’re going to talk make-believe about ‘building new cities’?”

Experts stress that cities have historically grown around natural centers of economic activity rather than state edict. “You can’t just wave a wand and have cities come into being,” said Rick McGahey, an economist at the New School who specializes in urban growth. “This is not where cities come from. The concept does not work.”

Some observers say the idea more closely resembles libertarian fantasies, such as that produced by a think tank funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, of new private communities run on cryptocurrency. Others found it reminiscent of projects to build centrally controlled cities from scratch in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Trump has routinely praised and defended authoritarian foreign leaders such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Some Trump allies give him credit for what they see as a bold new idea. One campaign adviser compared the proposal’s ambition to the “Opportunity Zones” economic incentives in Trump’s 2017 tax legislation, scaled up to emulate historic Republican achievements such as Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System.

“There is this broad recognition that we don’t build enough things in America and that, you know, obviously, we have great American cities, but we haven’t really built a new model city,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who has endorsed Trump’s presidential bid. “There are a lot of other countries that are trying different approaches out, and I think it’s fine for us to think about doing that here, too.”

Trump has specified that he wants to define architectural standards in existing cities as well, insisting on classical-style buildings, monuments to “true American heroes,” and schools and streets named “not after communists but patriots.” He has also proposed forcibly removing homeless people to outlying tent cities, wading into an area usually left to local governments and relying on unclear federal authority.

“Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they are willing to be rehabilitated,” Trump said in a recent campaign video.


‘Patriotic education’


Similarly, Trump has suggested a stronger federal role in education, a matter that conservatives have traditionally advocated keeping under local control. He has proposed letting all parents use state funds to send their children to the school of their choice, similar to Republican-led legislation in Arizona, Iowa and Utah. Critics say the arrangement hollows out public education.

Trump called for a school choice program during the 2016 campaign but didn’t push it when Republicans controlled Congress, and a proposal by his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, for “Education Freedom Scholarships” went nowhere. A second Trump administration could expand school choice through budget reconciliation (requiring a simple majority in the Senate) by offering tax credits for tuition, according to Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

But a direct federal voucher program would entail increasing federal outlays on K-12 education. Trying to require school choice as a condition of districts’ receiving federal funding probably would face a court challenge, Hess aid.

Trump also proposed holding direct elections for parents to hire and fire school principals. Hess said that proposal lacks clear federal authority and raised a range of questions, such as who the candidates would be, whether they would be partisan, and who would set the qualifications and terms.

“This is not a real solution,” Houman Harouni, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said of Trump’s proposals. “It has to do with communicating to a portion of his base that they are going to have the religious or nationalist or exclusive education that they would like.”

Trump said he would reestablish a presidential commission to promote a “patriotic” curriculum that rejects scholarship on systemic racism. His “1776 Commission,” which did not include any professional historians, released a report at the end of his presidency that demonized institutions such as federal agencies and universities.

“What Trump is trying to resurrect is something that was thoroughly discredited by the professional historical community in a totally apolitical context,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “There’s lots of places to look and see what happens when history education gets stripped of its professional integrity in the interest of a political party.”


‘Shatter the deep state’


In another form of enforcing loyalty and suppressing dissent, Trump has proposed making it easier to fire federal workers, cracking down on media leaks, and establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission” to publish records on alleged abuses by spy agencies. He said he will require all federal employees to pass a new civil service test covering due-process rights, free speech, religious liberties, and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore government that is controlled by the people and for the people,” Trump said in a campaign video. In another, he elaborated, “We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and America-Last globalists in the deep state, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”

Some of Trump’s proposals for overhauling the merit-based civil service would require congressional action. The result could be to undermine the ability of professional public servants to reliably deliver government services without political interference, warned Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports federal workforce development.

“He is proposing changes that would create the world that he is objecting to,” Stier said. “It does have real-time consequences in terms of undermining public trust in our government. That’s a real problem because trust in government is a core part of our democracy.”


‘Military resources’


Trump drew widespread criticism as president, especially during the demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd in 2020, for advocating harsh treatment of protesters, clearing peaceful demonstrators outside the White House, and deploying unmarked federal agents in Washington and Portland, Ore. Since leaving office, Trump has said he regrets not going even further to deploy military power domestically and wouldn’t hesitate to do so if he returns to the White House.

“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored,” Trump said at CPAC. “We will use all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

In campaign videos and messages, Trump has specifically proposed requiring police departments to use stop-and-frisk, a tactic that has been widely criticized for discriminating against people of color and that a federal judge in New York found to violate the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches. Trump also said he would order the Justice Department to investigate charging decisions by local prosecutors, challenging the constitutional division between federal and local authorities. He further proposed using federal law enforcement to dismantle gangs and execute drug dealers and human traffickers.

Trump doesn’t envision a national police force, the campaign adviser said, and in practice his initiatives could be accomplished through federal funding or joint operations with state authorities.

The president has no legal authority over local police or prosecutors, and attempts to attach conditions to federal funding usually face litigation, according to Vladeck, the University of Texas law professor. There are legal limits on using the military for civilian law enforcement but allowances for acting in a support capacity that a Trump administration could try to exploit, Vladeck said.

“Republicans have tried to corner the market on claiming the federal government has been weaponized, but that’s what this is,” he added. “And the only way you can do that is by interjecting federal authority into matters that constitutionally or at least traditionally have been reserved to the states.”

New research explores authoritarian mind-set of Trump’s core supporters


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/12/trump-voter-authoritarian-research/

Data reveal high levels of anti-democratic beliefs among many of the president’s backers, who stand to be a potent voting bloc for years to come



History’s Whispered Warnings on Authoritarianism vs. Democracy


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/05/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-and-a-report-card-on-democracy-vs-autocracy/41371c44-d369-11ed-ac8b-cd7da05168e9_story.html


Authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But the democratic resistance is also growing. Which side will win in this tug-of-war, and what are the stakes?

I can’t think of a better place to ponder these questions than central Berlin, nor a better sparring partner to do it with than Timothy O’Brien, Bloomberg Opinion’s senior executive editor. The other day, we walked from the Reichstag — where the Weimar Republic was born and burned — to the site of the bunker where Adolf Hitler killed himself, and the adjoining Holocaust Memorial. You can listen to our conversation in our Crash Course podcast.

Go ahead and swap in your own vocabulary. Authoritarianism is basically synonymous with autocracy, and can lead to despotism, tyranny, dictatorship, and ultimately fascism and totalitarianism. Democracy, meanwhile, means much more than regular elections. It also presumes many other liberal, pluralist and constitutional institutions that check and balance the power of wannabe strongmen.

This contest is explicitly not between “left” and “right” — you can have authoritarianism at both ends. Instead, it describes the perennial tension between what the philosopher Karl Popper called open and closed societies, and ultimately between liberty and serfdom. And these days, a casual glance at the spinning globe in your library shows that the fault line runs through all continents, except — for now — Antarctica.

Consider Israel in recent weeks. Born in answer to one totalitarianism — that of the Third Reich and its Holocaust, which Tim and I were revisiting symbolically — the country is a proud democracy. But even there, a populist leader and aspiring autocrat, Benjamin Netanyahu, has come dangerously close to wrecking one of the institutions that’s universally considered — at least since Montesquieu argued for the separation of powers — to be a prerequisite for liberty: independent courts.

Similar currents are causing, as the think tank Freedom House calls it, democratic “backsliding” or “decline” in other places. In some, the slide seems reversible. Poland and Brazil, as well as the US since January 6, 2021, are in that category. In others — such as Turkey, Peru or Hungary — the descent is steeper. And in some countries, such as Burkina Faso after two successive coups, democracy may have failed altogether, as it once did in Weimar Germany.

Elsewhere, liberty hasn’t even been on the menu in recent memory. North Korea and Iran are ruled by despotic regimes. Russia has in effect turned fascist since President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine and mobilized his entire society for a genocidal war of aggression. China increasingly looks totalitarian, with its Orwellian surveillance infrastructure, and its incarceration and “re-education” of an entire population, the Uyghurs. 

The picture isn’t all bleak, however. Whereas 35 countries became more authoritarian last year, according to Freedom House, almost as many — 34 — turned more democratic, among them Colombia and Lesotho. In theocratic Iran, people — and especially women — have demonstrated bravely for their liberties, including the simple right to show hair. Most encouragingly, Israeli society has risen up against Netanyahu’s proposed reform — and stopped it for now.

Here, then, are some of the themes Tim and I distilled during our walk through Berlin. The first is a reminder that historical lessons are never blunt, and always subtle. Nobody is exactly like Hitler, so we should avoid “Nazi porn” and “Fuehrer kitsch.” The threat today or tomorrow won’t come from a guy with a toothbrush mustache. But it’ll still come from some other guy — or gal.

Standing in front of the Reichstag, we looked at the balcony from which a German republic was proclaimed at the end of World War I. For about 14 years, this building then housed the parliament that represented a democracy that was vibrant for a while, before turning dysfunctional and chaotic — and then failing. For Americans, Brazilians, Hungarians, Israelis and others today, this period — the 1920s and early 1930s — is the most pertinent.

A superficial parallel is that Germany a century ago lived through successive crises, including a hyperinflation and — more importantly — a deflation. You could compare that to our financial crisis in 2008 and all the turmoil that’s followed, including the pandemic.

The more relevant similarity is that Weimar society, like America and other countries today, was ultra-polarized. Owing to different electoral systems, this took the form of fragmentation — a proliferation of parties — in Weimar but a two-way schism in the US. Yet in both cases, factionalism cleaved the nation into hostile camps — commies and other “reds” versus monarchists, nationalists and Nazis then; Democrats, progressives and the “woke” against Republicans, conservatives and MAGA today. And hapless pluralities of pragmatic or moderate centrists were and are caught between these fronts.

There’s nothing bad about disagreement as such. In fact, controversy — provided it stays civil — is what democracy and pluralism thrive on. The problem then as now is that other ingredients were thrown into the mix.

One was the spread — abetted by the media of the day — of conspiracy theories, and a corresponding devaluation of objectivity and truth as standards. Intriguingly, some of those conspiracy theories even share strands of narrative DNA, notably the anti-Semitic tropes of Weimar Germany and the ravings of today’s QAnon. Authoritarians promote such reality distortion. Putin, with his KGB-trained mind, spent years training Russians to believe, as one expert puts it, that “nothing is true, and everything is possible.”

Another factor was the rise of populism. This is not an ideology, but a style of politicking that appeals to resentments (as opposed to hopes or ideals) in the population. The populist’s goal is to energize mobs that will propel him (rarely her) into power. Back then, populists harped on the humiliation of German territorial losses or war reparations after World War I. Nowadays they might dwell on, say, “American carnage.”

Because populism frames politics as a struggle between “us” and “them,” it needs to define enemies, foreign and domestic. But in the pursuit of power, the latter category is more potent. Compatriots who should be viewed as a loyal opposition are instead depicted as traitors. Violence creeps into politics, first subliminally, then rhetorically and eventually physically, when thugs — Brownshirts, Proud Boys or what have you — go at it in the streets. 

In this climate, it pays to be ruthless, not civil. Gradually, voters get used to taboos being broken — as during the first decade of Viktor Orban’s current reign in Hungary — until they become numb. Eventually, a populist considers the time right to go from lots of little lies to one Big Lie.

That term — Big Lie — comes from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In that book, written in prison after his failed first coup, he theorized that a lie could be so colossal that nobody would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” From this insight sprang his own Big Lie, which was that Germany never lost the war on the battlefield at all, but that domestic traitors — Jews, socialists and other groups he hated — delivered a “Stab-in-the-Back.”

Big Lies abound again today. Putin inverts reality by claiming that Ukrainians are Nazi Satanists and, with their puppet masters in the West, the aggressors rather than the victims. Former US President Donald Trump — arraigned this week in an unrelated indictment — still claims falsely that the election of 2020 was “stolen” from him.

The final ingredient in the corruption of democracy is personalization. Every authoritarian — from Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao to Putin, Xi Jinping, Orban and Trump — tries to redirect loyalty. If it used to be toward a flag, nation, republic or constitution, it is now diverted to the Fuehrer, Duce, leader. Worryingly, such personalization has been the trend in political parties for the past two decades.

How, then, do democracies die? Rather as one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters famously went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. And you never know in advance when the time is nigh. Hitler tried to putsch himself into power in 1923 but failed. Trump egged on his mob to take the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but failed. Hitler tried again in 1933, and succeeded.

That year, he was made chancellor by elites who didn’t take him seriously. The following month, arsonists set the Reichstag on fire. To this day, it’s not known what really transpired. What’s clear is that Hitler immediately blamed, and eventually executed, a Dutch communist, then eliminated his domestic enemies and, the following month, leaned on parliament to vote itself out of power with an Enabling Act that gave the Fuehrer dictatorial powers.

An interesting footnote is that Hitler never bothered to abrogate the Weimar constitution — on paper, it remained law until 1945. The dictator simply ignored it, knowing that Germans now pledged allegiance to him, not a document. The rest is history. Tim and I walked past some of the reminders, just minutes from the Reichstag: a Holocaust memorial to the murdered Roma and Sinti, another to the Jews. Nearby is yet another, to Hitler’s homosexual victims. 

But the story of our walk has an uplifting ending. In the 1990s, a newly reunited Germany, with a much stabler democracy, moved its capital back from Bonn to Berlin, and its parliament into the Reichstag building again. A British architect, Norman Foster, was chosen to give it a new look. The edifice had been mothballed for decades. Workers had to peel off plaster and paneling. And suddenly the past re-emerged, as it is wont to do.

There on the walls were not only the bullet holes left by the Soviet soldiers when they took the building in April 1945, but also the Cyrillic graffiti they scribbled. Some wrote their names, others their journey, others profanities.

A debate broke out about what to do with  these reminders of Germany’s “zero hour” — its defeat and shame — right in the seat of its new democracy. Eventually, a decision was made not only to keep the graffiti, but to incorporate and highlight it. Today, members of the Bundestag walk past it when they enter the plenary to cast their votes.

Is each German politician aware of the subtle exhortation in the architecture? Probably not. Germany, like other Western democracies, once again has populists on the far right and the far left seated in the chamber. But the warning is there, whispering to all who have ears to hear it: It happened here, and can happen anywhere. Therefore, do your part to make sure it never happens again.


Donald Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Hide His Authoritarian Plans for a Second Term

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-isnt-even-trying-to-hide-his-authoritarian-plans-for-a-second-term


He and his allies are openly talking about them—which makes you wonder what they’re not talking about publicly.


Given how his final weeks in office went down the first time around, it’s not hard to imagine that a potential second term for Donald Trump would be a full-on horror show. Obviously, that’s because those final weeks involved a desperate, unprecedented attempt to steal a federal election, capped off by an actual insurrection that left multiple people dead. But it‘s also not hard to imagine because Trump and his allies fully and proudly admit that should he beat Joe Biden in 2024 and head back to the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, he’ll run the place like a true authoritarian from day one.

The New York Times reports that “Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government…reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.” That expansion, per the Times, involves “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House,” according to people familiar with the matter. (The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, which currently operates as an independent agency, would be directly controlled by Trump in a potential second term.) As previously reported in a report that should have scared the crap out of you, the former guy also intends to make it far easier to fire potentially thousands of career civil servants and replace them with die-hard MAGA loyalists, but in addition, according to the Times, he plans to “scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” And, should voters lose their minds come 2024 and send him back to the White House, he’ll revive the practice banned under Richard Nixon of “impounding” funds appropriated by Congress for programs he doesn’t support.

Thinking these alleged plans are simply fake news made up by the “failing New York Times” in an attempt to stop Trump from being president? They are not! And we know this because some of them, like the impounding business, are literally on Trump’s campaign website, and others are being talked about, on the record, by his advisers. “The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since FDR’s New Deal,” John McEntee, a former Trump administration employee who attempted to purge insufficiently loyal officials in 2020 and is now overseeing the approach for a Trump administration sequel, told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” he said, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Meanwhile, Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and is now heading up a Trump-aligned policy organization, literally told the outlet, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.” Commenting on why Team Trump is being so open about all this, he told the Times, that it’s part of a strategy to “plant a flag” prior to the election so that it can be viewed as a mandate should Trump make it back to the White House. He added that he was thrilled to see hardly any of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination defend the longtime independence of the Justice Department after the ex-president attacked it.

Speaking of the Justice Department, former officials warned last month that they are concerned Trump will use the DOJ to destroy his enemies, and given that he’s already pledged to investigate Biden, it’s not hard to see why. (Trump also reportedly plans to “immediately” fire anyone who worked on the classified documents and January 6 investigations into him.)

In a statement, a spokesman for the Trump campaign told the Times the former guy has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done,” adding: “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

Not surprisingly, people who don’t work for Trump are not all that jazzed about his (open) plan to rule the country with an authoritarian bent. “It would be chaotic,” John Kelly, Trump‘s second chief of staff—the one who recently reportedly said he should be in “jail or a nuthouse”—told the Times. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.” Peter Strauss, a professor emeritus at Columbia Law School, noted that the whole reason the current checks on the president’s power are in place is “because we don’t want autocracy.”

Unfortunately, he added that the courts might let Trump get away with it. “The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said.






The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a catastrophic failure, with researchers at Oxford University estimating that its mismanagement of the crisis resulted in nearly 60,000 preventable deaths.

And yet, despite the tumult of the past eight months, President Trump’s favorability numbers have barely budged: His approval rating hovers in the low 40s, just as it has most of his presidency. As the economy cratered and covid-19 mortality skyrocketed, the Trump faithful stuck with him, lending credence to his infamous 2016 campaign boast that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any support.

Authoritarianism is alive and well


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/28/authoritarianism-donald-trump-democracy/





The June 25 editorial “Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other” cited professor Stephen G.F. Hall when stating that “Authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish.”

This is exactly what this country is seeing in former president Donald Trump’s constant attention-grabbing stunts. Sadly, the media is allowing this illusion of power to metastasize, giving Mr. Trump the stage to denigrate and destroy all that truly made the United States the unique democracy it has been. Negative attention is still attention. It is past time to take Mr. Trump off the stage of networks and newspapers. It is high time to accept his showmanship for the purpose that it has: a fire hose of falsehood.

It will not be easy to give up the ruse. Networks and cable news will have to refocus on what really matters to people. Start paying attention to the rights and freedoms that are being quashed because we are not paying attention. Open minds to thinking about our real values. Do Americans want to give up freedoms to an authoritarian regime that wants to control our lives, create draconian laws and imprison those who disagree with them? I think not. I hope not. It’s time to let Mr. Trump’s illusion of power vanish.

As stated in the June 25 editorial “Dictator’s dark secret: They’re learning from each other,” “Democracy’s greatest strength is openness.” It is crucial to remind the world of the crimes of communism now more than ever. Propaganda was the Soviet Union’s strongest weapon. The world must not only renounce Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine but also for trying to rewrite history.

I am a Lithuanian American whose grandparents were deported to Siberia, and my grandmother told me that the Soviets forbade her to ever discuss her deportation. I consider it a duty to tell everyone of the horrors of the gulag. Mr. Putin is afraid of this truth.

Today, Ukraine fights for Europe against a despot who intends to remake the Soviet empire. Mr. Putin’s message is classic disinformation straight out of the 1940s Soviet handbook. We must support Ukraine militarily and win the war of words.

The truth will prevail.

Attorney General Merrick Garland: The 60 Minutes Interview

'Exceedingly dangerous': Why the rise of Christian nationalism is 'entirely out of our control'

https://www.alternet.org/exceedingly-dangerous-rise-christian-nationalism/?utm_source=123456&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=16389





In a Sunday, October 1 op-ed, New York Times opinion columnist David French posits that Christian nationalism may not be "serious," but it is "very dangerous."

He argues, "It's not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it's exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States."

French notes that upon seeing "a tremendous surge of interest in Christian nationalism" immediately following the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, "I started to hear questions I'd never heard before: What is Christian nationalism and how is it different from patriotism?"

The columnist cites Baylor University church history professor Thomas Kidd, who argues, "Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance."

French responds to Kidd's argument saying, "He's right. Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They're much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism."

He adds:

That's why the Trump fever won't break. That's why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won't be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the 'prophecies' change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.

Opinion  A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/





Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.

In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.

The rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow. Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.

Republicans who have tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then? Will the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump, continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting, only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in the world is going to attract support no matter who they are. That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.

But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help him do it.





Trump will thus enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party. Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him? Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high, continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already launched, respectively, third-party and independent campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left. The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.

Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term, the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? Regardless of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents.

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.

Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.

And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.





Imention all this only to answer one simple question: Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting panic about its prospects.

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?

Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?

A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy, but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as president.

Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.

END PART 1

PART 2 continued

Opinion  A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/





It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”

It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual “sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.

So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.

And who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.

Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. But in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.

Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the price for every transgression ever committed against the laws designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.

How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.

Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress, they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge once Trump regains power.

But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate, peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action? What would that look like?

Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them. But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.

And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief? Do we even want the military to have to make that call? There is every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs” supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.

Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find out.

Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.

This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.

What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?

Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.

Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.

A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?

We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.

THE DANGER AHEAD

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/donald-trump-reelection-second-term-agenda/676119/

If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’d bring a better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers, and a more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries.

By David Frum




For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.

Liz Cheney says US would be 'sleepwalking into dictatorship' if Donald Trump wins 2024 election

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/12/04/liz-cheney-donald-trump-sleepwalking-2024/71798386007/


WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said she’d rather see Democrats win back control of the House than her own party in 2024 and warned of a disaster if House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is still leading the lower chamber speaker when Congress certifies the next presidential race.

When asked whether she would prefer to see a Democratic majority in Congress as the nation approaches 2024, Cheney noted in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that she believes “very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party.”

“But the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven’t chosen the Constitution, and so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025,” she said.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate come together to "count" electoral votes after a presidential election. It's a largely ceremonial task following Election Day, but Congress' certification of the 2020 election was interrupted by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2020.

In recent days, Cheney has kept up her criticism of Trump, warning that the U.S. would be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” if Trump is elected in the interview.

Cheney also told CBS that she would not want Johnson, the newly minted speaker, to be in his leadership post in 2025.

“We are facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where it’s an existential crisis, and we have to ensure that we don’t have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority,” she said.

Johnson did voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and his critics have called him a crucial "architect" behind former President Donald Trump's attempts to revert his loss.

Cheney, a vocal critic of Trump, is releasing a book on Tuesday called “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” detailing how the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection unfolded and alleging her Republican colleagues acted as “enablers and collaborators” to the former president.

Cheney was the vice chair of the committee investing the Jan. 6 attack and was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the insurrection.

In her book, Cheney wrote that Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, “appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit.”

In one such instance, she said he pressured his Republican colleagues to support a legal brief that would throw out election results from four states that President Joe Biden won. When Cheney said there were flaws in his argument, she wrote he would “often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”

Three-quarters of Republicans back Trump being ‘dictator for a day’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/07/trump-dictator-authoritarian-democracy/





The irony of Donald Trump’s assertion that he would seek to have dictatorial powers for the first day of his presidency is that he was supposed to be saying he had no authoritarian inclinations at all.

Trump’s original formulation of the idea came during a conversation with Fox News host Sean Hannity in December. Hannity aired clips of observers offering warnings about Trump’s embrace of authoritarian rhetoric and offered Trump a chance to tamp down any such concerns. But Trump didn’t want to.

“I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?’ I say, ‘No, no, no — other than Day One,’” Trump said at the time. “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I’m not a dictator, okay?”

Those two issues, immigration and fossil-fuel production, were simply picked up from a bit earlier in the conversation. But Trump discovered that people liked the line — dictator for a day! — and so he has at times sprinkled it into his patter at rallies. That’s how his politics work: He angles for applause and, if the crowd likes something, it’s on the path to potential policy implementation.

On Wednesday, UMass Amherst released the results of a poll conducted by YouGov in which respondents were asked about the concept. The framing of the comment was stark, excluding Trump’s specific plans for using his theoretical dictatorial power. It was just, “Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term. Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?”

A plurality of respondents said this was “definitely bad” with 6 in 10 saying it was “definitely” or “probably” bad. Among Republicans, though, a third said it was “definitely good” with three-quarters saying it was at least “probably” good.

Again, this isn’t “Trump wants temporary absolute powers to build a wall on the border.” It is “is it good or bad if Trump has absolute powers for a fixed time period.” And three-quarters of Republicans responded that this was probably a good idea.

This response isn’t surprising as such. It’s been obvious for years that there is a non-insignificant part of the American public, largely on the right, that is supportive of the idea of suborning democracy to absolute executive power. There is unquestionably a gap between “supporting a dictatorship in theory” or “as a way to indicate anger at the system” and “approving of an actual implementation of dictatorship.” But it seems safe to assume that the more people you have in the theoretically accepting group, the larger the literally accepting group would turn out to be.

Past analyses of acceptance of authoritarianism in the U.S. have found a correlation to hostility to diversity. In the UMass Amherst poll, the groups most supportive of Trump’s “dictator for a day” idea are men (26 points more approving of the idea than women on net), and White Americans. There was not as wide a difference between respondents with and without a college degree.

Of course, Trump’s formulation also doesn’t really make any sense. He can’t be “dictator for a day” except to issue mandates that could then be challenged in court. He can try to mandate that a wall be built on the border with Mexico, but he tried that when he was president, too, declaring a state of emergency that allowed him to shift funding around to pay for it.

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked him what he meant by it in an interview on Sunday, again framing it in the context of the concerns raised by outside observers. Trump said that he’d offered the idea “in jest.”

But also: “I’m going to close the border and we’re going to drill, baby, drill, that’s all,” he said. “And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator.”

Did he mean executive orders, Bartiromo pressed? In response, Trump praised executive orders in general and suggested that President Biden was the one undercutting democracy.

In other words, he doesn’t really know. Think of it less as a plan than as an aspiration.

One that most of his party views positively.

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‘Megalopolis’ is about U.S. heading in ‘fascist’ direction, Coppola says

The director said at a Cannes news conference that he wasn’t thinking about Donald Trump per se, but there are certainly MAGA parallels in his new film.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/05/17/megalopolis-about-francis-ford-coppola-cannes/





Cannes, FRANCE — Near the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — a baffling sci-fi epic that cost the director $120 million of his own money and was 40 years in the making — Shia LaBeouf’s slimy rich-kid politician is exposed as a false prophet to the poor masses of New Rome and strung upside down by his feet.

Throughout the film, he’d been presenting himself as an alternative to the two warring leaders of the city: Adam Driver as a visionary architect who wants to build a utopia, and Giancarlo Esposito as a mayor who thinks the status quo is just great, though it could be raking in more money. He writhes and protests as the crowd, whom he had told he would lead out of poverty, pelt him with objects. The last thing that hits him is a red hat: “Make America Great Again.”

Is Coppola scared of people like Donald Trump being at the helm of American society, a journalist from Barcelona asked Friday, at what was by far the most crowded and anticipated news conference of the festival?

“Men like Donald Trump are not at the moment in charge … but there is a trend toward the more neo-right, even fascist tradition, which is frightening,” Coppola said. “Because anyone who was alive during World War II saw the harm that took place and we don’t want a repeat of that.”

He kept turning to Jon Voight, an old friend who plays New Rome’s richest man: “Jon, you have different political opinions than me,” he said as the press room burst into laughter.

Voight is one of Hollywood’s most outspoken conservatives and had urged his fans not to support the certifying of the 2020 election. He’s called Trump “the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.” He’s also come out in favor of Israel defending itself in the war in Gaza and has endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2024.

He did not, however, take Coppola’s bait. The film, he said, was about how we can make the world better, and he’d been deeply moved by it, as someone who’d first heard Coppola talk about it 25 years ago, back when Voight was a central figure of the American counterculture — which he’s since repudiated. “I agree with this film, Francis’s vision that says human beings are capable of solving every problem we get ourselves into … we must bond together, we must help each other, we must listen to each other and we must take this on,” Voight said.

Unlike many directors here trying to sell a film, Coppola hadn’t given a single interview about “Megalopolis,” despite the fact that he’s yet to find an American distributor and had to sell part of his successful winery to come up with the funds to make it. This news conference was journalists’ first opportunity to pepper Coppola with questions of why and how he had made such a head scratcher. (At an earlier screening, the audience gasped and burst out giggling, for instance, when Voight’s billionaire character, on his deathbed, pretends to have an erection and instead produces a tiny bow and arrow, perfectly suited for a vengeful rampage.)

The film has MAGA parallels, sure, but it’s also Coppola’s way of comparing the downfall of American society to the fall of Rome — under the framework of something like a Greek tragedy or Shakespearean play, replete with incest, star-crossed lovers and two warring houses, with Driver’s and Esposito’s characters essentially representing the allures of art and science, and LaBeouf as someone who’s preying off those disillusioned by both.

Why did Coppola want to do “a Roman epic, but set in modern America”? “Because America was founded on the ideas of the Roman Republic,” he said, explaining that much of our architecture is based on Rome, including the original Penn Station, modeled on the Baths of Caracalla.

“I had no idea that the politics of today would make that so relevant, because what’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola said. It wasn’t politicians who’d be the answer, he added, but artists who would illuminate what’s happening, “and allow people to see it, because you can’t act on it if you can’t see it.”

Coppola dismissed concerns that he’d squandered his personal fortune on this project. His children had careers and would be fine, he said. “Money doesn’t matter,” he said, providing a life lesson to the room. “What matters are friends.”

And he seemed quite comfortable about his lack of U.S. distribution. He could wait. He didn’t want to send it to streaming, “which is what we used to call home video,” he said, mentioning the dominance of companies like Apple and Amazon. He wanted an audience to see it together and become one. “I fear that the film industry has become more a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations,” he said, “because studios face great debt and their job is not to make good movies. Their job is to make sure that they pay their debt obligations.”

And he also put to rest the idea that “Megalopolis” is a coda to his career. “I’ll be here in 20 years, I think,” he said, mentioning that he’d already started writing another film.

At 85, criticism has long ceased to matter to him. “So many people when they die say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d done that,” he said. “When I die, I’m going to say, ‘I got to see my daughter win an Oscar and I got to make wine and I got to make every movie I wanted to make.’ And I’m gonna be so busy thinking of all the things that I got to do that when I die I won’t notice it.”