End of the American Republic?
Halifax2TheMax
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Because civilization is not natural, sustaining it entails a continuous input of matter, energy, and morale, without which it would necessarily decline or even collapse.
—William Ophuls
Signs of civilizational “decline or even collapse” show up in every morning’s headline, every evening’s newscast: mass killings in big cities and suburban shopping malls; children gunned down in elementary and high school classrooms. America’s democracy is divided resentfully against itself across the frontiers of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Vicious slander streams through the hydra-headed portals of the internet, goading quorums of non-law-abiding citizens to hate instead of help, love, or talk to one another.
Reports of turmoil in society come in concert with news of worldwide environmental and geopolitical catastrophe: Covid-19 claiming one million American lives, six million elsewhere in the world. Rising sea levels on the coasts of California and Japan; the sperm whale under threat of extinction in the Atlantic, the giant sea bass in the Pacific; Australia’s northern hairy-nosed wombat on the list of endangered species with the California redwood and the Texas poppy mallow. Climate change burns the Amazon rainforest, melts the Arctic ice. Chinese gunboats encircle Taiwan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine annihilates city, citizen, and town, unlimbering the weapons of mutually assured nuclear destruction.
The uncivil behavior of both man and nature mounts the makers of America’s elite opinion on the pulpits of the media to promote a fear of the future with top-of-the-hour terror alerts—war, disease, flood, and famine fast approaching at all points of everybody’s compass. The keepers of the nation’s conscience meanwhile tour the think-tank and Sunday-talk-show circuits to tell sad stories of the death of kings, mourn the perishing from the earth of the ideals set forth in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, lament the absence of Teddy Roosevelt’s snow-white teeth. The self-pitying cries of Old Testament alarm convert the signs of American decline into foretellings of the end of the world. The doomsday news attracts advertisers, yet we are confronted not with the Beast of the Apocalypse but with severe power outages imposed by the laws of thermodynamics and entropy on the worlds of mind and spirit created and re-created by mortal men.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Life on Earth springs from the light and heat of the sun. For all intents and purposes the massive radiance of the star is immortal. It cannot be deplatformed, at least not for another five billion years. What it can and does do is to be gainfully employed or uselessly squandered, which is the second law of thermodynamics—the tendency of entropy to increase as energy changes forms. The sun’s energy makes its way on Earth through a never-ending series of transformations. Matter into mind, mind into matter, acorn into oak tree, oak tree into log, log into fire, fire into smoke and ashes.
As was understood two thousand years ago by the Roman poet Lucretius, the laws of thermodynamics are the nature of things. Everything that exists—animal, vegetable, and mineral, man and woman, church and state, fish and fowl, mammal and microbe, cruise missile and paper hat—is composed of “atoms tiny and readily / Moving.” As are we all, spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, rotating on Earth’s axis at 1,000 miles per hour. The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of things”—Lucretius knew to be eternal and indestructible, ceaselessly colliding and combining in an inexhaustible variety of life-forms. So also the atomic fairy dust was understood by Leonardo da Vinci to be the “marvelous power” of energy that is “born in violence and dies in liberty,” named by Nikola Tesla as “ever moving, like a soul animates” the inert void of the universe with the vast turmoil of creation and destruction that is the making and remaking of cabbages and kings, of customs, laws, and coastlines, of dance moves, barbarians, and pizza toppings.
Over time and endlessly repeated use and misuse, the abundant energy of the sun becomes so widely dispersed and idly wasted that it depreciates in value and force. The result is the dwindling into entropy, a term the dictionaries define as chaos, randomness, and disorder—i.e., the sets of circumstance in which America finds itself adrift and palely loitering a year prior to the 2024 presidential election and the likelihood of a choice between two entropic candidates.
By way of a best-guess answer to the question “How can such things be?,” this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly borrows from a book, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by the political theorist William Ophuls. Published in 2012, but eleven years later more readily understood as a canary in the mine, the book supplies the issue with its accounting for the price charged by nature for the use of its facilities and resources, lists the thermodynamic tolls and fees paid for the self-glorifying assumption that mankind’s wonder-working technologies subjugate nature, develop it into a colossal cash machine.
Ophuls belongs to the school of theorists who find in the life spans of civilizations and human beings similar patterns of ignition, combustion, and exhaustion. A youthful age of vigor, virtue, and military conquest (i.e., a heavy concentration of moral, intellectual, and physical energy) moves through the ages of affluence and intellect before subsiding into an age of decadence. The fourteenth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun puts the proposition as simply as it can be put: The first generation retains the “desert qualities” of toughness and savagery, its members “brave and rapacious,” fierce in their religious belief, accustomed to privation and to “sharing their glory with one another.” The second generation, softened by prosperity and luxury, allows its conquering energies to atrophy. Wealth accumulates, men decay, and the will to act gives way to the wish to be cared for. The third generation sinks into narcissism, cynicism, and stagnation, its moral ideal a distant and sentimental memory, its politics increasingly corrupt, the administration of its laws increasingly unjust, and an ever-expanding distance between the have-nots and the haves. Worship of celebrity replaces reverence for divinity. What is moral is what makes a profit; what makes a profit is moral.
Ibn Khaldun pegs the three acts of a civilization’s life at 120 years. Other historians post other numbers for other civilizations: Polybius allows 35 years for the glory that was Themistoclean Athens, Edward Gibbon grants 200 years to the grandeur that was imperial Rome. Some historians divide a civilization’s life into five acts instead of three, add complicating factors of geography, geopolitics, and the turning of fortune’s wheel. The authorities differ on the placings of milestones, but they agree that the road to ruin is the misuse of energy, its changing into forms that make no return of energy—instead of seed into plant, plant into oxygen, the change is to toxic waste of fuel and intellect; the locking down of productive energy in pyramids of sterile debt ($200,000,000 apartments on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row), dysfunctional bureaucracy (the Pentagon’s lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq), and Donald Trump’s signature men’s colognes, Empire and Success. The result is the immoderate greatness to which Gibbon attributes the decline and fall of Rome:
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Ophuls borrows from Gibbon both title and thesis of his essay and finds the stupendous fabric of America’s twenty-first-century immoderate greatness collapsing under the weight of entropy and fear. It is thermodynamically too costly to maintain, bureaucratically too big not to fail. Its diminished energies are its own worst enemy directed to the work of its destruction.
This issue of the Quarterlyborrows from Ophuls because I share his way of thinking and know him as my first cousin. Ophuls was born in 1934, a year before my own arrival, and we are therefore old enough to have seen at least two changes of the civilizational guard over the course of our nine decades on the pilgrim road to who knows where. Before we were schoolboys in San Francisco in the 1940s, we were onstage for what Ibn Khaldun would have recognized as a first act in the life of a civilization: the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from the ashes of the Great Depression. After December 7, 1941, and beyond the age of six, we were participant in the willingness to lend a hand, collecting for the war effort scraps of rubber, tin, and bacon grease; as children we were accustomed to ration books and the shortages of sugar, shoes, meat, and fuel. From the roof of our grammar school we could see in San Francisco Bay the Navy aircraft carriers and Marine Corps troop ships departing for Guadalcanal and the Philippine Sea; educated in an atmosphere of courageous, wisecracking liberty, we were free to imagine ourselves on the side of righteous victory. As was our grandfather Roger D. Lapham, elected mayor of the city in 1943 and in the habit of bringing with him on political campaigns his two eldest grandchildren, introducing them in union halls and waterfront bars to what he called “democracy in the raw.” In April 1945, in his role as mayor, he welcomed the delegates who came to deliberate the chartering of the United Nations in the San Francisco Opera House. He insisted that cousin Ophuls and myself attend the plenary sessions, and memorize the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. In 1945 the words meant what they said; they were in tune with the trend and temper of the times. In 2023 they ring hollow, a fond and fading memory of a world that has come and gone.
My trust in Ophuls follows from our bearing shared witness to the rise and fall of an American dream of empire, watching the American democracy in the 1980s sell the vigor and virtue of its industrial manufacturing and well-rewarded labor to a globalized plutocracy, devolving further around the turn of the twenty-first century into a form of government that Aristotle in the fourth century bclikened to that of the prosperous fool, a ruling and possessing class of men so lost in the dream of riches that “they therefore imagine there is nothing money cannot buy.”
The twentieth-century American philosopher Lewis Mumford touches on the latter point in a passage borrowed from his book Technics and Civilization, published in 1934:
The habit of producing goods whether they are needed or not, of utilizing inventions whether they are useful or not, of applying power whether it is effective or not, pervades almost every department of our present civilization.
The manufacturing of goods to no purpose other than the making of money produces the stupendous fabric of immoderate greatness characterized by Edith Wharton as the product of “a frivolous society” acquiring “dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals.” Wharton is speaking of America’s late-nineteenth-century Gilded Age; she could as easily be describing our own early-twenty-first-century Gilded Age, its frivolity guaranteed by the machines that manufacture what we see on television and glance at on our phones, the ones with which we do our shopping and shape our politics. Mumford expresses a similar thought when he says that “our civilization is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments, because the opportunities for commercial production and for the exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical paraphernalia are treated as negligible.”
Continues……….
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/power-outage
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To treat the powers of the human mind as negligible is a mistake from whose bourne no traveler or civilization returns. Among the first of its many meanings, energy is nature creating and re-creating itself in the mind of man, nature looking back on itself, combining and recombining in the freedom of thought with the play of the imagination. Which in turn makes possible the discovery of “more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Machines don’t possess the same wayward curiosity. They can extend, complicate, and multiply the known knowns; they don’t stumble across the unknown unknowns.
Albert Einstein remarked on the distinction when asked to explain what prompted Max Planck in 1900 to come upon quantum theory. Einstein could find “no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles,” only “intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience.” He backs up his best guess with a variation on the general theory of relativity:
The American poet and essayist Annie Dillard makes the same point in her 1975 essay “Innocence in the Galápagos,” when she says that “man has more freedom than other live things; anti-entropically, he batters a bigger dent in the given, damming the rivers, planting the plains, drawing in his mind’s eye dotted lines between the stars.” So also David Wengrow and the late David Graeberin their life-giving book, The Dawn of Everything, published in 2021: “There are, certainly, tendencies in history…but the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.”
Substitute the power of money and machines for the greater powers of the human mind and sooner rather than later it comes to pass that instead of the people owning the money, the money owns the people. The same fatal misuse of energy was embraced by Midas, mighty king in Greek and Roman legend, who wished that everything he touched be turned to gold. The wish was granted by Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, and for one bright new Reaganesque morning in antiquity the king rejoiced in changing sticks and stones and sunflowers into precious heavy metal. But then so did the bread and wine turn to gold when he held them in his wonder-working hands. Unable to live on the produce of his vanity and greed, Midas begged Dionysus for deliverance. The god took pity on the prosperous fool, restored him to his senses.
Not being as observant, our own mighty kings of war and finance haven’t been so fortunate. A paralyzed Asia Minor afternoon in the eighth century bc was time enough for Midas to spot the design flaw in the IPO, the one identified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 as the substitution of “callous cash payment” for every other form of human worth, value, meaning, and endeavor. It’s been 175 years since Marx and Engels posted the handwriting on a wall, but our self-pitying bourgeois statesmen in Washington and Wall Street have yet to receive the message. Despite the fact that for at least 50 of those 175 years it has been apparent that the finite resources of the planet cannot accommodate the huckster-capitalist promise of infinite economic growth.
Technology is a use of energy, not a source of energy. Nor is capitalism a law of nature or a gift of God. Like all things made by mortals (the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Roman Colosseum, the heads on Mount Rushmore), capitalism is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end foreshadowed by the resource wars (for bread and oil and water) these days being waged across seven continents and five oceans. The guardians at the gates of our American consumer paradise sense the approach of something terrible on the near and far horizon. By way of a defense against their own fear and trembling, they hold up a holy cross of new and more marvelous machines, among them ChatGPT, born last November in a manger in San Francisco, willing and able to relieve us of the need to lift anything heavier than an eyebrow.
My guess is that the guardians at the gate are looking in the wrong direction. I take the cue not from a biblical prophet or a pagan oracle but from the first law of thermodynamics and the eminent British American physicist Freeman Dyson, who in the late 1940s joined J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to research quantum theory and pursue the possibility of deep-space travel. Asked to address the law of entropy and its implication of the universe as frozen as Midas in the prison of his golden wish, Dyson answers that the first law plucks out the flies from the ointment of the second. The energy reserve contained in the sun gives “strong support to an optimistic view of the potentialities of life”:
What Dyson says about the future can be as fairly said about the past; the further we go into it, the more marvelous it becomes, generative and inexhaustible, a huge and expanding landscape of human energy and hope that makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton called “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”—these days on the White House lawn, poolside in Palo Alto, on a Swiss alp at Davos.
History is a record of events (of kings crowned and queens decapitated), but it’s more usefully understood as a vast storehouse of human consciousness that is the making of ourselves as once and future human beings. On mankind’s travels across the frontiers of the millennia, we save from the death of families and the wreck of empires what we find useful, beautiful, or true. The stories carved on the old walls, printed in the old books, are the stuff of which man’s humanity to man is made. Navigational light flashing across the gulf of time—as words in ink and paint on silk, sculpture in marble and chapters of law, bills of lading and writs of execution, in five-act plays and three-part songs—tells us who and where we are.
We confront the choice between a future fit for human beings and a future made by and for machines. For the finding of a phoenix in our ashes we have as our most abundant resource the limitless expanse of human ignorance, which rouses out the will to know, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. So sayeth Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: “The course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.” Where else does one live if not in a house of straw made with the shaping and reshaping of a once-upon-a-time? What is it possible to change if not the past living in the present, the present living in the past? And how else do we do so if not with the gift of metaphor and the energy of mind?
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/power-outageLibtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Good article, thanks. I'm not a Taylor Swift fan, but I appreciate that she is concerned about the MAGA threat to democracy and is helping to fight that threat in a big way. Kudos for that.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
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A lot of Americans embrace Trump’s authoritarianism
With every hour that passes, Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination grows tighter. Every day in which his opponents aren’t gaining ground on his position is a day in which he gets nearer to appearing on the ballot next November and nearer to possibly being inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.To many observers, there’s an incongruity to this. After all, recent days have also brought new awareness of Trump’s plans should he be inaugurated on that day, plans that are often unvarnished embraces of an authoritarian use of power. Trump plans to root out disloyal bureaucrats and install ideologically sympathetic ones. He’s speaking openly of using the Justice Department to target his opponents, including to hobble possible political opponents. And that’s just to name two recent examples.
During his first term, Trump’s administration was staffed in part by people with long track records in government who understood the balance of power between the branches and the limits on presidential authority, however acquiescent they were to Trump’s pushing those limits. Some of those who played such enabling roles have been increasingly vocal in their opposition to Trump’s efforts to regain power. But this is why Trump plans to ensure that a second administration has no one in it, at any level, who will stand in his way.
Given all of this, given Trump’s increasingly explicit rhetoric about shifting the chief executive position toward authoritarianism, it seems difficult to understand how he’s still running even with President Biden in early polling — or, in some cases, leading him. A bevy of possibilities emerges: Is the media failing to inform voters? Are Trump-supportive voters tuning out media that’s reporting on his intentions? Is he simply seen as the lesser of two evils?
Parts of each of those are probably correct. But there’s a broader, simpler explanation, too: For many Americans, a turn toward authoritarianism isn’t seen as a negative. Many Americans support that idea.
Last month, PRRI released the results of its annual American Values Survey. The pollsters asked respondents a slew of questions measuring their views of the country and its politics in the moment. Included among the questions was one that specifically addressed the question of authoritarianism: Did they think that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction?
About 2 in 5 respondents said they did. That included nearly half of Republicans.
Those questions addressed several different components of authoritarian sympathy, MacWilliams explained. One asked a question similar to PRRI’s, about willingness to let a “strong leader” do what he or she wants. Another centered on perceptions of the media. A third focused on opposition to diversity.
The American National Election Studies survey conducted around presidential elections included questions that approximated the ones asked by MacWilliams.
Less than half of respondents objected to the idea that we need a strong leader, even if the leader bends existing rules. A plurality of conservatives endorsed that idea. Less than half of respondents similarly expressed concern that the government might want to muffle critical reporting with a plurality of conservatives again expressing a lack of concern about that possibility.
These are measurements of authoritarian sympathies in the abstract, which indicate that a lot of Americans shrug at the idea of a strong leader acting outside legal boundaries. But, again, we can see that explicitly in 2024 polling.
CNN’s most recent polling, conducted by SSRS, shows that Trump leads Biden nationally by a 4-point margin, statistically even. Even given Trump’s response to the 2020 election, though, and the myriad criminal charges he faces, respondents were five points more likely to say they would be proud to have him as president then said the same of Biden.
But remember: 49 percent of respondents prefer Trump over Biden. Meaning that at least 14 percent of respondents both think that Trump doesn’t respect the rule of law and want him to be president.
CNN also asked whether Americans would refuse to ever support either Biden or Trump. A majority of respondents said they would never support Biden — edging out the percentage who said the same of Trump.
The issue of Trump’s legal challenges is itself instructive. For years, he’s argued that investigations into his actions are inherently political, efforts to subvert his political success. He frames this as an elite response to his fighting for average Americans, a message that resonates with his base. Despite the obvious evidence for Trump’s wrongdoing — the Capitol riot, the documents found at Mar-a-Lago, the attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia — most Americans told YouGov pollsters in August that they viewed the charges as intended to block Trump politically.
About 4 in 5 Republicans held that view. That they would then shrug at Trump doing the same to his opponents is unsurprising.
Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, the press has been criticized for failing to accurately convey what he wants to do with presidential power. Again, this has at times been fair criticism. But the reason Trump is doing well in the polls at the moment is not simply that people are unfamiliar with his stated authoritarian intentions should he be inaugurated in January 2025.
It’s also that a lot of people support those intentions.
Gift article:
https://wapo.st/469jx6h
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"the reason Trump is doing well in the polls at the moment is not simply that people are unfamiliar with his stated authoritarian intentions should he be inaugurated in January 2025.
It’s also that a lot of people support those intentions."
That is a good point, (and good article, thanks!), but how many of his followers really even think about concepts such as authoritarianism or democracy?
Trump is the super hero to his loyal followers. The question is, Why are they so loyal to him? I think the biggest reason has to be that they see themselves in him. I mean, really, what else could it be? They see him as someone who has liberated and empowered them to feel good about certain traits many find highly undesirable. They see him as having given them carte blanche to be angry, rude, disrespectful, bating, nasty, ignorant, unhealthy, dishonest, lazy, aggressive, and narcissistic. He exhibits all of these traits and most of his followers feel liberated by his example and follow suit.
And let's not forget, as bad as 45 is in those ways, the bigger problem is that he has created a massive following of people who strongly desire to emulate his example and often (not always, but often) shun characteristics such as critical thinking, civil discourse, courtesy, kindness, compassion, and so forth. That is the crux of what we are presently dealing with- hoards of people who find those negative qualities attractive. I'm not sure how or when this will change.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
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Opinion A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
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.
Continued next post................
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Opinion A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
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.
Robert Kagan: Our constitutional crisis is already here
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.
I mention 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.
Continued next post............
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Opinion A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
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.
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.
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Opinion A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
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.
Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose
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.
Opinion | Would Trump be a dictator? And can he be stopped? - The Washington Post
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In the Washington Post yesterday, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan warned that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and today in The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last agreed. He pointed to a conversation neoconservative thinker William Kristol had this week with journalist Jonathan Karl, in which Karl described a dystopian future painted not by Democrats but by former Trump employees: a government full of Trump loyalists who understand “that they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned” as Trump seeks retribution against those he sees as his enemies.
“The storm is coming,” Last warned readers. “The world looks normal right now, but it is not. Forces are in motion that will bring us to a point of national crisis one year from now.”
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Right now, watch Tommy Tuberville's holding up of Military appointments. This is so Trump loyalists can get the slots. When Trump is back in office* loyalty will be key to every decision that's made. One silver lining the loss has had for them is that they've really been able to learn from their mistakes. The next VP will have no loyalty to the constitution; only to MAGA. There will be no transfer of power in 2029.
*OK, in theory he could lose. And if he does, like the last election, it probably delays the inevitable. Given his age and health, if he does lose, he'll almost certainly never be president. At that point, we'll find out the movement is not really about him. The anger at the left will not subside (it'll probably grow) and one of the two major parties will still focus almost every action and statement on vilifying their fellow countryfolk. Ultimately, with or without the leader, America is still far too divided to be what it used to be. So I'm going to the concerts, taking vacations, etc. Because one day I believe I'll be asked whether I am loyal to the party and I do not plan to lie.
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-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Opinion
In an essay I wrote last week, I painted a grim picture of the prospects for dictatorship in the United States. Some readers were unhappy that I did not offer a solution. What follows is an attempt at one, and if it seems like a long shot, it is. Our options today are harder and fewer because we have passed up so many better and easier alternatives in the past. Nor was it for lack of knowing what needed to be done. It would not have taken a miracle for Republicans to unite around a single non-Trump candidate in 2016 or for 10 more Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
The problem has never been knowing what to do. It has been doing it. In the past, stopping Trump has required people taking risks and making sacrifices that they did not want to make, whether out of selfishness, fear or ambition. Today, the challenges are even greater, but there is little evidence that the people we need to rise to the occasion are any more likely to do so than they have been for the past eight years.
Here are several things people could do to save the country but almost certainly won’t do, because they selfishly refuse to put their own ambitions at risk to save our democracy.
Robert Kagan: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious that candidate should be Nikki Haley and not because she’s pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible. Yes, Ron DeSantis is likely too selfish and ambitious to drop out of the race, but if everyone else does and the remaining money and support all flow to Haley, he will quickly become irrelevant.
It won’t be enough, however, to rally the forces behind Haley. Even if she were to get every vote that’s now spread among the other non-Trump candidates (and she won’t), it would not come close to being enough to challenge Trump. Until now, she has been gathering support at the expense of other non-Trump candidates. To make a serious run for the nomination, she will also have to cut into the more than 50 percent of the party that now seems solidly behind Trump.
What is her theory for doing that? Does she think she will attract these voters with her policies or her winning political personality? Trump supporters fall into roughly three categories. The great majority are completely committed to what former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman has called the “cult” of Trump. They are out of reach for Haley. Another smaller group has no problem with Trump, so long as he can beat President Biden and the Democrats next year. This faction is undoubtedly reassured by polls that say that Trump can win, so the possibility that Haley can also beat Biden is irrelevant to them. They prefer Trump, and there is no reason for them to rethink their position so long as Trump remains clearly electable. Finally, there is a small percentage of Republicans who say they will support Trump unless he is convicted; recent polls suggest these people make up roughly six percent of GOP voters in some of the key swing states.
Haley, therefore, has no chance of getting more than a small fraction of current Trump supporters to add to her collection of Trump-skeptical Republicans. She might make a respectable showing as the No. 2 candidate, thus setting her up to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, if he will have her, in which case her entire campaign will have been largely for show. Indeed, it will have served chiefly as a conveyor belt for Trump skeptics to get onboard the Trump train in the end. If that is what she’s up to, then the joke will be on the Koch network, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and others who have lately looked to her as a last hope for stopping Trump.
If she is serious about trying to stop Trump, however, there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who are still willing to drop Trump if he is convicted. And if Haley can begin to reel in those voters, she can begin to raise doubts in the minds of those who are supporting Trump because they think he can defeat Biden and the Democrats in November. In short, the way to beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable.
Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and open disdain for the Constitution can become his greatest vulnerabilities — they might be his only vulnerabilities — if sufficiently highlighted for the American voter, and he and his advisers likely know it. Trump’s bizarre assertion that he would be a dictator only on “Day One” of his presidency to “close the border” was, believe it or not, an attempt to deflect the charge. (But what if it takes two days?) Democrats have gotten mileage in downballot races by painting their Republican opponents as lawbreaking, MAGA radicals. Trump is aware that he needs to hold on to some normal, non-cultist Republicans — that is why he has taken a more moderate position on abortion than much of the rest of the party. Trump is nothing if not a shrewd politician (the people who persist in claiming he’s an idiot should have a talk with themselves), and he knows he cannot win the general election on cult votes alone.
So, are Haley and other Republicans trying to exploit these vulnerabilities? No. Quite the contrary, they are helping Trump by continually affirming his acceptability as president. Every time Haley and other Republicans say they will support Trump if he is the nominee, they are telling Republican voters, including their own supporters, that Trump is acceptable. When New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu says, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about,” he might as well just get it over with — and endorse Trump. To say that Biden is so dangerous to the country that even Trump would be better is to endorse the world as Trump and his MAGA cultists portray it. Not only does this undercut the rationale for Haley’s candidacy, but it also makes it extremely difficult to peel away current Trump supporters. If Trump is acceptable, then he is electable. And if he is electable, then why should any current Trump supporter shift to Haley? Haley’s posture is not only incoherent; it is fatal to her prospects.
Continued next post..............
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The problem is about to get much worse, moreover, because Trump himself is going to get much worse. He has clearly decided that his best response to charges of being a potential dictator is to double down. Instead of trying to calm people’s concerns by disavowing the accusations against him, he has issued more threats of investigations and persecutions should he become president. And he has taken another page out of the dictator’s playbook: claiming that he is the savior of democracy while the Biden administration is the real dictatorship. Republicans are already girding themselves for what they know is going to be an endless stream of frightening statements for them to comment on in the days and weeks to come.
This, of course, is also Trump’s legal strategy: to argue that the Biden administration is a dictatorial regime using the justice system to persecute its primary political opponent. In time-honored fashion, Trump is going for the biggest lie. His goal is to delegitimize the trials and convince Republican voters that he is the victim of corruption and abuse of the judicial system. He has just begun making that case, but he is going to bang it like a bass drum for the next year.
Can he succeed in establishing this as the narrative? You bet he can, and for the reasons outlined in the previous essay: As he becomes the presumptive nominee, the vast Republican campaign apparatus will be at his disposal, putting out his line on an hourly basis. If he says that the Biden administration is a dictatorship engaged in political persecution, then that is going to be the Republican line. Are leading Republicans going to say they support Trump but not his legal case? That they are for Trump — but not his defense? At best, they will be silent, as they are now; at worst, they will support his legal case.
As Trump remakes himself into a victim of persecution, will Haley and other Republicans still insist that they will support Trump if he is the nominee? In doing so, they will be tacitly agreeing, and certainly not refuting, the claim that Biden is a dictator and Trump is being persecuted. By the time the trials get underway, that will be the standard Republican talking point. Today, it is just the most devoted Trumpers, but before long, we will see even respectable Republicans “raising questions” about the prosecutions, to the point where the entire court proceeding will be delegitimized in the eyes of the ordinary Republican voter.
What effect will that have on that small percentage of Trump supporters who now say they would drop their support if he were convicted? Those who cling to the hope that the trials will bring Trump down need to understand that the number of Republicans willing to abandon Trump because of a conviction, already small today, is going to be much smaller come spring. As the Trump narrative gains traction and becomes the baseline Republican position, Haley will become a footnote as Republicans of all stripes rally to the martyrdom of Trump.
That is, unless people start pushing back against Trump’s narrative right now — and by “people,” I mean Republicans.
Think about that precious small percentage of Republicans who now say they would not support Trump if convicted. They are actually saying a lot more than that. These are Republicans who still regard the justice system as important and legitimate, who consider special counsel Jack Smith’s charges worthy of a jury trial and legitimate, and who for the moment think a guilty verdict, were it to come, would be legitimate. Can we count on them maintaining those views over the coming weeks and months if all they hear from Republican leaders and conservative media is that the trials are illegitimate acts of persecution? Do the people hoping to be saved by the courts think that these voters will conclude on their own that the trials are legitimate when their entire party is saying they’re not?
What they need to hear right now (and for the rest of the campaign) is that they are right, that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done. And they do not need to hear this from Democrats and Post columnists. They need to hear it from their fellow Republicans, from Republicans they admire. At some point, some leading Republicans are going to have to display the courage to defend the justice system even though that will put them in direct conflict with Trump and his supporters.
We probably can’t expect Haley to take the lead in making the case for Trump’s unacceptability, even though she should. But other Republicans certainly can. It is no secret what people such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) think about Trump. Romney’s biography is filled with whispered comments by leading Republicans privately indicating their fear and loathing of Trump. But today, those Republicans remain in their coward’s crouch, hoping to survive as they have the past eight years — by keeping their heads down, by waving off Trump’s threats and dictatorial behavior. Romney, who once had the courage to vote to convict Trump for trying to overthrow the government in 2021, now tells us “at some point you stop getting worried about what he says.” At this moment, Trump and his supporters are engaged in an attempt to obliterate history right before our eyes, to say that down is up and up is down, and that instead of destroying democracy Trump is saving democracy from the Biden tyranny, and that this is what the trials are about. And this is Romney’s response? The people who want to put their faith in the good judgment of Republican voters are counting on those voters to come to the right conclusion themselves while even their most respected Republican leaders are too frightened to defend the justice system against Trump. That is a lot of faith indeed.
But imagine a different scenario. Imagine that Republicans who know Trump poses a threat of dictatorship suddenly discovered their courage and began speaking out, and not just one or two but dozens of them — current and former elected officials, former high-ranking officials from the Trump and past Republican administrations. Imagine if the wing of the Republican Party that still believes in defending the Constitution identified itself that way, as “Constitutional Republicans” implacably opposed to the man who blatantly attempted to subvert the Constitution and has indicated his willingness to do so again as president.
Then the Republican primary campaign would become a struggle between those defending the Constitution and those endorsing its possible dismantlement at the hands of a dictator. That small percentage of Republicans who now say they would drop Trump if convicted would remain in play, and those now sticking with Trump because he can beat Biden might have reason to start questioning that assumption. It would not take a lot of speeches, or well-placed interviews, or appearances on Sunday shows, by the right people to change the conversation. But that, it seems to me, is the only chance Haley has of giving Trump a run for his money in the primaries.
Even if she loses, as she probably would, her campaign could nevertheless establish a useful and interesting dynamic for the general election. The formula for defeating Trump in November is simple enough: Unite the Democrats, and split the Republicans. That is why all the third-party candidacies now under consideration are disastrous. A middle-of-the-road, bipartisan third-party candidacy of the kind being promoted by No Labels is sure to hand Trump the election by siphoning more votes from Biden than from Trump. To defeat Trump, a third-party candidate must attract almost exclusively Republican voters. Who would be in a better position to do that than the person who already has a substantial Republican following, such as Haley? If No Labels really wants to help the country, it will hold its third-party slot open for Haley. And if Haley really wants to save the country from Trump, , and if she cannot defeat Trump in the primaries, she will run as a third-party candidate with the intention of drawing away Republican votes from Trump. Should Republican voters devoted to defending the Constitution vote for Biden over Trump in the general election? Yes, they should. But it would be smart to give them a more palatable alternative.
Many people responded to my last essay by insisting that a majority of Americans oppose Trump, and they are right. But the way our system works today, that popular majority is prevented from coalescing. Many blame the electoral college or the two-party prejudice built into our system, and they might well be right. But, folks, are we going to fix these problems before November? The question is how best to bring this majority together in a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans to prevent a dictatorship this coming year. Afterward, we can look at reforming the system. First, the system has to survive.
Could this coalition come into being? Yes. But it will require extraordinary action by a number of important individuals. People will have to take risks and make sacrifices, but is it asking too much? The risk of standing up today will not be nearly as great as it might be after January 2025. Does McConnell really want to go down in history as the silent midwife to a dictatorship in America? Can Romney not see that it is his destiny to lead the way at this critical moment in America’s history. Did Paul Ryan sell his soul for a Fox board seat? All these people went into public service for a reason. Wasn’t it to rise to an occasion such as this? Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney shouldn’t have to fight this alone. For people such as Condoleezza Rice and James Baker and Henry Paulson Jr., what was the point of acquiring all this experience and respectability, if not to use it at this moment of national peril? Why are Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defending Trump when they must know he is a threat to American democracy and the Constitution? Where is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the man who courageously pushed back against Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election? Where are all those officials who learned firsthand what a danger Trump was and who have occasionally said it out loud, people such as former attorney general William Barr and former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly? Where is former vice president Mike Pence, who single-handedly saved our system of government almost three years ago? Was that his last act? And for that matter, where is former president George W. Bush, who is well known to be appalled by Trump? A word from him would go a long way to emboldening others. What a service he could perform for his country.
What are they saving it for? If it’s for a future in the Republican Party, forget it. The Republican Party is finished as a coherent legitimate political party. Either it is about to become the party of the Trump dictatorship or it is going to break up into Constitutional and anti-Constitutional wings. The two-party arrangement the nation has known since the Civil War ended when the Trump cult captured the GOP. We are heading into a new era of politics in America. We could do worse than go into it with a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans. The fact is, even if Trump is defeated in November, the nation will still be in crisis as Trump leads his supporters in rebellion against that outcome. Democrats and Constitutional Republicans will need to stick together then, too.
Continued next post............................
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Can a Trump dictatorship still be prevented? Yes. It does not require a miracle, only courage. But will the people do what they need to do? Human frailty being what it is, and ambitious and selfish politicians being what they are, it is probably fanciful to imagine that the right combination of people will turn up and show a wisdom and courage they have not shown for the past eight years. Even now, we are being treated to what Abraham Lincoln called the “lullaby” arguments, the ones that urge you to go back to sleep and stop worrying. Such as: The voters will see reason. The polls are unreliable. The court system will work. Trump won’t do what he is threatening to do. Even as we get closer and closer to the possibility of a dictatorship in America, we accept the same assurances we have been accepting for the past eight years. Do we think that this time we will get a different outcome? There is a word for that.
Some readers of my last essay asked fairly: What can an ordinary citizen do? The answer is, what they always do when they really care about something, when they regard it as a matter of life and death. They become activists. They get organized. They hold peaceful and legal rallies and marches. They sign petitions. They deluge their representatives, Republican or Democrat, with calls and mail, asking them to speak up and defend the Constitution. They call out their political leaders, state and local, and give them courage to stand up as well. Americans used to do these sorts of things. Have they forgotten how? At the risk of sounding Capra-esque, if every American who fears a Trump dictatorship acted on those fears, voiced them, convinced others, influenced their elected officials, then yes, that could make a difference. Another ship is passing that can still save us. Will we swim toward it this time, or will we let it pass, as we have all the others? I am deeply pessimistic, but I could not more fervently wish to be proved wrong.
Opinion | Robert Kagan: How to stop the Trump dictatorship - The Washington Post
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Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, praises autocrat Orban
Trump also called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and again demonized immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”
DURHAM, N.H. — Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.
His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity.
And he used the term “hostages” to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.
The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump’s rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.
“Donald Trump sees American democracy as a sham and he wants to convince his followers to see it that way too,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who researches democracy and rhetoric. “Putin hates western values like democracy and the rule of law, so does Trump.”
Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president who invaded neighboring Ukraine, criticizing the criminal charges against Trump, who is accused in four separate cases of falsifying business records in a hush money scheme, mishandling classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020 election results. In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.
“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”
He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.
But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”
In the speech, Trump also repeated his own inflammatory language against undocumented immigrants, by accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates have condemned as reminiscent as Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf,” in which he told Germans to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
The crowd of thousands in a college arena cheered Trump’s recitation of an anti-immigrant poem called “The Snake” that he has repeated on the campaign trail and popularized since the 2016 campaign.
And approaching the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump came to the defense of alleged violent offenders who have been detained awaiting trial on the order of judges.
“I don’t call them prisoners, I call them hostages,” he said. “They’re hostages.”
The speech drew renewed criticism from Democrats. “Donald Trump is campaigning on an extreme MAGA agenda that would rip away hard-won freedoms from Americans — it’s as simple as that,” Democratic National Committee press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “If he takes power, Trump will waste no time implementing his dangerous vision for America.”
Trump’s speech began with an economic focus, with a new tagline of “Better off with Trump” and a recitation of statistics comparing affordability under his presidency to now. But Trump became more animated as he returned to his material on immigration and the charges against him.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump “gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park” in front of a large crowd.
In a move that experts said could have the effect of confusing voters about the true dangers to democracy, Trump has begun deflecting from reports that he would seek revenge on his critics in a second term, accusing Biden of acting like a dictator because of the prosecutions against Trump. Two of the cases were brought by local prosecutors, and the two federal cases are being handled by a special counsel acting independently of the White House in accordance with Justice Department rules.
Without evidence, Trump is portrayed all four cases as a coordinated persecution against him because of his lead in primary and general-election polls. As he pushed that theme on Saturday, the slogan “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY” flashed across the screen above him.
The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement.
Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, praises autocrat Orban - The Washington Post
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Opinion We can’t hit the snooze button on 2024. The country is on the line.
All is forgiven if you go to bed on New Year’s Eve hoping to sleep until New Year’s Day 2025. All signs promise that 2024 will be a year for the ages.
It most certainly will be a year of reckoning for Donald Trump in courts of law, as well as public opinion. It will be a noisy, messy and ugly 12 months.
In judicial circles, there are enough Trump-involved cases to fill a wardrobe. There’s the former president’s civil damages trial in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal hush money case, federal special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case, Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis’s election interference case, Smith’s election interference case, and rulings by the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state disqualifying Trump from those states’ presidential primary ballots.
Most of the court dates are still up in the air. But it’s a good bet that by year’s end, judicial trumpets will have sounded. Whether they herald doom or joy for Trump remains to be seen.
As Trump braces for verdicts before the bar of justice, he also will endure days of reckoning with the voting public.
In the 2024 Republican primary season, beginning with January’s Iowa caucuses, Trump will get what he believes he has coming by virtue of his self-evident wonderfulness. He will waltz away with the GOP presidential nomination and accept his coronation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.
Election Day in November is another matter, however. Trump will again face judgment at that time, but by a larger and more diverse group of balloters. One hopes it will be a day when Trump’s misdeeds as president — his abuse of power, his denigration of people and cherished values — catch up with him. That’s a hope, not a promise or even an optimistic expectation.
When George Wallace made his first bid for Alabama governor in 1958, he lost the Democratic primary to an openly racist opponent who, Wallace later charged, had “outsegged” him. Wallace never let that happen again. He won the 1962 gubernatorial race with what was then the largest popular vote in the state’s history. Wallace’s winning message: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
The lesson in the story, at least for me, was not how unprincipled ambition changed Wallace from a racial moderate (by Alabama’s standards) into one of the nation’s most outspoken segregationists. Rather, it’s how well he succeeded when he chose to express and exploit the beliefs of White Alabamians.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, I wrote columns about GOP candidate Trump’s serial insults and slurs, and the outright lies he would tell about anyone with whom he disagreed. I wrote about how he fanned religious and ethnic flames, played to racial stereotypes, fed off the worries and resentments of the White working class, had become the champion of adoring far-right nationalists — and how he flirted with the Kremlin and was sure to undercut NATO and our allies.
I and many others laid out the best case we could, based upon all we could gather, that a Trump presidency would be a danger to civil liberties, including voting, consumer and reproductive rights.
On Election Day 2016, Trump won with 63 million votes, or 45.9 percent.
In the 2020 election, running on a presidential record that included having disastrously handled the coronavirus, fueled record deficits with tax cuts and weakened rules on sexual harassment, toxic chemicals, racially segregated housing and more, the impeached Trump nonetheless garnered 74 million votes, or 46.8 percent of the cast ballots.
A Monmouth University poll in November 2019 found that 62 percent of Trump supporters said they could not think of “anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make [them] disapprove of the job he is doing.”
It’s a waste of time trying to persuade Trump voters to turn their backs on him. Trump, as with Wallace and his White constituency, gives his people what they want. He doesn’t create; he captures, reflects and exploits his supporters’ hope and fears.
For every nasty and dehumanizing thing Trump says about immigrants, and that offend tender liberal sensibilities, there are expressions of agreement in kitchens, diners and community clubs across America. When he talks about rooting out “vermin” and using the government to go after opponents, he sends shivers of delight up the legs of his backers. Seventy million voters? He owns them.
In a politically polarized and cynically divided America, the question of reckoning next November is: “Whose side wins?”
On second thought, best be you wake up in time for Election Day.
Opinion | Donald Trump wants you to sleep through 2024. Don’t do it. - The Washington Post
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