{"id":30379,"date":"2023-12-05T20:06:14","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T04:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=30379"},"modified":"2023-12-05T20:08:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T04:08:16","slug":"the-fear-of-a-looming-trump-dictatorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/12\/05\/the-fear-of-a-looming-trump-dictatorship\/","title":{"rendered":"The fear of a looming Trump dictatorship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor<\/a> Columnist<\/p>\n\n\n\n

December 4, 2023 at 12:00 a.m. EST (WashingtonPost.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re reading an excerpt from the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter.\u00a0<\/em>Sign up to get the rest free<\/em><\/a>, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Florida on Nov. 8. (Octavio Jones\/Reuters)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming is the poster child of a Republican establishment abandoned by the party\u2019s far-right base<\/strong>. Now, she\u2019s billboarding what may come next: In an interview with CBS aired Sunday, Cheney lamented the extent to which the Republican Party had been \u201cco-opted\u201d by Trumpism and said she feared the potential of a vengeful Trump presidency in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States,\u201d Cheney said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cheney\u2019s refusal to accept former president Donald Trump\u2019s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him \u2014 and her decision to publicly rebuke Trump for his role in stoking the Jan. 6<\/a>, 2021, Capitol riot \u2014 got her ostracized from the GOP and cost her the House seat. She has spent the months since campaigning against his potential reelection<\/a>, to little avail. Trump is the heavy favorite to emerge as the Republican presidential nominee, no matter the slew of legal cases against him and even the prospect of imprisonment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her CBS interview, Cheney said a Trump victory could mark the end of the American republic. \u201cHe\u2019s told us what he will do,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to see the steps that he will take.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term: \u2018I am your justice\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t mere hyperbole. <\/strong>As my colleagues have reported over the past year, Trump has made clear his stark, authoritarian vision<\/a> for a potential second term. He would embark on a wholesale purge of the federal bureaucracy, weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents (something he claims is being done to him), stack government agencies across the board with political appointees prescreened as ideological Trump loyalists<\/a>, and dole out pardons<\/a> to myriad officials and apparatchiks as incentives to do his bidding or stay loyal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In election rallies, Trump has vowed punitive action on all perceived enemies. \u201cI am your retribution,\u201d he told supporters at one event. In another, he promised to \u201croot out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholars of 20th-century fascism are less than impressed. \u201cTrump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians \u2014 communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left \u2014 to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,\u201d Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, told The Washington Post last month<\/a>. \u201cMussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, underscored the point over the weekend after Trump cast President Biden<\/a> at an Iowa rally as \u201cthe destroyer of American democracy.\u201d \u201cTrump\u2019s Iowa speech continues his use of fascist rhetoric: it\u2019s us versus them, he tells his supporters, and \u2018they\u2019 are enemies who cheat,\u201d Mercieca told my colleagues<\/a>. \u201cAuthoritarians have a lot of rhetorical tricks for explaining away anti-democratic actions as actually \u2018democratic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. democracy slides toward \u2018competitive authoritarianism\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some commentators are looking squarely at Trump and Trumpism as a direct existential threat to the future of U.S. democracy.<\/strong> In a widely circulated opinion essay for The Post<\/a>, Robert Kagan charted how, \u201cin 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kagan sees a scenario where Trump\u2019s mounting legal challenges galvanize his push for power, rather than check his rise. \u201cIndicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective,\u201d he wrote<\/a>. \u201cLike Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not for nothing have a bevy of Trump-inclined, right-wing intellectuals floated the idea of \u201cCaesarism\u201d<\/a> \u2014 an embrace of a strongman to flush out the perceived weaknesses and failures of the republic \u2014 as a necessary political solution for the moment. In Kagan\u2019s view, the institutional checks and balances of the United States are failing to arrest this authoritarian drift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the event of a return to the White House, Trump and his allies have already said they would marshal more executive power than his predecessors<\/a>. A Trump election victory could also boost Republican congressional control, and many members of the GOP seem content to march in lockstep with Trump. Then there are the courts, which the former president stacked with a huge number of loyalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA conservative litigant can guarantee a sympathetic judge by filing their lawsuit in a federal court in Texas, where a handful of hard-right judges have exclusive control over the docket,\u201d noted the New Republic\u2019s Matt Ford<\/a>. \u201cFrom there they go on to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where conservatives have a clear majority \u2014 Trump alone appointed almost half of its members. And then the last stop is the Supreme Court, where half of the conservative supermajority are also Trump appointees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europe\u2019s far right goes mainstream<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among traditional allies of the United States, there\u2019s no shortage of trepidation over what might be around the corner. <\/strong>\u201cWhoever comes to the White House, one case would be a catastrophe, the other case would be much better,\u201d German defense minister Boris Pistorius told reporters last week<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while European policymakers are fretting about Trumpist disturbances to transatlantic ties, the future of the NATO alliance and U.S. support for the war in Ukraine, they are more circumspect about the threat to American democracy itself. Far-right movements are in the ascendant<\/a> in many countries in Europe, including Germany, but the continent\u2019s parliamentary structures may restrain them more effectively than an anachronistic U.S. system<\/a> that seems primed to usher in minority rule<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it,\u201d wrote Kagan<\/a>. \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, as my colleague Philip Bump observed last month<\/a>, recent polling shows considerable numbers of Americans, and a plurality among right-wingers, endorse the idea that the country needs a strong leader who may bend the rules. \u201cFor many Americans, a turn toward authoritarianism isn\u2019t seen as a negative,\u201d Bump wrote. \u201cMany Americans support that idea.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

washingtonpost.com <\/a>\u00a9 1996-2023 The Washington Post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor Columnist December 4, 2023 at 12:00 a.m. EST (WashingtonPost.com) You\u2019re reading an excerpt from the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter.\u00a0Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. Donald Trump at a… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1555],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30383,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30379\/revisions\/30383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}