Saturday, August 03, 2024
Big Business Needs to Wake Up to the Economic Threat Trump Poses
The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he has no coherent policy agenda. He is transactional, impulsive and narcissistic. . . . . But Trump does have an ideological core, and it’s one that dates back a long way.
In 1987, when Trump was merely a New York developer, he spent almost $100,000 to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was an open letter “To The American People,” and its basic message should by now be familiar. It began, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” The thrust of the letter is that the United States is crippling itself by spending on the defense of its allies while those allies prosper. His solution? Make “Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others” pay America to protect them and “tax” these nations, by which he means impose tariffs.
This is the core of Trump’s worldview. In this campaign, he has announced that he would impose 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods and 60 percent tariffs on those from China. As for America’s defense commitments, Trump threatened he would not defend NATO countries that have not “paid their bills” — by which he means met their defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP. In fact, he said, he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” with such countries.
I’ve asked businesspeople who support Trump how they could be in favor of an agenda that was so obviously anti-markets, anti-growth and anti-stability. They reply that it’s all bluster, that Trump’s bark is always worse than his bite. But hostility to America’s allies and a fascination with protectionism are constants in Trump’s ideology.
Trump’s dark vision from the 1980s did not pan out. Japan and Europe stagnated, China rose, and through it all, the United States stayed remarkably strong, maintaining its share of global GDP at 26 percent from 1990 to today. American wages, once very similar to Europe’s, are now about 45 percent higher.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Reagan and Clinton administrations tried all kinds of measures to stop Japan’s advance. They amounted to costly failures (and Japan missed the information revolution anyway). Undeterred by that record of failure, Trump wants to try it all again, this time with China, which now seems to be entering a period of slower growth itself, caused by its own mistakes.
So far, the record has been clear. By Trump’s own key measure — the trade deficit — the tariffs against China (extended by President Biden) have failed. Since the imposition of the tariffs, the trade deficit has expanded rather than contracted. Many studies have shown that these measures have cost American consumers tens of billions of dollars and have not altered China’s policies. A recent study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that Trump’s new tariffs would cost American consumers $500 billion annually, or around $1,700 for a typical middle-income family every year. In other words, they would stoke inflation.
Trump’s is an ideological view that facts and evidence can do little to dissuade. He insists, for example, that his tariffs are not paid by Americans, but rather by China and other nations.
There is a broader point to make here. The United States did something truly revolutionary after World War II. It understood that by underwriting international stability and helping other nations get rich, it would create a zone of peace and prosperity in which it, too, would thrive. That vision of enlightened self-interest has been at the heart of America’s engagement with the world for almost eight decades. Trump and JD Vance utterly reject it, choosing instead a dark, narrow and selfish vision that would turn its back on one of America’s greatest and most enduring achievements.
Friday, August 02, 2024
Why Trump Can’t Banish the Weirdos and Extremists
After years of describing Republicans as “dangerous,” Democrats seem to have hit a groove with “weird.” “These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said recently. “We’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones who think conservative ideologues are weird. Trump thinks they are too—if weird means extreme and unpopular. In fact, he’s been trying to escape them. The problem is he can’t, at least not fully, because they’re his people.
On Tuesday, media outlets reported that the former Trump staffer Paul Dans had stepped down as the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which created a conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration. Dans left his role following Trump’s condemnation of Project 2025, and attempts by the former president to distance himself from its plans . . . and trashing the Project 2025-linked ‘lunatics’ who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.”
Trump is right to worry that Project 2025 is a political loser. The project’s 900-page presidential-transition document, “Mandate for Leadership,” includes a lot of unpopular conservative ideas, such as using the archaic Comstock Act to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone, preventing Medicaid from covering abortion, gathering data on women who get abortions, and allowing hospitals to refuse medical care to women ill from abortion complications. It also outlines plans to reorganize the federal bureaucracy into an organization that is loyal to Trump personally rather than concerned with public service, and to outlaw “pornography,” broadly defined as anything LGBTQ-related.
Lesser-known, yet equally extreme, ideas include dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service for the thought crime of acknowledging the reality of climate change as part of their work, repealing certain child-labor protections, undermining public- and private-sector unions, and allowing states to ignore federal labor laws regarding overtime pay and the minimum wage.
And in a GOP where loyalty to Trump is the paramount value, ideologues can rise by pledging fealty to him, even if their beliefs and public conduct are very strange.
Being associated with the ideologues who ran his administration last time and who would run it next time gives up the game, and lets the public know who would really be in charge during a second Trump administration, while the president live-tweets Fox News every day just like he did four years ago.
But whatever Trump says about Project 2025, his ties to it are undeniable. A CNN review in mid-July found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” and “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House
Condemning Project 2025 because it is a political loser does not mean that Trump won’t pursue many or most of its recommendations. As the Ronald Reagan staffer Scott Faulkner once famously put it, “Personnel is policy.” And whatever Trump says about policy in public, the people who put together Project 2025 are his personnel.
“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration—the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers,” one anonymous Project 2025 contributor told Rolling Stone. “They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!”
As CBS News reported, Project 2025 was advised by more than “100 conservative groups,” and its “Mandate for Leadership” lists as co-authors many former Trump officials, including Russ Vought, the policy director for the 2024 Republican National Committee’s platform committee. That means that all of the extreme positions documented in Project 2025 remain conservative goals, whether Trump embraces Project 2025 by name or not.
Another problem for Trump is that he chose an ideologue, J. D. Vance, as his running mate. Surveys suggest that Vance—who wrote an introduction to a new book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025—is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in the modern history of polling, in part because of what is a frankly very weird obsession with childless people, women in particular. . . . . He’s separately described people without children as “more sociopathic.”
Being obsessed with strangers’ personal lives, especially to the point where you’re trying to use the power of the state to force everyone else to live according to your values rather than their own, comes across as pretty weird. Even Trump understands that. He also understands that, weird or no, this is the agenda the movement behind him wants to pursue. If he can obscure that agenda long enough to get elected, that movement might actually succeed.
Thursday, August 01, 2024
Trump Has Racist Meltdown Before Black Journalists
Onstage at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention today, Donald Trump complained bitterly that technical difficulties had delayed his appearance, but he had no trouble squeezing plenty of inflammatory comments into a shortened interview.
The former president refused to condemn the violent rioters on January 6, 2021. He gave only faint support for J. D. Vance’s preparedness to serve as president. He wouldn’t refute allies’ claim that his presumptive presidential opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a “DEI candidate.” And in the most eye-popping moment, he questioned whether Harris is really Black.
Who knows what Trump is talking about? Harris was born in the United States to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She attended Howard University, one of the country’s most famed historically Black institutions, and has never shied away from her Black heritage during her career as a politician. But Trump has long engaged in these kinds of racial-purity tests.
As is often the case with Trump, the facts are beside the point. Trump may have been trying to undermine Harris’s bona fides with Black voters. His strategy to beat President Joe Biden included drawing some Black voters away from the Democratic Party and hoping that other Black voters—who, polling suggested, were unenthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy—would just stay home. Biden’s replacement by Harris threatens that path by energizing Black voters. If Trump’s goal at NABJ was to build a friendly rapport with the Black community, however, he approached it in a curious manner.
Some NABJ members questioned the decision to invite Trump at all . . . . Trump’s appearance showed why the invitation was worthwhile, though. The former president seldom conducts interviews that are not either with friendly outlets or on his own territory (most often at Mar-a-Lago), or both. He doesn’t often have to answer hard questions before a hostile or even skeptical audience, and when he did today, it went off the rails fast.
“A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today,” Scott said. “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like animal and rabid to describe Black district attorneys. You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a ‘loser,’ saying the questions they ask are ‘stupid and racist.’ You have had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. My question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”
Every one of Scott’s statements is true, and Trump should have been prepared to answer her question. But he’s so accustomed to friendly and fawning interviews that he was furious.
Trump said the message he wanted to impart at the conference was that immigration was bad for the Black community, but when Trump says that immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” many people hear him categorizing low-skilled or manual jobs as “Black.”
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Trump Has Exposed Evangelicals for Who They Are
Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" for over three decades and seen a number of them up close during my years as a Republican activist, I long ago came to the conclusion that this group and many of its members were neither "Christian" in the sense of actually following Christ's gospel message nor "right" about anything, especially their contempt for and treatment of others, and were "right" only in the context of being right wing. The message of the Sermon on the Mount" and other sayings attributed to Christ have no place in their quest which ultimately boils down to a pursuit of power. Power to denigrate and abuse those of other faiths and beliefs and to reserve privilege and control over others to themselves. Feeding the hungry, aiding the poor, and sheltering the homeless are invisible in their polemics and they ultimately want the ability to (i) actively harm and subjugate anyone they label as "other" or a "sinner" - think racial minorities, LGBT individuals and non-conservative "Christians" - and (ii) to stamp out anyone and anything (including science and modern knowledge) that challenges their cherry picked bible verses or the falsity of their ignorance embracing Bronze Age dogma. Trump, who is the embodiment of the seven deadly sins) has played upon these ugly motivations and promised them power in 2016, including ending Roe v. Wade, and now in 2024 promises them retribution against anyone who stands in their way. Project 2025 with its white Christian nationalism and white supremacy agenda. A piece in The Atlantic and a column in the Washington Post look at for how a thirst for renewed political power and heavy dose of hatred of others, including childless women, now define what it means to be evangelical. First highlights from The Atlantic that looks at the perverse prays of pastors at Trump rallies:
A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”
But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. . . . . Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” . . . . Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself.
To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.
There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues.
The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences.
Trump’s supporters attribute America’s fall from grace to a variety of national sins old and new—prayer bans in public schools, illegal immigration, pro-transgender policies, the purported rigging of a certain recent election. Whatever the specifics, the picture of America they paint is almost universally—biblically—bleak.
The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be reestablished, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. Burge told me that these ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.
Bradley Onishi, a scholar and former evangelical minister who studies the intersection of politics and Christianity in America, told me that prayers at political events have traditionally fit a certain mold. God is asked to grant the political leader inspiration and wisdom, to help him resist temptation and lead the country in a righteous direction.
But Onishi, like several of the other experts I asked to read the prayers, was struck by how many of them take Trump’s righteousness for granted. “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” Onishi told me.
Indeed, rather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection.
At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. “Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,” he shouted. “We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?
It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?
Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began.
Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day. . . . “Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
With that, he invited the audience to remove their hats, and turned his voice to God. “Lord, help us make America great again,” he prayed.
Of course, to these pastors, the greatest evil is anyone and anything that challenges evangelical privilege and power. It has nothing to do with Christ or furthering his gospel message. The Washington Post column focuses on how being a Trump supporter and supporting other extremist Republicans now defines what it is to be an evangelical:
Despite an effort to overthrow an election and a bevy of criminal charges, Donald Trump has managed to solidify and even expand his support among core demographics. . . . . The voters most loyal to the former president are White evangelicals. More than 80 percent backed him in the 2020 elections. And this has long presented a puzzle: How can people who prize moral rectitude and personal witness to Jesus so faithfully support the most secular president in American history, someone who seems by his behavior at best indifferent to Christianity?
It is easy to forget it now, but evangelicals initially were skeptical of Trump. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) was the preferred choice of churchgoing evangelicals, while Trump’s strongest support came from evangelicals with lower levels of church attendance.
But Trump’s awkward relationship with evangelicals grew stronger. At first, it was transactional, a question of power. He was the Republican candidate, and the vast majority of White evangelicals were Republicans. He promised them policy victories and delivered on appointing the staunchly conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And it wasn’t just that. As American culture became more secular and progressive on social issues, White evangelicals perceived themselves as under attack. Trump said he would protect them. He would fight not just for their preferred policies but for their very identities.
The catch was many of these new evangelicals didn’t go to church. They became evangelicals because of what it meant politically, most of all because it was a way to signal support for Donald Trump. Among White Trump supporters who were not evangelicals in 2016, 16 percent began to identify as evangelical by 2020, suggesting again that politics rather than religion was the driving factor.
Evangelicalism, in short, has become about shared political convictions. In one survey of Christian attitudes, for example, 43 percent of evangelicals said they did not believe in the divinity of Christ. But it gets even more bizarre. According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, 14 percent of Muslims (and 12 percent of Hindus and 5 percent of Jews) described themselves as “born-again” or evangelical Christians. This is not a joke.
If we look more closely at the numbers, what’s happening becomes clearer — and it’s fascinating. . . . In an America that is rapidly secularizing — in just two decades, church membership has plummeted to under 50 percent, from about 70 percent — partisan commitments are replacing religious affiliation as people’s overarching source of identity.
Now that White evangelicals are so disproportionally and unapologetically Trump-supporting, the share of Democrats who view Christianity negatively is likely to remain high or perhaps even increase. . . . Religion matters, even when it’s not really about religion.
It is all about power and the ability of a shrinking minority to impose and inflict their beliefs on the majority of Americans. Christ and feigned religious belief have nothing to do with the real agenda. It's
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
The Lament (and Warning) of a Former Republican
With so much attention focused on the changes at the top of the Democratic ticket, we are not paying enough attention to the lack of change on the top of the Republican ticket. This month, Donald Trump won his party’s nomination for the third straight time. Whatever else we might say about him, he is a transformative figure.
This further confirmed, for me at least, the wisdom of my decision eight years ago to break with the Republican Party. In January 2016, I warned what were then my fellow Republicans that if they nominated Mr. Trump, he would constitute a grave threat to the nation. But I added that there was an additional reason to oppose him: Mr. Trump’s nomination would pose a profound danger to the Republican Party, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. “For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it,” I wrote. “But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.”
Few figures in American history have overhauled a political party as quickly and as fundamentally as Mr. Trump has. To understand just how different it is, we need to go back briefly to what it was like in the pre-Trump era.
During the time I served in three Republican administrations (Reagan and both Bushes), the party was hawkish and unrelentingly critical of the Soviet Union and then Russia. It was supportive of NATO. It condemned anti-American dictators and authoritarian leaders. It was deeply committed to “the common task of strengthening democracy throughout the world,” as Reagan said in 1982. And it argued that it was in America’s interest to provide global leadership.
The Republican Party championed free trade and fiscal discipline, though in practice it often fell short. It was welcoming of legal immigrants and refugees. Republicans argued that reforming entitlement programs was vital. Many of its leading figures insisted that moral character was an essential trait for political leaders and especially for presidents. Republicans warned, too, that a cruel, squalid political culture undermined a decent society.
Today, the Republican Party has jettisoned every one of these commitments.
Even on abortion, things have changed. The Republican Party has been pro-life for decades, including in its party plank. But this month that plank was removed. . . . Mr. Trump succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, but now that the abortion issue is a political liability, he has thrown the “pro-life cause under the bus,” Mr. George wrote on Facebook. Mr. Trump has succeeded where liberal Republicans long failed.
[T]o begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine. Unlike normally functioning parties and their political machines, like Tammany Hall, Mr. Rauch said, a personal political machine is dedicated to the interests of an individual and that individual’s family, loyalists and operatives. It accepts only one person as leader and requires submission to that person. Today, Mr. Trump is that person.
Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics. Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. . . . . A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office. By contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.
“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”
This reactionary version of the party is drawn to Mr. Trump because he defines himself by his enemies, and those enemies are in many cases the left-leaning elite. The left is contemptuous of Mr. Trump, and since the Republican Party has implicitly become a party that stands for what the left despises, it has been very difficult to separate Republican voters from Mr. Trump in the name of any more positive vision or ideal.
A third way to understand today’s Republican Party, something that grows more obvious with every passing day, is that it has become a populist rather than a conservative party. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t conservative here and there, now and then. What it does mean is that when traditionally conservative views aren’t in alignment with populist views, it’s the traditionally conservative views that most often get jettisoned.
Mr. Trump tapped into the growing resentment of millions of voters. He was seen by them as their tribune. Unfortunately, he exploited their fears and did almost nothing to solve their problems. But that doesn’t seem to matter to them. It’s all about the posturing.
The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. . . .Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.
But the most worrisome feature that has defined the Republican Party during the Trump era is a relentless assault on reality, fused with lawlessness and the embrace of illiberalism.
The Republican Party once preached about the importance of standing for moral truths and standing against moral relativism; today it is, in important respects, nihilistic. The Republican Party once described itself as the party of “law and order”; it now worships a man who is a felon, who was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, and who portrays the violent mob that attacked the Capitol as a band of patriotic “J6 martyrs.” Republicans once proudly proclaimed their reverence for the Constitution; in Milwaukee, they crowned as their leader a man who attempted to subvert it.
It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.
Monday, July 29, 2024
Sunday, July 28, 2024
T rump Telegraphs His Dictatorial Intentions in Plain Sight
Donald Trump told a group of supporters that they won’t have to vote again if they elect him to the presidency. “You won’t have to do it anymore,” Trump said at the Turning Point Believers’ Summit in Florida. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely if ever has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.
There are at least two ways of interpreting this statement. First, Trump could be implying that there won’t be any future elections if he comes to power. He may imagine himself as an American Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator he routinely praises, a leader who’s declared himself “president for life.” As he often does, however, Trump left just enough room in what he said for plausible deniability. A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country. Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.
Trump’s remarks last night are just the latest in his long record of expressing authoritarian ideas and admiration for strongmen in several undemocratic regimes—including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015 by painting an entire group of immigrants as rapists, Trump has taken just about every page from the authoritarian playbook. He lies constantly. He calls the press “the enemy of the people,” a phrase so incendiary that Joseph Stalin’s successor removed it from Soviet propaganda. Trump even went so far as to label any critical reporting “fake.”
Throughout his first term, Trump engaged in despot-style nepotism and cronyism, hiring his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to oversee crucial briefs in government while elevating his son’s wedding planner to a top role in federal housing. He abused his power to offer pardons as an enticement or a reward . . . . And, like all authoritarians, he saw himself as the sole embodiment of the state—which is why he referred to the military brass as “my generals,” used his office to personally enrich himself, and attempted to orchestrate an egregious quid pro quo, trying to trade missiles for political dirt on his former opponent.
It was in the dying days of his presidency, though, that Trump’s authoritarian instincts were most clearly unmasked. Continuing on his long history of inciting political violence, Trump inspired a mob to attack the United States Capitol in the hope of overturning the election that he lost. . . . his continuing refusal to accept election results, the former president has made it obvious that he cares about unrestrained power and self-interest, not democracy and national interest.
Since being ousted from the presidency by voters, Trump has pledged to be a dictator “on day one,” backing a series of formal policy proposals that could make that closer to reality. . . . . And now Trump says voting will become obsolete if he wins. How many more ways can he tell us that he’s an existential threat to American democracy?
It would perhaps be more comforting if Trump’s anti-democracy machinations were hidden, covert, subtle. Then we might chalk up his ongoing political popularity to an unfortunate by-product of voter ignorance and wishful thinking. Instead, because he’s conveying his authoritarian intent in blunt language in front of rolling TV cameras, it’s impossible not to conclude that at least some of his base are what political scientists call “authoritarian voters”—citizens who care about getting their way even if it means destroying democracy in the process.
More dystopian still, Trump’s acolytes are co-opting the language of autocracy . . . . many Republicans insist that the insurrection on January 6 was a “normal tourist visit” and balk at the notion that a president launching a coordinated conspiracy, pressuring election officials to find additional votes, and inciting a violent mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power are textbook attempts at a so-called auto-coup.
Trump is a unique threat to the core institutions that constrain power in the United States and make self-governance possible. We must not make the mistake of, yet again, giving Trump an undeserved benefit of the doubt. He has told Americans who he is and what he intends to do. All that voters need to do is believe him—and care enough to vote for democracy. After all, Trump said it himself: If you don’t, you may never need to again.
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