Trump: The Danger Ahead

Belatedly, more of the mainstream media is exposing the threat Donald Trump and a potential second Trump regime would pose not only to American democracy but to the existing world order.  American democracy could literally end and Trumps political opponents and media critical to Trump and his lies could face prosecution or worse  Just this week, Trump acolyte Steve Bannon ranted that such domestic threats are "just not rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious."  Ironically, Trump's MAGA cultist are too stupid or so overwhelmed with their hatred of others to realize that once a Trump dictatorship was in place they might find themselves  no longer needed and in danger themselves as happened to many Germans under the Nazis. Across the globe, a second Trump regime friendly to tyrants could equate to a green light for Vladimir Putin to move against other former Soviet satellite nations and China and North Korea could likewise feel free to act against Taiwan and South Korea, respectively.  A lengthy piece in The Atlantic authored by a conservative former Republican looks at the very real dangers America faces.  The big worry is that too many Americans will continue to sleepwalk towards disaster and not recognize the urgency of stopping Trump and his enablers such as Speaker Mike Johnson who is busy blurring the faces of January 6th rioters so that they will not face "retaliation" for the crimes they committed that day.  Here are article highlights:

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

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

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

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

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law. 

From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

 The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency.

If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up. 

After Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment of an independent special counsel.

Since 2021, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.

Most of the people who would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy; forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses. Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement against his perceived opponents . . . .

First-term Trump told aides that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term.

Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.

If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

That at grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on.

A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. . . . every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. . . . .For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.

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There Are No Moderate Republican Presidential Candidates

Today's Republican Party is unrecognizable when compared to the party I left over two decades ago.  Yet much of the mainstream media continues to pretend that the GOP is still a normal political party devoid of moderates in the old sense of that term  and too often refuses to call Republican candidates the extremists they are in fact. The GOP has become a cult and is largely controlled by "Christian" extremist, white supremacist and billionaires who want to destroy the federal government so they can pay even less in taxes and/or their business need not be impacted by inconvenient safety regulations or bans on child labor. The current crop of GOP presidential candidates shows this reality writ large even as much of the media call those like Nikki Haley "moderate" when they are anything but.  All would gut the federal government, reduce programs that benefit regular Americans and shift wealth to the already extremely wealthy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at some of the extreme positions of those challenging Trump for the GOP nomination.  Here are excerpts:

It’s tempting to believe most Republican presidential candidates — including the latest media darling, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — are more “moderate” than front-runner Donald Trump. And if your low-bar definition of “moderate” is “unlikely to foment an insurrection,” then sure.

But when it comes to how they’d actually govern, many of their policy proposals are essentially a warmed-over Trump agenda. Among them: plans to dismantle the federal government’s basic functions and abilities to serve regular Americans.

Trump often speaks of “draining the swamp.” When Trump was president, this mostly meant draining the government of experts whose work he found inconvenient — such as those tasked with measuring the impact of his tax cuts or safeguarding the integrity of the 2020 election. He blew up a prestigious statistical agency, for instance, after it produced research he didn’t like, and on his way out the door, he laid the groundwork for a broader purge of civil servants.

Other GOP presidential hopefuls have now echoed Trump’s attacks on the “deep state” and promised purges of their own.

Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, has promised to arbitrarily fire every civil servant whose Social Security number ends in an odd digit. More disturbingly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to domesticating “these deep state people” includes a pledge to “start slitting throats on Day One” — never mind that public workers at all levels of government are already at heightened risk of violent attacks.

Even Haley, who’s supposed to be the grown-up, “moderate” alternative to these histrionic boys, has offered her own more genteel-sounding version of the proposal. She has pledged to impose a “term limit” on all civil servants, so that every public worker would be fired after a maximum of five years.

This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.

Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.

And everyone else who has some valuable, specialized expertise, and who, because of a sense of duty and belief in their public mission, is willing to tolerate constant denigration from elected officials and lower pay than they could receive in the private sector.

Proposals like Haley’s, in short, are a good way to destroy the basic machinery of government. Not the good “creative destruction” kind of destruction, either. It’s just demolition, involving expulsion of as many subject-matter experts as possible — including those who keep our country safe and our drinking water clean and whose skills are hard to replicate at the price we pay.

Like other candidates, Haley has promised to claw back Internal Revenue Service money dedicated to upgrading customer service and catching more wealthy tax cheats.

Defunding the IRS would have two major consequences. First, it would lead to a more frustrating experience for normal taxpayers merely trying to comply with the law (so, most Americans). Second, it would mean less revenue coming in to fund everything else the federal government does — including border security, law enforcement and other functions even Republicans concede are necessary.

Another proposal: Haley wants to have Congress vote on every federal rule and regulation. Once again, this has the gloss of thoughtfulness, until you do the briefest of homework about its likely consequences.

Congress already has the right to pass new laws (obviously) and to rescind regulations it dislikes. But it can barely get its act together to keep the lights on. Do you really want to require lawmakers to vote on every bit of minutiae usually left to subject-matter experts, such as aviation safety standards or the technical specs for mammography equipment? There are thousands of these rules issued each year.

To be clear, no one claims the federal government is perfect — or even particularly efficient. But there are plenty of serious policy proposals to improve the civil service, assuming politicians genuinely want to strengthen rather than hollow out state capacity.

[M]aybe it’s easier for presidential contenders to run on a platform that government doesn’t work — and then, once in office, ensure that it never will again.

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Trump’s Aberrant Behavior is Getting Worse and More Dangerous

This past week Donald Trump suffered legal setbacks when a gag order was reinstated in the New York civil fraud case and Trump's insane claim of immunity was rejected by an appeals court in the Washington, DC, January 6th case.  Rather than being chastened the always megalomaniacal Trump again attacked the wife of the New York judge  and went on further unhinged rants on his Truth Social, which does anything but provide the truth on issues and/or Trump.   Meanwhile Trump cultists continue to rally to Trump's standard as he promises them retribution on those he/they deem as enemies and the larger public seemingly yawns and ignores the growing threat Trump poses to the nation and civil society.  Speaking with CBS News, Liz Cheney summarized the nation's sleepwalking towards a dictatorship should Trump regain the White House with the help of his GOP enablers:

“He’s told us what he will do. It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take. People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances,’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States. If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself. He has to have collaborators. And the story of Mike Johnson is a story of, of a collaborator and of someone who knew then – and knows now – that what he’s doing and saying is wrong, but he’s willing to do it in an effort to please Donald Trump. And that’s what makes it dangerous.”  

Perhaps even more disturbing is the view of many mental health specialists who seem Trump lurching toward even deeper mental illness and insanity - something much of the mainstream media continues to ignore or perhaps even normalize through the continued pretense that Trump is merely another political candidate.  A piece at Salon looks at the frightening conclusions of mental health experts and the extreme danger Trump poses.  Here are excepts: 

In evaluating his public and private behavior, America’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, and likely a sociopath — if not a psychopath. In even more direct terms, Trump has shown himself to apparently have a diseased mind, which in turn amplifies his already corrupt morality and ethics, attraction to violence, and overall capacity for evil. Ultimately, if he were to become president again, such an outcome would be a disaster for both the United States and the world.

In a new essay in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall consulted with mental health professionals from some of America’s most prestigious institutions about this emergency. Their conclusion: Donald Trump’s aberrant behavior is getting worse.

Once again, the American people and their leaders have been warned about the growing danger(s) and too few of them are responding with the appropriate energy and seriousness.

Leonard Class, who is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told Edsall that:

If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as "vermin" and "poisoning the blood of our country"), we have to wonder if he has crossed into "new terrain." That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is "the only one" and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.

Several mental health experts whom Edsall consulted highlighted the role that Trump’s aging brain and apparent cognitive decline are playing in his pathological behavior:

"Trump is an aging malignant narcissist," Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. "As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous."

Craig Malkin, who is a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, emphasized what he believes is Trump’s increasingly psychopathic behavior.

If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.

I have been very vocal in my criticism of the New York Times and other agenda-setting media about their failures to consistently engage in pro-democracy journalism — a type of journalistic practice that requires that the abnormal is not normalized and that the American people are repeatedly warned about Trumpism, neofascism, and the dangers embodied by other types of anti-democratic politics.

Edsall’s new essay, and his writing more generally, is an example of the type of bold public teaching and truth-telling that the New York Times and other elite media should be doing much more of. In fact, the future of American democracy depends on it.

And given how the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine is escalating its war on reality and truth as it shapes and prepares the information space to facilitate Trump’s return to power as America’s first dictator, the New York Times and other such elite media should be even more earnest in such a commitment.

Collectively, the small group of mental health professionals who followed through on their "duty to warn" the American people about Trump and his dangerousness were marginalized, harassed (including death threats) and in at least one example suffered sanctions and loss of employment. Their warnings about Trumpism and the ascendant neofascist movement and the type of widespread harm, including violence and mass death (as seen with the Trump regime’s negligent if not outright criminal response to the Covid pandemic) have proven to be prescient. Trump’s plans to become America’s first dictator are creating a cataclysmic synergy between his diseased mind, with its megalomania and God complex, and a fascist political party and movement that is eager to rubbleize democracy with the goal of creating an American apartheid Christofascist plutocracy.

To that point, Trump and his agents have publicly announced their plans to use the United States military to occupy Democratic-led cities and other "blue" parts of the country as part of a plan to impose martial law. Dictator Trump and his enforcers will attempt to legitimate this attack on the American people’s fundamental civil and human rights by claiming that they are actually cracking down on "crime" in the name of "public safety."

None of this is new. As seen in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, history shows that sick leaders attract sick followers who in turn combine to create sick mass movements that oppress (and do worse to) their fellow citizens as they destroy society. Ignoring these lessons and precedents is a choice – one that is usually fatal.

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