THESE POLITICIANS DENIED DEMOCRACY ON JAN. 6. NOW, THEY WANT YOUR VOTE.
By Steve Brodner, The Washington Post
While the violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aiming to subvert democracy and keep President Donald Trump in power, another group was already working on the same project inside. In an unsuccessful bid to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, 147 Republicans formally supported objection to counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes.
Some have already left office. But as many as 117 members of Congress are running for reelection in 2024. They engaged in using democracy in order to attain the power to subvert it.
In Pennsylvania: Glen Thompson (R) - 15th Congressional District Congressman.
YOU SHOULD VOTE ACCORDINGLY!
By Steve Brodner, The Washington Post
While the violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aiming to subvert democracy and keep President Donald Trump in power, another group was already working on the same project inside. In an unsuccessful bid to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, 147 Republicans formally supported objection to counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes.
Some have already left office. But as many as 117 members of Congress are running for reelection in 2024. They engaged in using democracy in order to attain the power to subvert it.
In Pennsylvania: Glen Thompson (R) - 15th Congressional District Congressman.
YOU SHOULD VOTE ACCORDINGLY!
IF YOU DON'T VOTE, BELOW IS A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF WHAT HAPPENS NEXT:
A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP IS INCREASINGLY INEVITABLE. WE SHOULD STOP PRETENDING.
By Robert Kagan, The Washington Post
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.
For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.
The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.
All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.
In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.
The rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow. Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.
Republicans who have tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then? Will the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump, continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting, only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in the world is going to attract support no matter who they are. That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.
But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help him do it.
Trump will thus enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party. Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him? Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high, continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already launched, respectively, third-party and independent campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left. The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.
Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term, the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? Regardless of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents.
Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.
Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.
Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.
Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.
Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.
It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.
Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.
And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.
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.
Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.
What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?
A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy, but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as president.
Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.
It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.
What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.
But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.
Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”
It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual “sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.
And who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.
Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. But in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.
Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the price for every transgression ever committed against the laws designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.
How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?
The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.
Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress, they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge once Trump regains power.
But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate, peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action? What would that look like?
Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them. But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.
And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief? Do we even want the military to have to make that call? There is every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs” supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.
Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find out.
Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.
This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.
What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.
Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?
Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.
A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.
A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP IS INCREASINGLY INEVITABLE. WE SHOULD STOP PRETENDING.
By Robert Kagan, The Washington Post
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.
For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.
The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.
All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.
In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.
The rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow. Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.
Republicans who have tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then? Will the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump, continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting, only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in the world is going to attract support no matter who they are. That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.
But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help him do it.
Trump will thus enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party. Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him? Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high, continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already launched, respectively, third-party and independent campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left. The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.
Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term, the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? Regardless of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents.
Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.
Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.
Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.
Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.
Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.
It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.
Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.
And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.
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.
Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.
What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?
A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy, but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as president.
Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.
It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.
What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.
But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.
Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”
It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual “sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.
And who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.
Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. But in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.
Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the price for every transgression ever committed against the laws designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.
How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?
The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.
Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress, they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge once Trump regains power.
But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate, peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action? What would that look like?
Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them. But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.
And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief? Do we even want the military to have to make that call? There is every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs” supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.
Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find out.
Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.
This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.
What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.
Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?
Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.
A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.
‘GIVE ‘EM, HELL, JOE!’ HOW HARRY TRUMAN SHOWED BIDEN A WAY TO WIN IN 2024
High inflation, a Moscow dictator, an exhausted electorate — Harry Truman somehow won in 1948, and created lessons for Joe Biden.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He was an accidental president — a Democratic ex-senator and vice president, thrust into the Oval Office in a chaotic time — and almost every political pundit and journalist insisted he could not win another term. Runaway inflation, especially at the supermarket, had already led to GOP gains in midterms some dubbed “the beefsteak election.” There was a spike in labor unrest at home, and a menacing dictator in Moscow threatened world peace.
American voters were exhausted by years of disruption. There was even an active effort to displace the incumbent president at the top of the ticket, to head off disaster that fall. When that didn’t happen, third-party candidates loomed on the left and the right. The polling numbers for the Democrat were so dismal that one leading firm even stopped doing surveys a month before Election Day.
That proved to be a big mistake, albeit not as famous as the Election Night screw-up by editors at the conservative-minded Chicago Tribune, who produced the big-type erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Harry Truman — facing a sea of supposedly insurmountable obstacles that would look painfully familiar to today’s President Joe Biden — won that 1948 election over the GOP’s Thomas Dewey by a solid margin.
What’s especially striking about the comparison between a monumental election that just marked its 75th anniversary and today is that the laws of political science haven’t changed as much as you think. The then-novel strategies cooked up by Truman’s kitchen cabinet of advisers — making the vote less about the 33rd president and more about an unpopular Republican brand, with a focus on energizing the Democratic base — look like the best hand Biden can play in 2024.
Whether the Delawarean, who turns 81 later this month, can pull it off may decide the difference between an American 21st century of democracy or dictatorship.
The political world, from TV talking heads to anxious tweeters on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has been struggling to make sense of Biden’s chances with just under a year until that do-or-die 2024 vote. Two major data points last week seemed wildly contradictory.
On one hand, Biden’s popularity, and his poll numbers against the all-but-certain GOP nominee — an increasingly dictatorial sounding Donald Trump — are dropping. The much-discussed New York Times/Siena College poll showing the 45th president topping the 46th in five of the six swing states likely to decide the election — matched by other new polls showing Trump pulling ahead — is not destiny, but a loud alarm bell for Democrats to get to work.
Yet last Tuesday, poll-panicked Dems suddenly had something to celebrate. A series of off-year election triumphs in swing states and even red states like Kentucky, where a Democratic governor was reelected, and Ohio, where an abortion-rights amendment won big, showed just how toxic the post-and-pre-Trump GOP brand has become for voters. Many reject the assault on women’s rights and the book-banning culture at the core of Republicanism.
A lot of folks looked at those results and concluded that the Biden polling numbers are bunk. I don’t agree. I think the president has real problems with a) millions of casual, less politically engaged voters who only show up every four years and who think Biden is too old or blame him for chaotic current events and b) core past supporters including under-30 voters or Black and Latino men finding fault with Biden’s record on issues like the war in Gaza.
Truman was vice president when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, near the end of World War II. Truman decided to run for a full term of his own, and he announced his candidacy on March 8, 1948.Read moreUncredited / AP
The specifics aren’t the same, but the incumbent’s bleak scenario would have looked familiar to Truman, who’d seen his approval rating plummet from over 80% in 1945 after FDR’s death thrust him into the Oval Office to just 35% in the pre-election year of 1947, in part because of post-war consumer inflation that peaked at a 20% annual rate.
The Harry Truman analogy is a bit ironic because for much of Biden’s nearly three years in the White House, the nattering nabobs of political history have instead been asking whether the 46th POTUS is channeling the original New Deal Democrat, HST’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt. Biden’s push for an expanded social-welfare state, major infrastructure work, and stronger labor unions has certainly echoed FDR’s 1930s agenda, albeit with mixed success on Capitol Hill. And a global rise in authoritarianism and militarism that threatened democracy in Europe and elsewhere also looks familiar today.
But what seems clear now is that the challenges Biden faced coming out of a worldwide pandemic — inflation, a workforce demanding its fair share in a return-to-work economy, an anxious and uneasy electorate — looks more like 1947 than 1933. So how on earth did Truman — with a perception problem not that he was too old for the White House but too small, an accidental president — get reelected? And did he leave lessons for Biden, 75 years later?
Looking back, 1948 was a game-changing election — including the first political conventions beamed into America’s living rooms on TV, as mass media including radio and newspapers played a greater role. Team Truman seemed to understand the new landscape better than the beleaguered Dewey, an overly cautious, boring candidate — famously described by Alice Roosevelt Longworth as “the bridegroom atop a wedding cake” — whose staid campaign was better suited for the turn of the 20th century. Truman’s top political advisers, James Rowe and Clark Clifford — crafted a battle plan called “The Politics of 1948.” Team Biden would do well to read it now.
There are three Truman takeaways that should be invaluable for Biden:
The ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The Truman campaign turned the conventional wisdom — that a presidential election is always a referendum on the incumbent — on its head. Rather than run on his record, the plain-spoken Missourian worked hard to reassemble the winning FDR New Deal coalition with a relentless focus on the Republican Party that had seized control of Capitol Hill in the 1946 midterms. He attacked “the worst Congress” and later “a do-nothing Congress” captured by special interests. And he electrified delegates at 1948′s fractured Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by calling lawmakers into a special summer session, where Republicans’ refusal to pass popular bills like national health care played right into Truman’s hands.
Today, it’s clear that Biden made an early mistake in hoping that a rebranding of the economy’s strongpoints, including record low unemployment, as “Bidenomics” would move voters more focused on higher prices and soaring rents. Meanwhile, the current House of Representatives — now under Christian nationalist extremist Mike Johnson after months of chaos, struggling to keep the government open — ought to inspire nostalgia for the run-of-the-mill conservatives of Truman’s era. The highly toxic brand of 2023′s Republican Party is what propelled last week’s Democratic wins. Biden — who seems to have wrongly thought Trump would be crushed by his mountain of legal woes — needs to make the do-nothing-or-worse Republicans and the dictatorial danger of Trump his 2024 focus.
Focus on the base. One thing truly groundbreaking about Truman’s “Politics of 1948″ memo was its almost prehistoric emphasis on the need to energize the Democrats’ most loyal core voters rather than the harder task of winning over swing voters. Rowe’s plan for HST aimed to excite big-city African Americans, unionized blue-collar workers and farmers who had been the heart and soul of FDR’s unprecedented four straight election victories. That meant writing off other voting blocs, including the Deep South that had been at the core of Democratic strategy since the Civil War but which in 1948 was going for third-party segregationist Strom Thurmond. Forgetting the South and wooing urban Black voters freed Truman to integrate the armed forces, which helped in key Northern states.
Like Truman, Biden’s challenge in going into 2024 is not to reinvent the wheel — Democrats have won the popular presidential vote in seven of the last eight elections — but to boost enthusiasm and turnout among the coalition that produced those million-vote margins. Today, that includes white voters in cities and suburbs with college degrees, Black and brown voters, and young people of all stripes, among others. Truman outsmarted Dewey by designing campaign trips that intensely targeted the places he needed to win, and Biden must do the same.
‘Give ‘em, hell!’ In the White House, Truman may have shrunk in comparison to the larger-than-life Roosevelt, but crisscrossing America by train in the summer and fall of 1948, his combative style honed in Kansas City’s notorious machine politics suddenly struck a chord with the restive electorate. “We’re going to give ‘em hell,” Truman declared in boarding his whistle-stop express in mid-September. A campaign slogan — and a winning vibe — was born. The growing shouts of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” from the swelling crowds meant more than any public-opinion poll.
Biden — despite his lifelong struggles with stuttering, and now his advancing age — can be Truman-esque when he is truly unleashed on the campaign trail. “Is there ever anything America set its mind to as a nation that we’ve done together and we haven’t succeeded?” Biden asked union autoworkers celebrating a new contract in Illinois last week, before, uncharacteristically, lashing out at Trump by name. His energized audience booed and someone shouted “send him to jail!” Biden was giving ‘em hell, and his crowd was eating it up.
Times change, but commonalities abound. Voters fret about the economy, but what brings them to the polls is a threat to their fundamental rights. Three-quarters of a century ago, the No. 1 human-rights issue was Jim Crow segregation. Last Tuesday’s election shows that in the 2020s, nothing has motivated voters more than the threat to women’s reproductive rights since the GOP’s handpicked Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, as well as the freedom of speech assaults by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.
Until now, Democrats haven’t fully figured out how to translate that anger into energy into Biden’s reelection, but it can be done. Plans to put abortion-rights referenda on the ballot in key states like Nevada or Florida will help. Team Biden needs to spotlight Trump’s frequent boasts that he’s personally responsible for ending Roe v. Wade through his radical Supreme Court picks.
Abortion rights can be a winning issue. So can voter revulsion at the poisonous GOP brand and growing legitimate fears of dictatorship, which should trump any qualms over Biden’s age. The history of how Biden wins in 2024 was written in 1948. Give ‘em hell, Joe!
High inflation, a Moscow dictator, an exhausted electorate — Harry Truman somehow won in 1948, and created lessons for Joe Biden.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He was an accidental president — a Democratic ex-senator and vice president, thrust into the Oval Office in a chaotic time — and almost every political pundit and journalist insisted he could not win another term. Runaway inflation, especially at the supermarket, had already led to GOP gains in midterms some dubbed “the beefsteak election.” There was a spike in labor unrest at home, and a menacing dictator in Moscow threatened world peace.
American voters were exhausted by years of disruption. There was even an active effort to displace the incumbent president at the top of the ticket, to head off disaster that fall. When that didn’t happen, third-party candidates loomed on the left and the right. The polling numbers for the Democrat were so dismal that one leading firm even stopped doing surveys a month before Election Day.
That proved to be a big mistake, albeit not as famous as the Election Night screw-up by editors at the conservative-minded Chicago Tribune, who produced the big-type erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Harry Truman — facing a sea of supposedly insurmountable obstacles that would look painfully familiar to today’s President Joe Biden — won that 1948 election over the GOP’s Thomas Dewey by a solid margin.
What’s especially striking about the comparison between a monumental election that just marked its 75th anniversary and today is that the laws of political science haven’t changed as much as you think. The then-novel strategies cooked up by Truman’s kitchen cabinet of advisers — making the vote less about the 33rd president and more about an unpopular Republican brand, with a focus on energizing the Democratic base — look like the best hand Biden can play in 2024.
Whether the Delawarean, who turns 81 later this month, can pull it off may decide the difference between an American 21st century of democracy or dictatorship.
The political world, from TV talking heads to anxious tweeters on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has been struggling to make sense of Biden’s chances with just under a year until that do-or-die 2024 vote. Two major data points last week seemed wildly contradictory.
On one hand, Biden’s popularity, and his poll numbers against the all-but-certain GOP nominee — an increasingly dictatorial sounding Donald Trump — are dropping. The much-discussed New York Times/Siena College poll showing the 45th president topping the 46th in five of the six swing states likely to decide the election — matched by other new polls showing Trump pulling ahead — is not destiny, but a loud alarm bell for Democrats to get to work.
Yet last Tuesday, poll-panicked Dems suddenly had something to celebrate. A series of off-year election triumphs in swing states and even red states like Kentucky, where a Democratic governor was reelected, and Ohio, where an abortion-rights amendment won big, showed just how toxic the post-and-pre-Trump GOP brand has become for voters. Many reject the assault on women’s rights and the book-banning culture at the core of Republicanism.
A lot of folks looked at those results and concluded that the Biden polling numbers are bunk. I don’t agree. I think the president has real problems with a) millions of casual, less politically engaged voters who only show up every four years and who think Biden is too old or blame him for chaotic current events and b) core past supporters including under-30 voters or Black and Latino men finding fault with Biden’s record on issues like the war in Gaza.
Truman was vice president when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, near the end of World War II. Truman decided to run for a full term of his own, and he announced his candidacy on March 8, 1948.Read moreUncredited / AP
The specifics aren’t the same, but the incumbent’s bleak scenario would have looked familiar to Truman, who’d seen his approval rating plummet from over 80% in 1945 after FDR’s death thrust him into the Oval Office to just 35% in the pre-election year of 1947, in part because of post-war consumer inflation that peaked at a 20% annual rate.
The Harry Truman analogy is a bit ironic because for much of Biden’s nearly three years in the White House, the nattering nabobs of political history have instead been asking whether the 46th POTUS is channeling the original New Deal Democrat, HST’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt. Biden’s push for an expanded social-welfare state, major infrastructure work, and stronger labor unions has certainly echoed FDR’s 1930s agenda, albeit with mixed success on Capitol Hill. And a global rise in authoritarianism and militarism that threatened democracy in Europe and elsewhere also looks familiar today.
But what seems clear now is that the challenges Biden faced coming out of a worldwide pandemic — inflation, a workforce demanding its fair share in a return-to-work economy, an anxious and uneasy electorate — looks more like 1947 than 1933. So how on earth did Truman — with a perception problem not that he was too old for the White House but too small, an accidental president — get reelected? And did he leave lessons for Biden, 75 years later?
Looking back, 1948 was a game-changing election — including the first political conventions beamed into America’s living rooms on TV, as mass media including radio and newspapers played a greater role. Team Truman seemed to understand the new landscape better than the beleaguered Dewey, an overly cautious, boring candidate — famously described by Alice Roosevelt Longworth as “the bridegroom atop a wedding cake” — whose staid campaign was better suited for the turn of the 20th century. Truman’s top political advisers, James Rowe and Clark Clifford — crafted a battle plan called “The Politics of 1948.” Team Biden would do well to read it now.
There are three Truman takeaways that should be invaluable for Biden:
The ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The Truman campaign turned the conventional wisdom — that a presidential election is always a referendum on the incumbent — on its head. Rather than run on his record, the plain-spoken Missourian worked hard to reassemble the winning FDR New Deal coalition with a relentless focus on the Republican Party that had seized control of Capitol Hill in the 1946 midterms. He attacked “the worst Congress” and later “a do-nothing Congress” captured by special interests. And he electrified delegates at 1948′s fractured Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by calling lawmakers into a special summer session, where Republicans’ refusal to pass popular bills like national health care played right into Truman’s hands.
Today, it’s clear that Biden made an early mistake in hoping that a rebranding of the economy’s strongpoints, including record low unemployment, as “Bidenomics” would move voters more focused on higher prices and soaring rents. Meanwhile, the current House of Representatives — now under Christian nationalist extremist Mike Johnson after months of chaos, struggling to keep the government open — ought to inspire nostalgia for the run-of-the-mill conservatives of Truman’s era. The highly toxic brand of 2023′s Republican Party is what propelled last week’s Democratic wins. Biden — who seems to have wrongly thought Trump would be crushed by his mountain of legal woes — needs to make the do-nothing-or-worse Republicans and the dictatorial danger of Trump his 2024 focus.
Focus on the base. One thing truly groundbreaking about Truman’s “Politics of 1948″ memo was its almost prehistoric emphasis on the need to energize the Democrats’ most loyal core voters rather than the harder task of winning over swing voters. Rowe’s plan for HST aimed to excite big-city African Americans, unionized blue-collar workers and farmers who had been the heart and soul of FDR’s unprecedented four straight election victories. That meant writing off other voting blocs, including the Deep South that had been at the core of Democratic strategy since the Civil War but which in 1948 was going for third-party segregationist Strom Thurmond. Forgetting the South and wooing urban Black voters freed Truman to integrate the armed forces, which helped in key Northern states.
Like Truman, Biden’s challenge in going into 2024 is not to reinvent the wheel — Democrats have won the popular presidential vote in seven of the last eight elections — but to boost enthusiasm and turnout among the coalition that produced those million-vote margins. Today, that includes white voters in cities and suburbs with college degrees, Black and brown voters, and young people of all stripes, among others. Truman outsmarted Dewey by designing campaign trips that intensely targeted the places he needed to win, and Biden must do the same.
‘Give ‘em, hell!’ In the White House, Truman may have shrunk in comparison to the larger-than-life Roosevelt, but crisscrossing America by train in the summer and fall of 1948, his combative style honed in Kansas City’s notorious machine politics suddenly struck a chord with the restive electorate. “We’re going to give ‘em hell,” Truman declared in boarding his whistle-stop express in mid-September. A campaign slogan — and a winning vibe — was born. The growing shouts of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” from the swelling crowds meant more than any public-opinion poll.
Biden — despite his lifelong struggles with stuttering, and now his advancing age — can be Truman-esque when he is truly unleashed on the campaign trail. “Is there ever anything America set its mind to as a nation that we’ve done together and we haven’t succeeded?” Biden asked union autoworkers celebrating a new contract in Illinois last week, before, uncharacteristically, lashing out at Trump by name. His energized audience booed and someone shouted “send him to jail!” Biden was giving ‘em hell, and his crowd was eating it up.
Times change, but commonalities abound. Voters fret about the economy, but what brings them to the polls is a threat to their fundamental rights. Three-quarters of a century ago, the No. 1 human-rights issue was Jim Crow segregation. Last Tuesday’s election shows that in the 2020s, nothing has motivated voters more than the threat to women’s reproductive rights since the GOP’s handpicked Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, as well as the freedom of speech assaults by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.
Until now, Democrats haven’t fully figured out how to translate that anger into energy into Biden’s reelection, but it can be done. Plans to put abortion-rights referenda on the ballot in key states like Nevada or Florida will help. Team Biden needs to spotlight Trump’s frequent boasts that he’s personally responsible for ending Roe v. Wade through his radical Supreme Court picks.
Abortion rights can be a winning issue. So can voter revulsion at the poisonous GOP brand and growing legitimate fears of dictatorship, which should trump any qualms over Biden’s age. The history of how Biden wins in 2024 was written in 1948. Give ‘em hell, Joe!
Democrats passed the legislation below
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. - Thomas Jefferson
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
THE RESULTS OF VOTING REPUBLICAN
Before voting based on some “hot button” issue, consider how your family will be affected by:
Today’s America has nothing in common with the democratic dream envisioned by Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. Democrats are the modern equivalent of the colonists who battled at Lexington and Concord - as we battle for the America that the founding fathers envisioned – and against the creeping oligopoly that the founders warned against.
You may not think Democrats are perfect, but Republicans are getting nuttier by the day – yikes!
Before voting based on some “hot button” issue, consider how your family will be affected by:
- Tax cuts for high-income individuals at the expense of the working people
- Continuing to allow tax loopholes that the rich and corporations use to avoid paying their fair share
- The rich passing on huge fortunes to their heirs with little or no taxation
- The rich buying Congress and legally hiding their contributions from scrutiny
- Wall Street legally being allowed to cause another depression
- Keeping the minimum wage so low that many workers are forced to collect welfare
- Decline of the quality of life due to stagnant wages caused by the rich outsourcing jobs abroad to raise profits
- Big insurers, drug companies, and major hospital lobbyists preventing good health care for all
- No Medicare or Social Security
- Business-friendly regulations weakening labor, public health, and environmental regulations
- Ignoring climate science and adding to global warming, making portions of the planet uninhabitable
- Climate change causing sea level rise which will wash away housing for millions
- The spread of union-hostile "right to work" laws
- An unprecedented wave of restrictions on women’s rights
- Legislation impeding the ability to get equal pay for equal work
- Large-scale layoffs of teachers and public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats
- Keep putting guns in the hands of crazy people who will kill you or your children
- Condoning the killing gays and supporters of: women’s’ freedom and keeping guns away from crazies
- Supporting anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-science, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, right-wing extremists
- Supporting fascism, violence, poverty, and anarchy
Today’s America has nothing in common with the democratic dream envisioned by Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. Democrats are the modern equivalent of the colonists who battled at Lexington and Concord - as we battle for the America that the founding fathers envisioned – and against the creeping oligopoly that the founders warned against.
You may not think Democrats are perfect, but Republicans are getting nuttier by the day – yikes!
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY by Wes Williams
Radio host Thom Hartmann says that the Republican Party is made up of three types of people: the rich, shills for the rich, and suckers. That’s an accurate description, but not detailed enough. Each of those categories can be broken down further, to give a more precise picture of the makeup of the modern Republican Party. With that in mind, here are the eight types of people who currently call themselves Republicans.
1. The Oligarchs - Example: Sheldon Adelson
The oligarchs are the financial backers of the party. They rarely seek the limelight, but sometimes find themselves thrust into it. They are the “kingmakers,” thanks in large part to the Citizens United decision. Witness the Koch brothers’ recent vetting of announced and likely Republican presidential candidates, trying to settle on the one who will receive a massive infusion of their cash. Ditto Sheldon Adelson, who spent $93 million on the 2012 election, according to the Washington Post. Those are the biggest examples, but there are many more.
2. The Billionaire Industrialists - Example: Mitt Romney
This group of Republicans could also fit into the category of oligarchs, but, unlike the oligarchs, they don’t want to be kingmakers, they want to be king. They see America as belonging to people like them: wealthy, and powerful. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, these guys will tell you that it’s just because you didn’t work hard enough, or weren’t creative enough. Never mind that most of these guys — Romney, Donald Trump, etc. — inherited wealth, positions of power, or both. If you’re poor, or middle class, and struggling, well, just work harder, and more. Sleep is overrated, anyway.
3. The Corporate Shills - Example: The Cato Institute
There are so many individuals shilling for the oligarchs, and financed by them, that it is easier to talk about the organizations they work for, than to identify each person. The Cato Institute, which describes itself as “a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace,” is just one of dozens of these groups.
According to Forbes, Charles and David Koch (see “Oligarchs” above) have contributed millions to the Cato Institute. It’s almost laughable to read Cato’s description of how the group is funded, which says:
“In order to maintain its independence, the Cato Institute accepts no government funding. Cato receives approximately 80 percent of its funding through tax-deductible contributions from individuals, with the remainder of its support coming from foundations, corporations, and the sale of books and publications.”
Other groups, that put out pseudo-research designed to promote the interests of the oligarchs who fund them include: Americans For Prosperity (another Koch brothers funded group), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and many, many more.
4. The Religious Hucksters - Example: Franklin Graham
This faction of Republicans has an important job: To convince people to vote against their economic self-interest, by using “wedge issues” such as same-sex marriage, abortion, fear of Muslims (or “MOOs-lims” as Graham would say), etc. This group is extensive, and counts as members those with well known names such as Graham, as well as unknown preachers who step into the pulpits of numerous churches every Sunday. But they’re all selling the same message: vote Republican, or God will want nothing to do with you.
5. The “Noise Machine” - Example: Rush Limbaugh
The noise machine is extensive, and it permeates the airwaves. Limbaugh has, for years, been the CEO of the Republican noise machine, but, after a series of gaffes cost him many sponsors, his star seems to be fading. There are plenty more out there, whose names may not be as big, but who are just as good as stirring up the uninformed, including: Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and so on. Of course, this section can’t leave out the entire cast of characters at Fox News. From the curvy couch crew of Fox and Friends, to the evening rants of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, Fox News is one 24 hour noise cycle.
Of course, the job of this segment of the party is to tell half truths, and flat out lies, to those who aren’t paying attention, in order to, again, get them to vote against their own self-interests (see “Religious Hucksters”).
6. The War Hawks - Example: Dick Cheney
These Republicans have never seen a war they didn’t like. Some of this group served in the military, such as John McCain. But many of them, like former vice president Cheney, have never worn a uniform. They see the world as a dangerous place that can only be tamed by American intervention. Intervention that might require your child to go fight and die. But not their children. They have more important things to do, like grow up to be leaders, who will then send other people’s children off to fight and die. This group sees any dissent from a Republican president’s war plans as “unpatriotic.” But, they will travel the world to criticize a Democratic president for his handling of American conflicts he inherited from a Republican.
When talking about this group, we can’t leave out their connections to the defense industry. Isn’t it interesting that most of the biggest hawks in the country have the deepest ties to the military-industrial complex?
7. The Country Clubbers - Example: Hundreds of thousands of upper middle class voters
This group includes a lot of educated people, who should be able to see through the claims made by the shills and hucksters. But hey, they live in gated communities. They’re doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women. Republicans keep their taxes low. And those wars Republicans like to start? No worries. The children of this group are in some sort of professional school, or preparing to take over the family business. They’re too busy to do anything like sign up for military service. Even though they don’t make anything close to the money made by the oligarchs and other billionaires, they’re comfortable. They don’t need things like food stamps, so they don’t really see the purpose of them. They take advantage of all sorts of tax deductions, but don’t like the idea of others getting government assistance. Their motto could be “Government program that helps me — GOOD. Government program that helps you — BAD!”
8. The Dumb*sses - Example: The Tea Party
This is an example of one place where something called “trickle down” actually works. Everything done by the members of the first six groups in this summary winds up here — with people who listen to what the shills have to say, and who vote the way the oligarchs want them to. Were it not for this group of terminally uniformed voters, mostly old, mostly white, mostly uneducated, there would be no Republican party, or at the very least, it wouldn’t resemble what it is today.
These people hate the government, but love the largest government agency — the military. They’re quite happy to send their kids off to die in Republican wars, to protect their “freedom.” They opposed the so-called “government takeover of healthcare,” aka the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), but don’t you dare touch their Medicare.
You have to give the chiefs of the Republican Party credit. They have all of the pieces in place, and the thing runs like the proverbial “well oiled machine.”
This is why Democrats can never rest. And why we must always, ALWAYS, get out and vote.
Radio host Thom Hartmann says that the Republican Party is made up of three types of people: the rich, shills for the rich, and suckers. That’s an accurate description, but not detailed enough. Each of those categories can be broken down further, to give a more precise picture of the makeup of the modern Republican Party. With that in mind, here are the eight types of people who currently call themselves Republicans.
1. The Oligarchs - Example: Sheldon Adelson
The oligarchs are the financial backers of the party. They rarely seek the limelight, but sometimes find themselves thrust into it. They are the “kingmakers,” thanks in large part to the Citizens United decision. Witness the Koch brothers’ recent vetting of announced and likely Republican presidential candidates, trying to settle on the one who will receive a massive infusion of their cash. Ditto Sheldon Adelson, who spent $93 million on the 2012 election, according to the Washington Post. Those are the biggest examples, but there are many more.
2. The Billionaire Industrialists - Example: Mitt Romney
This group of Republicans could also fit into the category of oligarchs, but, unlike the oligarchs, they don’t want to be kingmakers, they want to be king. They see America as belonging to people like them: wealthy, and powerful. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, these guys will tell you that it’s just because you didn’t work hard enough, or weren’t creative enough. Never mind that most of these guys — Romney, Donald Trump, etc. — inherited wealth, positions of power, or both. If you’re poor, or middle class, and struggling, well, just work harder, and more. Sleep is overrated, anyway.
3. The Corporate Shills - Example: The Cato Institute
There are so many individuals shilling for the oligarchs, and financed by them, that it is easier to talk about the organizations they work for, than to identify each person. The Cato Institute, which describes itself as “a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace,” is just one of dozens of these groups.
According to Forbes, Charles and David Koch (see “Oligarchs” above) have contributed millions to the Cato Institute. It’s almost laughable to read Cato’s description of how the group is funded, which says:
“In order to maintain its independence, the Cato Institute accepts no government funding. Cato receives approximately 80 percent of its funding through tax-deductible contributions from individuals, with the remainder of its support coming from foundations, corporations, and the sale of books and publications.”
Other groups, that put out pseudo-research designed to promote the interests of the oligarchs who fund them include: Americans For Prosperity (another Koch brothers funded group), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and many, many more.
4. The Religious Hucksters - Example: Franklin Graham
This faction of Republicans has an important job: To convince people to vote against their economic self-interest, by using “wedge issues” such as same-sex marriage, abortion, fear of Muslims (or “MOOs-lims” as Graham would say), etc. This group is extensive, and counts as members those with well known names such as Graham, as well as unknown preachers who step into the pulpits of numerous churches every Sunday. But they’re all selling the same message: vote Republican, or God will want nothing to do with you.
5. The “Noise Machine” - Example: Rush Limbaugh
The noise machine is extensive, and it permeates the airwaves. Limbaugh has, for years, been the CEO of the Republican noise machine, but, after a series of gaffes cost him many sponsors, his star seems to be fading. There are plenty more out there, whose names may not be as big, but who are just as good as stirring up the uninformed, including: Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and so on. Of course, this section can’t leave out the entire cast of characters at Fox News. From the curvy couch crew of Fox and Friends, to the evening rants of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, Fox News is one 24 hour noise cycle.
Of course, the job of this segment of the party is to tell half truths, and flat out lies, to those who aren’t paying attention, in order to, again, get them to vote against their own self-interests (see “Religious Hucksters”).
6. The War Hawks - Example: Dick Cheney
These Republicans have never seen a war they didn’t like. Some of this group served in the military, such as John McCain. But many of them, like former vice president Cheney, have never worn a uniform. They see the world as a dangerous place that can only be tamed by American intervention. Intervention that might require your child to go fight and die. But not their children. They have more important things to do, like grow up to be leaders, who will then send other people’s children off to fight and die. This group sees any dissent from a Republican president’s war plans as “unpatriotic.” But, they will travel the world to criticize a Democratic president for his handling of American conflicts he inherited from a Republican.
When talking about this group, we can’t leave out their connections to the defense industry. Isn’t it interesting that most of the biggest hawks in the country have the deepest ties to the military-industrial complex?
7. The Country Clubbers - Example: Hundreds of thousands of upper middle class voters
This group includes a lot of educated people, who should be able to see through the claims made by the shills and hucksters. But hey, they live in gated communities. They’re doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women. Republicans keep their taxes low. And those wars Republicans like to start? No worries. The children of this group are in some sort of professional school, or preparing to take over the family business. They’re too busy to do anything like sign up for military service. Even though they don’t make anything close to the money made by the oligarchs and other billionaires, they’re comfortable. They don’t need things like food stamps, so they don’t really see the purpose of them. They take advantage of all sorts of tax deductions, but don’t like the idea of others getting government assistance. Their motto could be “Government program that helps me — GOOD. Government program that helps you — BAD!”
8. The Dumb*sses - Example: The Tea Party
This is an example of one place where something called “trickle down” actually works. Everything done by the members of the first six groups in this summary winds up here — with people who listen to what the shills have to say, and who vote the way the oligarchs want them to. Were it not for this group of terminally uniformed voters, mostly old, mostly white, mostly uneducated, there would be no Republican party, or at the very least, it wouldn’t resemble what it is today.
These people hate the government, but love the largest government agency — the military. They’re quite happy to send their kids off to die in Republican wars, to protect their “freedom.” They opposed the so-called “government takeover of healthcare,” aka the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), but don’t you dare touch their Medicare.
You have to give the chiefs of the Republican Party credit. They have all of the pieces in place, and the thing runs like the proverbial “well oiled machine.”
This is why Democrats can never rest. And why we must always, ALWAYS, get out and vote.