He is making no secret of his strongman ambitions
Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.
I don’t think sleepwalking is the right word, on account of how we’re not asleep. It’s more that we’re helpless. We would stop him if we could, but we can’t.
The 45th and 47th president has wasted no time in launching a concerted effort to consolidate executive power, undermine checks and balances and challenge established legal and institutional norms. And he is making no secret of his strongman ambitions.
Trump, 78, has declared “We are the federal law” and posted a social media image of himself wearing a crown with the words “Long live the king”. He also channeled Napoleon with the words: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And JD Vance has stated that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.
Trump quickly pardoned those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, placed loyalists in key positions within the FBI and military and purged the justice department, which also suffered resignations in response to the dismissal of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams after his cooperation on hardline immigration measures.
The president now has the courts in his sights. Last weekend the White House defied a judge’s verbal order blocking it from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to justify the deportation of 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they will be held in a 40,000-person megaprison.
…
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, noted that Democrats and their allies have filed more than 125 cases against various attacks on the rule of law and obtained more than 40 temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.
“We’re in the fight of our lives,” he told the Guardian. “This is not a two week, two month or even two year fight that we’re in. This is going to take us many years to defeat the forces of authoritarian reaction and the Democrats are rising to the occasion.
“If you look at he way democratic societies responded to fascism a century ago, it just takes time for people to realign and refocus and mobilise a concerted and unified response. Are we there yet? No. But are we going to be in a place where we can stand together and defeat authoritarianism in our country? Yes, we are going to get there.”
Here’s hoping.
I have the horrible feeling that the US is just one Reichstag fire away from total fascism.
A few points on how to run a military dictatorship. The necessities include:
1. Remember always that the army’s prime purpose becomes not national defence, but domestic policing and control. Getting it involved in foreign wars is thus done at the dictator’s own risk. (General Galtieri of Argentina learned this the hard way in his contest with Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands in 1982.) So expect to see Trump steadily bringing troops home from bases and conflicts abroad as his time in office runs down.
2. If I have control of your supply of air, water, food, comfort, your opportunities for interaction with others, your information and above all in the modern context, your supply of money, then I have got control of you. (BF Skinner showed the essentials of this control with regard to rats, pigeons and other animals.) Guaranteed minimal income thus becomes an important democracy-enhancing idea; of course, dictators and wannabees favour the opposite.
3. Threaten dissidents and oppositionists with serious consequences if they persist.
4. Encourage mutual rivalries and hostilities between groups opposing you; ie divide and rule.
5. “Heil Drumpf,”.! I mean Heil Trump.! is likely just stock for nighhtclub comedians and such. Hitler found that ‘Heil Schuckelberger’ (his original family name) did not quite have the right ring to it. So he got rid of it in favour of ‘Heil Hitler.!’ It served him well for the best part of about 20 years.
We can hope that America is able to save itself from Trump due to the fact that he’s a fucking moron who’s surrounded himself with talentless lickspittles. There are certainly a lot of weaknesses that a smart, determined , internal Opposition could exploit, if it were to come down to that. Perhaps the greatest is his own personal cowardice, which is probably what kept the January 6 insurrection from succeeding. Had Trump joined his mob at the Capitol as he’d promised, there very well might never have been a Biden presidency. A similar failure of nerve now might result in the failure and sputtering out of his current coup, if the others he’s so reliant on decide not to do his dirty work for him at some crucial juncture.
Welllll I’m sorry to say that wasn’t because of his cowardice, it’s because his security detail refused. He went into a towering rage at them but to no avail. Of course, he had zero reason to think he would be in any danger if he went there, so it’s not a point for “he’s not a coward”; it’s just that that particular item isn’t a point for “he’s a coward.”
You need to look to Canada if you are to save your Republic.
Encourage Canada to accept tRump’s “invitation” to be come the 51st state.
Canada will provide two more likely Dem Senators and a huge swathe of Dem Reps, plus a bunch of electoral college votes. The Canadians will ensure a Dem House, Congress and Presidency. Once that is achieved, you can go about rebuilding your Republic, say thank you to the nice Canadians, who will then secede from the USA taking the rest of the Great Lakes and some blue states with them as their reward.
Now that is a plan.
If we try to annex Canada, you should hold out in negotiations; you’ve got 12 Provinces, so you should at least get half a dozen states. I suspect that would mean we’d get one or two senators and reps for the GOP, but we should still end up with sanity on the plus margin. Oh, and your first order of business should be pressing for statehood for Puerto Rico and Guam, and maybe a general state of “Pacifica” for the other island territories. Once you’ve locked that in, then institute the Wyoming Rule (the least populous state gets 1 Rep, as does any state with up to 1.5 times that population; then you add one Rep for each multiple, so 1.5-2.5 gets 2 Reps, and so on; once the math is done, that determines the size of the House of Reps overall). This would vastly dilute the power of the rural states that get way too much representation because of how apportionment currently works. It would also course-correct the issues with the Electoral College until that can be done away with, as well.
Fox News seems to be taking every opportunity to run the scene of the sadistic & humiliating ‘welcome’ given to the immigrants in El Salvador: being greeted by an assembled mass of armed Salvadoran soldiers & police, being made to run in shackles & handcuffs in a doubled-up position (a large paw pressing on the back of their necks), being kicked & punched if they fall over, being forced to kneel & have their heads shaved… The idea, on Fox’s part, seems clearly to be that their viewers should revel in the cruelty, take sadistic pleasure in it. Since it is already clear that some of the immigrants were not gang-members at all, there is no reason to suppose that a large number, perhaps most, of these immigrants were gang-members, either, since the Trump regime carefully ensured that none of them were allowed due process to determine whether they were gang-members or not. I have seldom seen anything so disgusting. But those non gang-members are ‘collateral damage’; and, as we have been informed, collateral damage is ‘unavoidable’.