As I write, Congress is debating Trump’s budget, including his “beautiful” tax cut for the wealthy that will increase the U.S. debt by $3 to $5 trillion over ten years. If something like the version passed by the House of Representatives is accepted by the Senate, it will constitute the most significant redistribution of income and wealth in American history, to the rich and super-rich.

Politically, it can only hurt the Republicans. As Rahm Emanuel wrote in the Washington Post, they are handing the Democrats a political gift for the next campaign. The pending legislation, he suggested, “should be understood by the public in one phrase: ‘tax cuts for the wealthy, health-care cuts for the many.’”

What can we expect in the United States in the coming months, indeed weeks? This is an emotional matter for me. At least in one case, it has even affected my friendships. I have no problem respecting conservative views on domestic and international issues, but I draw the line at support for Trump. Some of the policies he advocates are not necessarily bad. But statistically, that is inevitable; it’s true of Mussolini, Franco and others as well. Trump would be a dictator like them if he could.

An institutional outlier

The United States, we need to remind ourselves, is an outlier among democracies, notably with its pure two-party system in which the only way to express dissatisfaction with the party in power is to vote for the opposing one, even if you have to hold your nose. There is, I suggest, good reason to believe that a large number of Trump voters from 2024 are releasing their noses. In any other modern democracy, such developments would find their way into political changes. Given its exceptional institutions, that is not necessarily the case in the United States:

• Although the United States is politically divided almost evenly, Trump’s Republicans control both houses of Congress, and their appointees comprise a majority on the Supreme Court. In effect, at this moment, the United States is a one-party state.
• Trump, even if increasingly unpopular, can call on the MAGA network to threaten congressional Republicans with being “primaried” – denied renomination – and force them to mouth the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Apparently, the threats extend to being attacked physically,
• For his part, Trump is a lame duck, and so has no personal stake in GOP unpopularity.
• When it comes to domestic policy, in contrast to the Trump I administration, the Trump II cabinet and administration consists of yes men and women, almost all of whom are grossly unqualified for their jobs.
• Those working directly or indirectly for government are silenced by threats of withholding funds and fears of impending further layoffs.
• Trump brings nonstop media attention to his schemes, many of which are empty (e.g. annexing Canada), while the real threats in what he is planning get too little attention.

A reverse social model

Were I ten years younger, I would update my comparative research linking civic literacy and democratic political participation and apply it to what has been happening in U.S. politics and society in the era of Trump.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a close observer of what was happening in our neighbour to the south, especially in 1968–69, when I lived in a highly political commune, “in the belly of the beast” – Washington, DC. My intense immersion there in the American antiwar and civil rights movements left me with a profound ambivalence toward our neighbour.

In the ensuing decades, my focus shifted, but recently, with the emergence of the New Right and then Trumpism, I have come to renew my relationship (obsession?) with the United States. Only this time, ambivalence has given way to a perception of the United States as, in effect, a reverse social model, providing a lesson in what modern democratic countries, starting with Canada, need to be wary of.

Trumpites imagine that people elsewhere all want to be Americans. In fact, the high American GDP belies a relatively poor quality of life, according to a committee of 13 experts who advised the past five presidents. assembled by Tulane University economist Douglas Harris. The committee used 37 measures of success grouped into 15 topics: education, mental health, social capital, environment and others, as well as economy. And there is widespread awareness in comparable countries that U.S. economic success is only part of the story.

In the 2024 campaign, the GOP took advantage of the unique American political institutional structure – only two parties, with small rural states overrepresented – and repeatedly drew attention to various expressions of discontent, notably via Elon Musk’s X and Fox News. The underlying message was that you may not like Trump, but the only way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo is to vote for him and his party, a message meant to appeal to a particular type of voter. And it did.

Many qualities distinguish Trump voters: gender, region, generation, income, race, education, class, and urban/rural. Cross-cutting all of them is civic illiteracy: the absence of social- and physical-science-based understanding of how the world works. The data as to who elected Trump are unambiguous. More than 70 percent of “low information” Caucasian males without a college degree voted for him and his candidates, a sufficient number of them residing in the key “purple” states to secure a majority of electoral college votes.

Trump unbound

The constraints Trump faced when taking office early this year are much reduced from when he took over as President in 2017. External constraints matter because Trump has no internal ones. Those in positions of power in democracies take into consideration institutional and legal, not to mention principled, constraints in making policy choices. None of this applies to Trump. It is only when encountering insurmountable external constraints after the fact that he changes his policies. And then he rewrites the facts.

So, without even elementary planning, he talks of taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Canada. He makes the announcements on Fox News, assured that no one will raise any questions. The serious media, national and international, have no choice but to report on Trump as if he is a serious person.

But he is ultimately no different as President than he was as a media personality. Then, his power was limited to “you’re fired.” Now, he can attack the message and the messenger of any and every version of events that makes him look bad, making the cost of unflattering coverage so steep that journalists do not risk his displeasure. That is the point of his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over a segment of 60 Minutes, which he claims “put a halo” on Kamala Harris.

There is thus no constraint on what he will say and threaten to do, including what he said yesterday, or whether there is any chance of what he says coming to pass. The media covering the presidency are at a loss for how seriously to take his exaggerations, distortions and threats. They can get little of value from his cabinet secretaries, selected on the sole criterion of loyalty.

How to report on a personal dinner with foreigners who poured large amounts of money into his crypto business, or his accepting Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace”? Or the fact that, according to Robert Reich, Trump or his team have charged, investigated or threatened with investigation New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago and the Kennedy Center? As Reich puts it, “Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.”

And there is Harvard.

When it comes to international relations, European leaders, like Canadian and Mexican ones, have learned to play the game with Trump and avoid direct criticism while building popular support for standing up to his bullying. As I write, Prime Minister Mark Carney is publicly calling for Canada to join the European Union’s major rearmament plan by July 1, aiming to rely less on U.S. weapons and defence supplies.

Will Republicans in Congress continue to keep silent as the real costs of Trump’s economic threats to their allies and the uncertainty surrounding them emerge, costs that they will pay in votes lost in purple regions?

Andrew Coyne may be right: despite all this, “we should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses.” But perhaps we need to worry about what Trump will do if they do come to their senses. As this excerpt from radio commentator Thom Hartmann puts it:

The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that “there must be an enemy within.” Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked “Mexican rapists and murderers” he said were “invading” America. In the years since, his enemies’ list has grown…

 Trump appears to be preparing for the type of authoritarian crackdown Germany saw after the Reichstag fire that propelled Hitler to power in 1933. Strongmen leaders are generally dangerous, but they’re particularly perilous when their grip on popularity and thus power begins to slip. Trump’s there now, which should put us all on high alert. And, to compound the alarm, he’s firing the people responsible for early warnings and investigations. History has shown us that when autocratic leaders are cornered, they often resort to drastic measures to retain control.

My own view is that Trump is too much of a coward to be compared to strongmen leaders, but I have been wrong before.