Henry Milner: A long, cold, hard winter
Henry Milner is co-publisher of Inroads.
The focus of this editorial has evolved over several drafts. It began before the election with trying to explain why half of American voters were ready to vote for Donald Trump, shifted immediately afterward to analyzing the consequences of the voters’ mandate, and then to analyzing his appointments once his cabinet nominations were made public. I begin with a brief portrait of the man.
Trump is not a fascist as he has been called: that requires an ideology. Trump’s only ideology is to serve the interests and indulge the passions of Donald Trump. Among those interests and passions, one priority is getting even with his “enemies”; a second is rewarding his sycophants. Fortunately (sic), unlike other psychopaths who have achieved and maintained power through force, and for whom he has great respect, he is ruthless but not fearless: indeed, he is more of a coward. What he says can and will differ from what he does. But the greater difference is between what he says and what is true. He simply has no concept of objective truth. His thousands of false claims as President began the day of his inauguration, when he insisted in January 2017 on there being three times as many spectators as there actually were.
Human beings are not perfect; that’s why we have laws and courts and jails. But beyond this, for democracy to survive, those we put in power need to be not so different from the rest of us; they need to have an ethical line that they will not cross, even if they can get away with it. There is no such line with psychopaths like Trump: no conscience, only external constraints. Only now these constraints are about to be severely tested.
It is not as if Americans, including some of his supporters, are unaware of this. As Larry Diamond pointed out in Foreign Affairs on November 8, “Among the majority of all voters who said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, one in ten voted for him anyway. And of the near majority of voters who said they were ‘very concerned’ that a Trump presidency would ‘bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism,’ a tenth of them also voted for him anyway.”
Many knew the book written by his niece, Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. They may have heard that in 2019 Mary Trump secretly recorded federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry – her aunt, Donald Trump’s sister – saying, “All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles – none.” Some would have heard about the recent film The Apprentice, which depicts his deeply troubled older brother coming to him just to be sent away, and how Trump was just too busy to visit his mentor, Roy Cohn, as Cohn lay dying.
As portrayed at the end of the film, Trump contemplates entering politics. The motivation is less an interest in public policy or public service than a way to regain public attention after having been a media celebrity with his reality TV show. So he starts at the highly visible pinnacle, entering primaries for the Republican nomination for president, without any apparent prospect, or indeed expectation, of actually being nominated or – even less likely – defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election.
Trump’s unexpected and undeserved victory in 2016 was due basically to his being the opposition candidate in a two-party system at a time when a sufficient number of voters were ready for change, with a bit of sexism thrown in. Because he was so new on the political scene, it was reasonable for traditional Republican voters to assume that he cared about the trappings of office and would leave the legislative decisions to experienced congressional Republicans.
Indeed, when he found himself in office in 2016 having few personal backers with real political experience, he appointed some competent people in certain policy areas, mainly areas he cared little about. Incapable of playing the sycophantic role expected of them, most were gone by the time of the midterm elections. By then, fortunately, Trump was soon to be restrained by a Democratic Congress.
After he lost the 2020 election, the gloves came off. He refused to accept the decision and summoned a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a set of events investigated publicly by a House committee. Leading Republican legislators kept their distance. It seemed, as it had with the revelations of his treatment of women, that there was no way Trump could reemerge triumphantly from disgrace.
It took four years, but on November 5 he did. And he hasn’t forgotten for a moment those who contributed to his humiliation.
The information gap
This time there will be no silver lining to Trump’s taking office. He and his collaborators had four years to get ready and they have majorities in both houses of Congress, along with a sympathetic Supreme Court majority.
Useful insight into how he will govern is provided by Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter at the New York Times and author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. As she noted in an October 25 interview in the Times,
Trump doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things. He really wants to, in his mind, avenge the loss in 2020, which he still won’t admit was a loss, that would be proof that he didn’t really lose … He wants to exact payback on people who he thinks deserve it. He’s been quite clear about that … He just wants certain things done, and whatever it looks like to get that done is how he does it. He has no use for democratic norms. He has no use for Washington process. He has no use for the way good governance works or the way the transparency rules are supposed to work.
In November, half of Americans gave this psychopath something as close to absolute power as you can have in a democratic country. This time the institutional checks and balances that James Madison had enshrined in the U.S. Constitution effectively failed. Trump’s party controls all political institutions, with the exception of some state governments.
Much ink has been spilled trying to understand how this could happen. The standard explanation, based on the polls, is “the economy.” Typical was a Washington Post poll taken a few weeks before the election: in the swing states, 86 per cent of definite Trump voters and 74 per cent of probable Trump voters told pollsters that the American economy was getting worse. In fact, there is more to it. Writing in October in Fortune magazine, economists Kaushik Basu and Robert Lynch elaborated on the contrast between macroeconomic realities and polls:
By most objective measures, U.S. economic performance under the Biden-Harris administration has been superior to that under the Trump administration, and a vast majority of Americans report satisfaction with their own economic situation. And yet, most Americans believe the economy is faring poorly … Consistent with these economic facts, the Federal Reserve’s 2023 annual survey found that 72% of Americans said they were doing fine financially. However, in a striking inconsistency, only 22% thought the national economy was doing well.
Poll results – surprise, surprise – suddenly changed after the election. Philip Bump noted in the Washington Post on November 21, “Since 2022, more than half of Republicans have said their economic situations have declined over the past year. But suddenly, over the last month, that’s shifted. Among Democrats, views of how they fare now relative to a year ago haven’t changed much in the past month. Among Republicans, though, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage saying that they were doing worse than a year ago.”
The low level of knowledge in the United States about economic and political reality – something I have explored in my earlier research – played a part. According to a poll from the group Data for Progress, Harris won among voters who said they paid attention to the news “a great deal” or “a lot,” while Trump won by decisive margins among those who paid attention “a moderate amount”, “a little” or “not at all.”
As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted, Trump’s margin of victory was greatest among those who “know shockingly little about government, policy and their fellow Americans … Moreover, political reporters and pundits … consistently overestimate voters’ knowledge. They nag politicians (as they did with Vice President Kamala Harris) to provide reams of policy detail that these voters never hear – or care to learn about.” She cited an article by Matt Robison in the Washington Monthly: “The share of Americans who say they are following any kind of news closely dropped 13 points in the past eight years to just over one-third … According to studies conducted by pollster Ian Smith, up until a couple of months before an election, ‘people spend as little as ten minutes a week absorbing political news.’”
With Trump I’m a somebody
Still, given the amount of effort by the Democrats to inform voters in the seven swing states, the fact that Trump still was able to win all seven tells us that, unlike in 2016, there is more to it this time than political ignorance. When Trump voters told pollsters that things were better under him, it reflected something beyond their own economic circumstances. It reflected their perceived place in society as interpreted for them by right-wing media1: “With Trump I feel like I’m a somebody.” In their rhetoric – though not in their policies in office – the Trumpites’ message has been clear: Trump is there for me, while the Democrats are there for those who don’t look like me and look down on people like me.
Other cultural factors that used to count don’t any more, making it easier to turn the feeling of being treated like a nobody into supporting Trump. In 2011, 70 per cent of Americans polled by the Brookings Institute said that a candidate’s immorality in their private life should matter in voting. After Trump was nominated, only 30 per cent agreed. Before 2016, half of Republicans favoured welcoming immigrants; by 2020 favourable attitudes were down to a third. So it becomes easier to cast a vote for Trump as a protest against a system he tells them is rigged against them, and to ignore how much he lies or what corrupt things he has done, let alone what the Democrats actually accomplished in office or what Harris was promising.
The Republicans implicitly charged that the Democrats, in choosing a non-White woman as their candidate, are not there for White working-class people who “look like me.” The charge was largely left unsaid in public: it is much more socially acceptable to cite inflation. Working-class males – including Latino working-class males, some of whom had voted for Biden in 2020 – had difficulty voting for a woman, let alone a non-White one. This factor may help explain why polls underestimated Trump’s vote: knowing who he was, some of those polled identified themselves as undecided rather than telling a pollster that they were ready to vote for such a man.
But this is hindsight, which is always 20/20. If this is the crucial factor, it means that to defeat Trump the Democratic Party would have had to consider excluding non-White and/or women candidates – something it could not even suggest. Rather than accept this self-evident reality, some Democratic insiders find it easier to blame the campaign strategy, on what Harris did and did not do or say rather than on who she is. We need to remember that voters’ lack of exposure to actual news, as noted by Jennifer Rubin above, would limit the impact of what Harris did and said. We also need to remember that Trump only won the popular vote by 1.5 per cent, the smallest margin since the Bush-Gore nailbiter in 2000.
Ultimately, though, the fact that it was Trump rather than some other conservative Republican male on the ballot means that limited political knowledge is an insufficient explanation. Unlike in 2016, this time voters knew enough about Trump – especially in the swing states where they were reminded constantly. Nevertheless, half of American voters, overlooking his obvious flaws and potential threat, were ready if not eager to hand him the levers of power that go with being the most salient actor on the world stage.
All of this must be placed in the context of America’s unique political institutions. Other democratic countries have extremist parties like Trump’s GOP, but nowhere do they exercise power, let alone exercise it on their own. Only in America do voters have only one alternative if they do not want to support the party in power or throw away their vote. Taking on Trump in the years ahead must take place within these institutions,2 assuming Trump leaves them in place. From what we see taking place in the transition up to this point, it seems that Trump’s people are not (yet?) violating the letter of the legal and constitutional safeguards, but certainly they are discussing whether it is a good idea to violate constitutional conventions.
What now?
We should not attempt to sugarcoat the implications of the decision the people of the United States made. As David Remnick concluded,
There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.
While someone else in Trump’s position might seek some middle ground on which to approach the 50 per cent who did not vote for him, as well as to the many democratic leaders in other countries whose preference for Biden was unmistakable, there is no reason whatsoever to expect this from Trump.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has reminded us, “Trump has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities … He has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as ‘vermin.’” And as Larry Diamond notes,
When voters elect authoritarian-minded leaders for instrumental reasons, they typically get the baggage of revenge, intimidation, and lust for power that accompanies their candidates’ policy promises. Over the course of an increasingly dark 2024 campaign, Trump promised to unleash presidential power on the Justice Department, other federal agencies, and even the military, to persecute his critics, punish unfriendly media, purge and politicize the civil service … Candidates who borrow the language of fascists and strongmen to denounce their opponents as “vermin” and “the enemy within” do not suddenly evince the democratic virtues of compromise and moderation when they take office.
During the campaign, Stephen Miller, whom Trump has appointed deputy chief of staff, said that the military would be used to build “vast holding facilities” for migrants as their cases progressed. In mid-November Trump confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to assist in his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without new legislation from Congress. And spokespersons have revealed plans to reclassify more than 50,000 civil servants as political appointees, so that they can be replaced by loyal Trumpites.
In the words of Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman,
The American military, the country’s leading universities, the Federal Reserve, the justice system, the free press, the scientific establishment, even the health of American citizens are all at risk. The president-elect has nominated vengeful crackpots to key positions and promised to let ideologues like Robert F Kennedy Jr (Trump’s choice for health and human services secretary)“go wild”. The damage that Trump’s policies could inflict on America will delight the country’s real enemies in Moscow and Beijing.
In the foreign policy sphere, the damage Trump will inflict on democracy will be less via action than by moving out of the way of bad actors doing bad things. In his first term, he sought to weaken multilateral cooperation and the rules-based international order and undermine international organizations such as the World Health Organization and UNESCO, as well as the UN’s attempts to reach an agreement on handling migration and refugees.
Other Western democracies will have to step in. Ukraine will be a test case. Western democracies have achieved a remarkable level of solidarity in defending Ukraine: Europe’s combined military and financial aid to Ukraine now exceeds that of the United States. The Europeans will need to maintain and even step up their efforts.
There is little improvement to expect in prospects for any sort of just peace in the Middle East. Biden may try desperately to get a Gaza deal during his last months in office. But Netanyahu has every interest in continuing to stall, awaiting Trump’s inauguration.
Most worrisome in the long term is Trump’s probable second withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, which he calls “a hoax.” Over the past four years, the Biden administration reversed course, invested heavily in renewable energy and sought to limit oil and gas production. At the end of the hottest year in recorded history, Trump in office again will expand oil and gas production, roll back pollution controls and eliminate federal incentives that promote renewable energy and electric vehicles – though an exception may be made for Elon Musk, who will end up even richer with the blocking of competition from China.
Turning to domestic policy, the states run by Democrats will have to use their limited powers to play a role similar to that of Western democracies; so will the courts. A legal test will come when Trump attempts to carry out his promise to expel millions of illegal immigrants. Apart from the human cost, this very costly action, combined with high tariffs, will likely hurt the economy.
So will the effect of his appointing to the cabinet, with few exceptions, inexperienced and ideology-driven sycophants. Jim McGovern (D – Massachusetts), Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, described some of these appointments as “beyond insane (including) someone who sucks up to foreign dictators and has attracted major concern that they can’t be trusted to protect America’s secrets from our adversaries … Someone who says that tap water turns kids gay?”
Then there are the really dangerous appointments. The worst was Matt Gaetz as chief law enforcer, a man despised by his congressional colleagues on both sides of the aisle and accused of multiple acts of immorality. The withdrawal of his nomination showed that there may remain some limit to what the Senate will swallow. We will see. The nomination of Kash Patel, a “firebrand loyalist,” to head the FBI is only a marginal improvement. And Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for defense secretary, has run into numerous allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.
But as Susan Glasser has written in the New Yorker, personal misconduct is only part of the story. The appointment of Hegseth and Patel reflect Trump’s plan for “a radical reimagining of our national-security institutions”:
This is why Hegseth’s recent book, “The War on Warriors,” published in June, focusses so much on an array of “woke” generals and other “domestic enemies” seeking to undermine the Pentagon from within in their ongoing “cultural Marxist revolution.” It’s why Patel’s 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: the Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” has an appendix that names no fewer than sixty “deep state” enemies from the executive branch to be targeted, including many Republican appointees of Trump’s first term, such as his Attorney General, Bill Barr, and his White House counsel, Pat Cipollone … They are reflecting the boss’s own radicalization over these past few years … The single most worrisome – and revealing – Trump statement of the entire 2024 campaign … came in a mid-October interview on Fox News, when Trump said, “We have two enemies – we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”
Surviving the bad times
In and beyond the United States, the defenders of liberal democracy will have to come together and develop a common defensive strategy. The House Republicans, with a tiny majority and a weak leader, will ensure that Congress will have little influence over decisions taken over the next two years. Its primary role will be as a public forum: right-wing Republicans will push using House committees to attack and even punish their “enemies.” The Senate minority will try to draw attention to what the administration is doing and threaten to invoke the filibuster. But this will be a sideshow. The Supreme Court majority, out of either ideology or expediency, will likely get out of Trump’s way – and he will appoint two even more conservative judges to replace the two expected to retire. The serious mass media will pull their punches. They will be financially squeezed and likely threatened with investigation, denounced by the Trumpites as the enemy.
Federalism will provide some protection from Trump’s revenge against his Democratic opponents, at least in the near half of states – including such large states as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois – led by Democrats, and perhaps a few led by non-Trumpite Republicans. Moreover, state courts will be a factor: liberal judges did well in elections for positions in state supreme courts even in a few red states.
The final source of hope is Trump himself: that he will so screw up that the Democrats take over Congress in two years. Like most of his appointees, he is not especially competent and can’t be bothered with the details of complex decisions. His first priority will be to implement his extremely costly and ultimately impossible plan to deport millions of illegals. Beyond that, he will concentrate on using his power to punish his enemies and reward his friends. Less than competent people will be running the country. Few of his appointees have anything close to the necessary experience for the jobs he has given them; none will in any way inhibit his whims.
This leaves Musk, the only appointee with some leeway. Whether he likes it or not, Musk has become a politician and will run up against real internal opposition with his layoffs and other cost-cutting initiatives. To get anything meaningful done, he will have to make politically motivated concessions to others in Trump’s orbit – something, to say the least, that doesn’t come naturally to him. He probably won’t stay all that long.
Beyond the institutions of government, informal networks will arise to keep channels of communication open and the spirit of resistance alive. The Democrats in Congress need to set up a structure modelled on opposition parties in parliamentary systems, for example designating a senator or member of Congress as spokesperson/critic on a particular area. This would allow the party to speak coherently with one voice, concentrating scarce resources and media attention. As the awfulness of Trump’s awful appointees emerges, his opponents should engage some of his less-than-wholehearted supporters in an “I didn’t vote for this” campaign.
All of this presumes that Democrats, from moderates to Bernie’s buddies, will prove able to end recriminations and put factionalism aside. And let us be clear. Even with the above, these next two years will be among the worst in the lifetimes of Americans, worse probably than the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. January 20, 2025, will mark the onset of a long, cold, hard winter in America, with much of the world not far behind.
Notes
¹Michael Tomasky in the New Republic sets out the media environment in which this transformation has been taking place: “The right-wing media – Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more – sets the news agenda in this country.”
²To change the institutions underlying this dilemma would require a constitutional amendment, something extremely difficult to do. Congress must pass an amendment by a two-thirds vote and three quarters of the states must ratify it. Alternatively, two thirds of the states must call a constitutional convention where three quarters of the states must approve any amendments – which has never happened and is unlikely in any foreseeable time.
Anne Michèle Meggs: Survival values
Anne Michèle Meggs is a former Quebec senior civil servant and a member of the Inroads editorial board.
Much of the analysis of the American election results has centred on the Democrats’ failure to relate well to the “working class” or the “non college-educated.” What we’re really talking about here are the poor – about people who are literally having trouble surviving on low-paying jobs, and the socioeconomic inequalities that Bernie Sanders has been rightly ranting about for years. The famous 99 per cent is real and consequential.
What we haven’t looked at closely is the impact of these inequalities on values. The World Values Survey (WVS) has been analyzing values in different countries for decades with a common questionnaire. This extensive international research project has offered up important observations in shifts in values over time and their causes. In particular, it provides important insight into the types of values associated with survival mode.
The project has established a “cultural map” that groups certain sets of values along two axes: an axis of traditional versus secular-rational values and one of survival versus self-expression values. These groupings are roughly defined on the WVS site as follows:
- Traditional valuesemphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family. People who embrace these values reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
- Secular-rational values indicate the opposite preferences. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)
- Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. They are linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
- Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, gender equality, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.
It is not difficult to see that traditional/survival values resemble much of what we hear about Trump voters and secular-rational/self-expression values line up with much of the Democrats’ electorate. Research shows essentially that as a country moves through industrialization to become a postindustrial knowledge society, the increase in its standard of living leads to a shift in values along both axes. Its place on the cultural map moves diagonally from the lower left corner (poor) to the upper right corner (rich), indicating a transit from traditional to secular-rational values and from survival to self-expression values. There are also clearly other factors that influence a country’s position on the map, notably religion and colonial histories.
We seem to be seeing that economic policies which consistently serve the one per cent are leading to half of American society exhibiting the same kind of values as those manifested in some of the poorest countries in the world. Democracy is less of a priority when survival is uncertain.
Donald Trump instinctively gets this message. In his first campaign he boasted about how he “loves the poorly educated”; he plays on the distrust of government (“deep state”) and the mainstream news media; he emboldens intolerance. Project 2025, a clue to Trump’s intentions, proposes to eliminate the Education Department. His gut tells him that it is clearly in his interest to keep as many people as possible in a state of poverty.
Democrats will have to grasp exactly how seriously economic inequalities may be changing “what it means to be an American.” Trump voters are not “deplorables”; they are in survival mode and exhibiting survival values.
There are surely lessons here for Canada as well. Leaders should be encouraging trust in government and reliable news sources, furthering tolerance of immigrants and trans people and, once in power, putting in place policies that reduce economic inequalities. If we allow people to fall into survival mode, we will soon no longer recognize “what it means to be a Canadian” either.
Reg Whitaker: 2024 or 1933?
Reg Whitaker is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University and an Inroads political columnist and editorial board member.
On November 5, 2024, Americans voted. The next morning many might have wondered if they had not got that date wrong. It seemed more like it was January 30, 1933, the day that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The day democracy died in Weimar Germany. The day fascism triumphed.
No, what follows Donald Trump’s return to the White House will not be a repeat of Nazi Germany, swastikas waving, straight-arm salutes, stormtroopers marching in jackboots, gas chambers fired up for industrial-scale genocide. Not exactly.
Trump is a generic Hitler, his personality protofascist, if we see fascism not as a specific historically rooted ideology (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain), but as a state of mind, a way of imposing the personal will of the Leader on the country and the world. The fascist state of mind celebrates the hegemony of the strong over the weak; the monolithic will of the majority (the “People”) embodied, encoded, in the will of the Leader; the exclusion, even the elimination, of minorities; demand for the submission of all to the Leader, without qualification; celebration of the self-serving lie over facts, along with the assertion that “truth” is what serves the Leader, no more, no less.
All these are present in Trump – in his successful campaign and in what will follow once he resumes office. He is much else, of course: a monstrous egomaniac utterly lacking in empathy for others (a trait shared by the worst dictators of the 20th century); a greedy, corrupt con man and tax evader; a sexual harasser and rapist; a convicted felon; a man manifestly unfit, in terms of character and personal morals, for the highest office in the land, indeed for any office at any level. But let’s focus on those elements of his personality that impact most on how he will govern over the next four years – and how he may change a democratic country into a self-perpetuating autocracy.
American government was designed, at least in part, to insulate the political sphere from being captured by a single-minded faction or by a demagogue or scoundrel intent on seizing power. Federalism divides powers and responsibilities between national and state jurisdictions. Government is divided between the legislative arm in Congress and the executive arm in the president (mirrored at the state level with the separation of power between the state legislature and the governor). The judicial branch is supposed to be independent of both Congress and president. There are vetoes and overrides between president and Congress. All this brings an elaborate institutionalized set of checks and balances to ensure that no one part of government can dominate the other parts, permanently at least.
This might seem an impressive barricade against the assumption of one-person rule. The reality of the Trump victory casts a harsh light on this assurance. As I have argued before, the American Constitution has a serious flaw in its design of the office of the president, who is both head of state and head of government, combining in one office what the parliamentary system and most republics carefully divide into two separate functions fulfilled by separate individuals, elected or appointed separately. The president’s direct democratic mandate stems from all of the voters, as opposed to the geographically partial mandates bestowed on individual members of Congress and senators. The inflated “imperial presidency” arising out of world wars, cold wars and the finger on the nuclear trigger is further boosted by the president’s role as commander in chief of the armed services.
Republicans – a party that under Trump has become an abject invertebrate tool of its boss (bye bye Dick and Liz Cheney) – now control both houses of Congress. Having packed the Supreme Court and other key courts around the country with partisans and ideologues posing as jurists, Trump can now safely ignore the threat of judicial review interfering with his agenda. The Supreme Court has become another conservative Republican partisan tool, one that has already granted him preemptive immunity from legal accountability for anything he does as president. Blue states like California will try to limit the Trump autocracy, but they are few and relatively weak in legal and political resources for a fight like this.
Forget checks and balances and constitutional guardrails. Upon inauguration in January 2025 Trump will step into an office that rivals the office given Hitler in 1933 for unlimited autocratic power. He has already promised his first day back in power will be a day of “dictatorship.” Believe him.
It may begin with revenge charges and legal harassment against anyone who challenged Trump in his many court cases, with threats and intimidation of journalists and federal fiscal punishment of resistant blue states. With each successful act of intimidation, as the Jeff Bezoses of the media world continue to slink away from criticism into sycophancy, Trump’s authoritarian appetite and reckless pursuit of unchecked power will grow. And if any guardrails of the old constitutional order manage to retain some restraining force, Trump will always have the sinister, looming threat of unleashing against his enemies his equivalent of the Nazi SA and SS: the rabid mobs inflamed by Fox News and Elon Musk’s antisocial media, like those that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but this time with full official blessing.
The radicalization of mainstream conservatism that Trump has both accelerated and promoted since he first ran for the Republican presidential nomination has two faces: policy but also process.
What policies Trump will follow is uncertain. Rhetorically he has called for drastic, unprecedented moves such as the mass deportation of more than 11 million undocumented aliens. Fear about illegal immigration was one of the two leading issues driving the Trump vote, the other being inflation. If he really follows through on mass deportation, it will require very large investment in the necessary administrative infrastructure, including the construction of holding or concentration camps on a large scale. This will look much like the path Nazi Germany followed from ad hoc camps to house Communists and Social Democrats rounded up in the Nazi regime’s early days to the extermination camps like Auschwitz. But mass deportation can only be carried out at huge cost to American capitalism, dependent on undocumented labour that can now be paid less, without benefits, than American workers. It will penalize the same business owners who backed Trump’s campaign financially.
In 2016, Trump had promised a Wall along the entire Mexican border that he would make the Mexicans pay for. After four years in office, little more than 130 kilometres of new fencing had actually been constructed. Yet who talks any more about the Mexican Wall? Mass deportation got Trump reelected: that may well prove to be its definitive contribution. The hard and expensive and economically dangerous task of actually bringing about mass deportation may well mean that the realization of that promise will go the way of the promised Wall.
The same fate may well await Trump’s promise of tariffs on everything entering the United States. It’s a great electoral sound bite, but putting it into practice may exceed Trump’s capacity to overcome business opposition and hard economic realities, not to say his own brutally short attention span. Trump’s radical conservatism lives mostly in the realm of rhetoric and marketing, sound bites and photo ops.
The great dictators of the 20th century, Hitler but also Stalin and Mao, were each in their own ways prisoners of their ideologies. Faith in Aryan racial supremacy led Hitler into the abyss of war with both the West and the Soviet Union, and into Nazism’s self-destruction. Ideological zealotry drove Stalin and Mao into forced collectivization of agricultural production and mass famines that killed tens of millions. Trump’s only zealous faith is in himself, his sole reference point for humanity and the world. Just as he can throw followers and flunkies under the bus for the slightest offence to his narcissism (and has done so repeatedly), so too he can pick up and drop policy promises remorselessly. Since he cares about them as ideas not a whit, why stick with them if they’re hard to implement?
Process is a different matter. Trump’s radicalized conservatives want to run roughshod over institutions, checks and balances and the rule of law. All of these are seen as impediments to the will of the people, which boils down in practice to the will of the Leader, as authoritarian populism blurs into fascism. Trump inciting the insurrectionary mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to overturn a democratic election he had just lost embodies perfectly his contempt for the Constitution, due process, the rule of law and democracy whenever he finds himself in the minority. One of his first acts as president will be to pardon all these insurrectionists convicted by the courts.
Hitler used the power of his streetfighters to leverage access to office, and then to consolidate his totalitarian rule. Here Trump is at one with his predecessor. When it comes to the process of government, there is a nihilism in Trump’s dark vision, a nihilism alarmingly prevalent among the Trump faithful. No wonder the tech bros like Elon Musk staked their fortunes on Trump’s election: the watchword of the tech bros has always been the sinister slogan “Move fast and break things.” Amid the wreckage of liberal democratic governance there will be profits to scavenge and power to grasp.
If Trump is indeed an autocrat in waiting, one might legitimately ask why he failed so badly to set that course in his first term. One response is that a characteristic feature of Trump’s presidential style is sheer incompetence. Everything else aside, Trump was simply a lazy, incompetent chief executive who made a mess of everything to which he turned his erratic attention.
Take the COVID pandemic. Trump stumbled and bumbled his way through, regularly denouncing the chief health officer Dr. Fauci but not replacing him, casting aspersions on the vaccine program, advising people to drink bleach and take horse medicine instead, but letting the vaccine program go ahead at less than full steam. The result was disastrous: Americans died from COVID at two and a half times the per capita rate at which Canadians died.
If an aspiring autocrat with a brain had landed in the White House and begun planning a coup against the Constitution, would he not have assiduously cultivated the heads of the military and the security and intelligence and policing agencies, whose support for a takeover would be essential? You would think so. But instead Trump set about systematically alienating and insulting these very people, with the result that executives of the CIA, FBI and NSA and the top generals came to loathe and detest him. His former chief of the general staff has publicly described him as a fascist and Nazi. His acolytes spoke darkly about a “deep state” that was determined to thwart the will of the people.
The second coming may be different. He now has the deep state alarmists surrounding him as strategists, and appears to have plans to take more effective control. There may be purges at the top of the military and intelligence agencies, with professionals replaced by Trump loyalists and flacks. Already he has named:
- a Fox News host as his Secretary of Defense;
- a former far-right Texas congressman as Director of the CIA;
- the preposterous Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (with not one minute of experience in the intelligence world, but described by intelligence professionals as one of Putin’s “Russian assets”); and
- a rabid deep state alarmist as Director of the FBI (who has previously called for a cleaning out of the entire top management of the FBI and setting it to investigate and prosecute liberal and leftist enemies of Trump).
That may just ignite guerrilla warfare and sabotage from within, as the agencies strive to maintain their identity and integrity. After all, the deep state goes deep. The result will likely be a further weakening of American capacities and effectiveness on the world stage. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the lower ranks of the military and the rank and file of police across the United States contain many Trump loyalists and MAGA sympathizers, ready to spring into action on behalf of their hero and against the Constitution.
Yet even if the deep state manages in the end to maintain its grip, more or less, there is serious turbulence ahead. Apocalyptic visions of civil war would have been more likely realized had Harris won the election, with mini–January 6’s reproduced all across the country. But the relative calm that descended after Trump won a majority both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote is a misleading guide to the future.
Trump may not quite be another Hitler, however much he tries to be. But one deeply troubling aspect of 2024 is more worrying than 1933. There is a persistent myth that the German people voted Hitler into office, thus voting out their own 14-year-old democracy. Untrue. The Nazis never achieved a majority in a free election, and indeed they failed to do so in the election after they had taken power and were waging open war on the opposition. In the last free election to the Reichstag in 1932, the Nazis actually lost more than two million votes and began suffering internal splits. Hitler was called to the Chancellery not by the voters but by scheming right-wing politicians who managed to manipulate an aged and senescent President into compliance.
On November 5, 2024, the American people did the German people of 1933 one worse. They voted in their near-majority (just a shade under 50%, but a clear plurality) for a man who would, if he could, end their two-and-a-half-century-old democracy.
To their eternal shame.
