The point of no return: Only days left to stop a totalitarian state in the US

Same here. I do not think that my overall prediction – USA will still have elections, only it will become nearly impossible for Democrats to win at the federal level – will hold up. But I vastly underestimated how brazenly the new government can get away with dismantling the rule of law, how radically they destroy government services and the USA’s foundations of soft power in diplomacy and science, how nakedly self-enriching they can be without Republican politicians putting even the slightest constraints on them, and how much they can harm the lives and material interests of their own supporters and voters without facing meaningful backlash. I underestimated the strength and the spread of the cultishness that has taken over the Republican party.

Unfortunately, I am now not optimistic. Even if millions of Republican voters lose their jobs or businesses or see social security payments cancelled, they will blame the deep state or Democrats before they ever consider that they are the victims of a confidence fraud. Even if Trump has a stroke next year, the cult will go on without him and coalesce around a new leader. Even if the Democrats should somehow be able to retake the presidency in 2028 (assuming their candidate doesn’t get conveniently arrested during the campaign), the MAGA cult will remain, and the Democrats being the Democrats, the cult will then be back in power from 2032.

That doesn’t mean there is no hope at all. But one has to be realistic. Unless the Republican party is liberated from the cult, there is no hope for democracy and rule of law in the USA.

“he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised”

Now be fair, he’s not exactly been in power long. Three months? UK Labour have been in power for nine and we’re getting poorer.

I know “everyone I don’t like is Hitler”, but I can’t see The Donald as Il Duce. I’m more concerned that

a) he doesn’t seem to have a thought out strategy for re-industrialising America, whereas the Far Eastern nations built their undoubted industrial might over decades, no matter who occupied political power.

b) he’ll be gone in 4 years whereas reindustrialising the US is a 20-30 year project

But.. the story of the last 40 years is one of ever-diminishing Western economic power. I remember seeing the derelict factories of Milwaukee in the 1980s and being reminded of the UK. Trump, for all his faults, sees that decline and is attempting to halt or reverse it. Whereas the default position of both parties, in the US and UK, has been to manage the decline.

Unless he faces massive political blowback in the next few days, he will doubtless order these flunkies to recommend invoking the Act, effectively the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act.

Would the Reichstag Fire Decree be a better analogy?

“…the [Insurrection] Act, effectively the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act.”
Not sure that this is correct enough. Trump has already tried to put troops into the cities back in his last term but was stymied behind the scenes. I think that’s why Trumpery trumpets that George Floyd/BLM was a much worse revolutionary threat than 1/6. And why DEI in the military is the Deep State conspiracy to enslave or even replace real Americans, therefore some conveniently undefined we need Hegseth to purge the officer corps.

Now it is true that the wonderful thing about armies is that you can more or less give them orders and it doesn’t matter in the normal course of events what the troops think. But when you turn the rungs of the career ladder into turnstiles? Even worse, what happens if your newly whitewashed officer corps starts looking rather different from substantial segments of the rank-and-file? Especially when these troops start confronting the real world citizens in hostile missions into what is allegedly their own country, even when they are loathsome dens of iniquity, aka cities? Would every Gary Gallegher be so admirably lethal not just in El Paso but Austin, not just in Harlem but Boulder? And if there were, are there enough Galleghers to patrol the streets?

There are hints of what might function more as an Enabling Act, the purge of the judiciary. https://apnews.com/article/gop-bill-district-court-injunction-trump-doge-764231e50ae5e7119a8bdc9c0d7daf89 Even if a purported compromise merely required such orders to be fast tracked to the Supreme Court, that would leave legal judgments to the mercies of the so-called shadow docket…while acceptable rulings would be finessed, as in the current example of the difference between “facilitate” and “effectuate.”

Political moves against the Federal Reserve, whether vilifying Jay Powell or good old fashioned jawboning by Trump, also would be highly significant, in my view.

In one sense this is quibbling over the difference between days (John Quiggins’ position) versus months. I will note that the speed of Hitler’s movement was partially determined by the necessity for elections for legal cover…but the 2026 midterms means the Hitler precedents are not directly relevant. By the way, the recent book Takeover by Timothy Ryback is I think grimly instructive reading. [The importance of the slump in the Nazi vote in the actual course of events is not particularly helpful to the Thaelmann thesis that it was always the Communists’ fault, I’m afraid.]

“The vast majority of Republican voters support everything Trump is doing, even though he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised.” Republican voters or Republican office holders? In my judgment, the real mass support for Trump lies in billionaires, decibillionaires and centibillionaires, particularly those who control their rural districts. It’s relatively easy for what you might call the gentry to dominate their rural districts. The power of the masses is felt most strongly where there are actual masses of people. They tend to be Blue. Every Blue state has its Red districts.

The problem of course is that the rather antiquated representative system in the US is designed to empower the minority. The principle of majority rule is not only not accepted as defining democracy, the system is pretty much based on the notion that only a system of minority rule is democratic. That minority is formally defined as citizens, but the practical definition has always been centered on property. The minority has always ruled on the key issue, what kind of property does the state defend? [Against the propertyless within the nation *and against other states, which may or may not impose the necessity of concessions to the lowers.]

My judgment is the turn of the truly rich to Trumpery (whether an Ackmanesque enthusiasm or a Dimon’s indifference) has to do with long-term relative decline of the US in world economy, hence the centrality of the struggle against the PRC and for the dollar’s role in the world economy. I certainly do not think this argues against John Quiggins’ pessimism. If anything it supports it. The democracy we had was never very democratic in the majority rule sense, but it was still a historic advance for US and in the long run for the world too. But even the longest runs end. I think the old democracy needs to be replaced by something better…which is not Trumpery.

One small clarification on Abrego Garcia (which doesn’t change the conclusion): The main reason his deportation to El Salvador and the prison there is plainly illegal is that in 2019 an immigration judge ruled that he could not be sent to El Salvador because he faced a danger of persecution/harm there. (He’s not technically a “legal migrant” because he entered the U.S. illegally, fleeing personal threats/violence in El Salvador, as I understand it. He’s lived in Maryland for roughly a decade without incidents/run-ins with the law, or so I gather.) Of course the Trump administration really doesn’t care about any of these legal distinctions, and it’s likely that federal district judges will soon start to hold Trump officials in contempt of court for failure to comply with their orders.

p.s. Ezra Klein on the Abrego Garcia case (link to transcript):
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-asha-rangappa.html

The whole discourse around whether Trump is like Hitler, and MAGA is like the Nazis, is really unproductive. I have even seen people argue that you cannot call the MAGA crowd fascists because their rise to power did not mirror that of the Nazis in every detail as it played out in the 1920s to 1930s. There is no reasoned argument to be had with somebody who claims that it devalues “like the Nazis” if that comparison is applied to any ethnic cleansing with fewer than at least six million victims.

However, Laban at 3 has inadvertently illustrated one way in which MAGA is, in fact, very much like the Nazis. The commonality is the nostalgia for a past economic system combined with a seemingly earnest ignorance of how the contemporary economy functions and what constitutes national strength in the contemporary economic system.

The Nazis believed that the German people were morally weakened by industrial modernity and constrained by the small area of the German state. What was needed was a return to an agrarian society: conquer Lebensraum in the east, get rid of the people living there, and fill it with low-density German farming settlements. They did not appreciate that with modern farming techniques, only a minuscule fraction of the population needed to be farmers. More importantly, they did not appreciate that Germany was and had been for decades one of the leading, most prosperous nations of the world on the basis of modern (e.g., chemical) industries and scientific excellence, and that all that was needed to guarantee and grow that leadership and prosperity was maintaining a steady flow of imports and exports from and to other nations and continued investment in research.

Which is what happened after WW2. After an entirely unnecessary orgy of self-harm and harm to others, the logical path of economic development resumed. Germany now has even less area, and it doesn’t matter, because being a low-density agrarian society was a stupid idea in the first place.

The MAGA movement believes that the American people are morally weakened by effeminate office and service jobs. What is needed is a return to manly factory jobs: enact massive tariffs, bully other countries around, destroy the environment, and halt the deployment of regenerative energy sources like wind power, and somehow (?) manly American men will once again work in mines, oil fields, and manufacturing plants. They do not appreciate that with modern manufacturing and mining techniques, only a minuscule fraction of the population needs to work in mining and manufacturing. More importantly, they do not appreciate that the USA is currently one of the leading, most prosperous nations of the world on the basis of information/computer technologies, life sciences, and scientific excellence, and that all all that is needed to guarantee and grow that leadership and prosperity is maintaining a steady flow of imports and exports from and to other nations and continued investment in research.

They are currently engaged in an entirely unnecessary orgy of self-harm and harm to others that will not bring millions of manufacturing jobs back. We will have to see over the next twenty years if the logical path of economic development can at some point be resumed, or if the damage being done to US research will permanently derail it.

What upsets me most are statements like “ever-diminishing Western economic power”. Outside of occasional blips caused by economic crises, Western nations have consistently grown their economies over the last few decades and are much richer now than they were twenty, forty, sixty years ago. Resource limits and global warming are looming ahead, but so far, the trend line has always been up. Life expectancy is up, and we have technologies that would have looked like magic when our grandparents were our age. If this looks like “diminishing economic power” to you, it can only mean in relative terms.

So, what is the demand here? That the people of China and India should have remained in abject poverty for the next few centuries? Is it a moral and strategic failure on the part of the West if we didn’t manage to beat them down, keep them in their place, keep them from industrialising like we did? What world view is that?

He’s [Abrego Garcia] not technically a “legal migrant” because he entered the U.S. illegally, fleeing personal threats/violence in El Salvador, as I understand it.

“legal migrant” isn’t a technical legal term, so to a degree there’s no point arguing about this. But, Garcia was granted “withholding of removal”, a legal status that allowed him to live and work in the US. It isn’t an “immigrant” status, in the technical sense of that term, in that it itself doesn’t allow for eventual access to citizenship, and doesn’t, itself, allow for adjustment of status to that of a lawful permanent resident (“LPR”). But his status in the US was not in any way unlawful or illegal at the time he was kidnapped and removed in violation of the law.

I do not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump administration is about. Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side. Some fans of Trump want to regard him as a herald of systemic change within the USA, comparable to Roosevelt (but undoing much of what Roosevelt did), but I don’t know if what he’s doing actually runs that deep.

Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.

There’s a fact of the matter here, of course. It seems like that’s relevant, even if some people wish it were not.

Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.

Sure they will, but those things they tell you will be lies! If you go back to the comments on the earlier post John Quiggin has linked, that’s exactly what you will find: responses from a conservative commenter full of stories which aren’t true.

It’s common enough to find two parties or two people or two whatever each saying bad things about the other, but that’s not a valid excuse for indulging in false equivalences. To quote Daria Morgendorffer, the truth and a lie are not ‘sort of the same thing’. Do you actually think there are actual examples of authoritarianism and lawlessness from the other side? If not, how is it relevant to mention that Republicans think there are?

“I do not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump administration is about.””

Okay then, what would be helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump regime administration is about? I’d really like to know.

“Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.”

Have Democrats ever done anything like this? Have the Democrats ever crashed the stock market within a few weeks? Have the Democrats ever made inroads toward crashing the bond market within the same few weeks? Have the Democrats threatened loyal allies with boots-on-the-ground war unless they cede their territories to us? Have the Democrats made a positive point of buddying up with oligarchs and dictators worldwide? Have the Democrats physically trashed the Capitol building? Have the Democrats invited allies over for talks and then gone out of their way to humiliate and diminish them on camera? Have the Democrats ever done this while verbally demanding gratitude? Have the Democrats ever snatched people off the streets in broad daylight, sometimes literally smashing car windows and dragging them out of their cars, then sent them to foreign prisons, dumped them off, shrugged, and left them there? Have the Democrats invited global jailers over for talks and then told them to build more prisons because they were about to be in receipt of more deliveries? Have the Democrats discussed the rendition of ‘home-growns’ (in other words, of citizens) with these same global jailers? Have the Democrats turned the cybernetic infrastructure of the United States over to persons with known fascist sympathies who were born and raised in countries which haven’t always been perfectly friendly to this one? Do Democrats, after having stolen sensitive American paperwork, store it for years in a powder room at a resort? This is only a partial list.

So yes, please tell me, what would aid me in my quest to grok the fullness of the Trump administration? What am I missing? I seem to be having a lot of trouble figuring it out on my own.

I am finding that far too much of what the top levels of the executive branch and the SCOTUS are doing makes sense if you assume the goal is the Empire of North America, under Donald the First.

@ Eric F

Confederates seceded from the Union and started a Civil War in 1861. Try again.

David Brooks, of all people, is calling for an uprising. Yet CT commenters are stroking their chins going “yes, well, Republicans think bad things about liberals so everything is even stevens”?

Thanks for trying JQ. I think the energy needs to go back to figuring out dispensation. 90 days can be used constructively.

What is known about how the US army would be likely to act in various scenarios? Trump is Commander in Chief but presumbly there is a deep-seated commitment to upholding the Constitution, no? I asked this of Adam Przeworski on Substack but he said he had no idea. If Trump simply refuses to accept the results of the mid-term elections, what happens then?

Regarding the questions of the midterms and whether Trump simply gets bored at some point, one problem is that once certain red lines have been crossed, an authoritarian has to cling to power out of fear that the other lot will prosecute them. Even if, on recent evidence, the Democrats would probably only conduct an investigation that drags on until Trump has died of old age, the paranoid authoritarian mind projects revenge-seeking onto their opponents. Part of Trump’s motivation to stand for 2024 was clearly to make legal troubles go away, and he succeeded. Anybody who isn’t effectively immune from consequence due to being a billionaire or an ICE officer could potentially face actual legal repercussions, like Paul Manafort or some of the January 6 rioters did before Trump pardoned them.

Given all of the blatantly illegal and corrupt actions taken by the current US government, everybody from Trump down to Musk’s least qualified DOGE intern can be assumed to be sweating at the idea of a Democrat being in charge of federal agencies and police. They will be extremely motivated to make it impossible for that to be the case ever again in their lifetimes. We will see how exactly they attempt to go about it, but unless they are even dimmer than I think, they will try to not let it get to the point where whether or not to accept an adverse election outcome becomes the issue. The shenanigans that US voters have long tolerated as completely normal will likely be ramped up: closing voting stations in Dem-leaning areas so that voters have to queue for hours until they give up, randomly purging voter lists, requiring forms of ID that Dem-leaning voters are unlikely to have, making early voting difficult while having elections on a working day, and, of course, gerrymandering.

In addition, it seems likely to me that they might look into arresting at least some Democratic candidates. As one of them said recently (forgot his name, sorry), if all those sent to El Salvador are terrorists, then anybody who speaks out against sending them to El Salvador is aiding and abetting terrorists, and there is your legal justification for criminalising the opposition. What is more, and without making any claim here that both sides are equally bad (they really aren’t), many politicians are at least slightly corrupt. It should be trivial to find something in the realm of “sure it is technically illegal, but everybody is doing it, and it is so minor that it isn’t in the public interest to prosecute” and prosecute only Democrats for it.

And thus my prognosis remains: there will continue to be elections, but the MAGAs will be highly motivated to make it impossible for Democrats to win. Especially once they have committed so many crimes in office that that becomes a question of self-preservation.

I took that statement to be ironic.

and bill kristol is asking “where does the abolish ice movement get its apology.”

welcome to the resistance bill.

i’ve been resisting since reagan was president, and i’ve been doing it in texas my whole life.

John@37–NO! Your takes on the march toward Nazi America are dead on. And the place of the US in international affairs–for worse or worst–makes your commentary all the more important.

Having stirred things up a bit at #17, I guess I should attempt some kind of follow-up.

I will begin by noting that according to a new CNN report, Hegseth and Noem will not even recommend that the Insurrection Act be used. Furthermore, from the CNN article I learn that the point of invoking the act was specifically to use American soldiers on the southern border. I had no idea of this after reading John’s post, which implied that the Act would be used for arbitrary purposes and was a gateway to totalitarianism (he compared it to some legislation of Hitler’s, that allowed him to pass laws regardless of what the elected assembly wanted).

Then we have the Salvadoran whose case is being used to argue that a regime of lawless and arbitrary deportation is being instituted. This is probably about the 10,000th event in my lifetime, in which two political sides are taking a complex event and insisting that the facts are simple, but in contradictory ways. While searching for an objective perspective, I somehow thought of looking up Ben Shapiro for the first time in a long time, and his take was that the Democrats had made a political mistake, since they could have just said it was about protecting due process, but instead they insisted on building sympathy for a man who may well be an MS-13 gang member (though I think we haven’t definitively obtained the facts about that yet).

So these are two of the most prominent talking points in the post, and yet when you get into the details, it can be argued that they were wildly overblown. The appeal to the Insurrection Act was to deal with hundreds of thousands of foreigners flooding into the country, not to institute arbitrary personal power. And the violation of due process in deportation revolved around a man who was in the country illegally, and who was accused of membership in one of the worst gangs there is, which means it is more about overzealous law enforcement than ethnic cleansing.

Hopefully this serves to illustrate how a coherent right-wing perspective can exist, even under Trump, that is distinct from a left-wing perspective, and is not just about rationalizing evil desires (or whatever the pop-psychological theory of the right might be). I mention this because a few of the responses to my comment accused me of both-sides-ism in a situation that is supposed to be asymmetric, in which truth and justice are much more on one side than the other.

By the way, when I’m trying to be objective about western politics and culture wars of the 21st century, I don’t just substitute right-wing interpretations for left-wing interpretations. An analogy I use a lot is a battery, the kind of battery where you have positive ions at one end and negative ions at the other, and they are mixing and slowly neutralizing each other by pairing up. This reminds me of how polarization in western society is manifested in the form of millions of temporary and highly localized micro-conflicts, happening all the time throughout our societies. If you were trying to describe a battery objectively, it would not be helpful to insist that negative ions are good and positive ions are bad, and I suspect the same goes for left and right in our incessant culture wars and political oscillations.

I’m not saying that right and wrong should be absent from political discussion, just that for me at least, they are not going to map one-to-one onto our two majority political paradigms. I believe in climate change, I also believe in much less immigration. That already makes me politically homeless. Add to that beliefs like, I’m a transhumanist, but I think the plunge towards superhuman AI is reckless, but it’s already happening this decade, and my personal notion of the good seems utterly removed from any existing political option. Finally add to that that I’m Australian, not American, and I especially have an incentive to be “objective” about Trump 2.0’s America. (Incidentally, John Q has a project on how the remaining liberal democracies of the world can band together independently of the USA, and as an Australian I regard that project as a positive resource even though I don’t quite share his geopolitical orientation, simply because it’s in Australia’s national interest to explore all the options.)

There’s a lot of other things I could respond to, but I’ll pause here for now.

@bekabot, William Berry, GeoX

From Wikipedia:

Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the only president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party before the American Civil War. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857.

Jefferson Davis was a Democrat. The Confederates were not exactly a political party.

There was a time when I would often read this site, but after a while, I couldn’t abide the enforcement of a certain orthodoxy of thought here.
Call me a Republican if it makes you feel better.

@’I guess I should attempt some kind of follow-up’.

but as having no ‘political’ homes either we did not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what somebody who didn’t find Prof Q’s not helpful what the Trump administration is about.

Couldn’t you have explained ‘the nihilistic destructiveness and rage unleashed by the second Trump administration’? and/or that ‘there’s something deeply personal about the entire MAGA drive to destabilize the country that cannot really be explained by vicarious enjoyment of Trump’s comeuppance of his detractors’?

Is that really because Trump got blackballed by so many decent Golf Clubs and laughed at by so many Politicians and/or Regulars of Studio 54 that NOW he not only wants to be a German Neo Nazi but also the conquerer – of Trudeau and whole countries who had laughed at him?

And what’s about ‘the long and terrible tradition in right-wing authoritarian politics of intense hostility to allegedly self-serving and disloyal “elites” that have to be demolished so that a given nation, race, or culture can thrive?
Like in early 20th-century Europe, financial, academic, professional, and bureaucratic elements — which were thought to be disproportionately Jewish and “cosmopolitan” — were treated as the incorrigible enemy and thusly have to be crushed by any available means, legal or extralegal.

What is that all about?!

@ Eric F

a) I know who Jefferson Davis was.

b) The Confederates may not exactly have been a political party but they certainly were a political body. Their political heirs, if you want to stick to strictly American lines of transmission, are the Republicans of the present day. Up until about ten years ago, present-day Republicans still retained some vestige of their Abrahamic inheritance, but two Trump administrations, coming almost in a row, have taken it out of their hands. Very few Republicans seem to want it back. (There are some who do, but not many, and I’m not talking about them.)

c) Jefferson Davis was a Democrat, but he was the kind of Democrat Richard M. Nixon set out to capture with the Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy was successful, which means that since Nixon’s day, Democrats of the Jefferson-Davis type have all transferred themselves over to the Republican Party, and have more or less remade it in their image. To be fair, the exodus was going on even before Nixon goosed it, but Nixon was the guy who closed the deal. When I was a kid some of these people still passed as Democrats, but they were understood to be a subgroup within the larger Democratic body, and they were understood (correctly) to be at variance with it. They called themselves Dixiecrats and were intensely scrupulous about setting themselves apart. (The noli-me-tangere routine would not have been necessary had they been in step with the main body of their Democratic colleagues, but they weren’t.)

d) I am stating facts everyone knows. I find it difficult to believe that you yourself are ignorant of them. Pretending not to know what you do know is weird, and insisting that your enemies back up your pretense when both you and they know that they don’t have any incentive to do it is weirder still.

e) “Call me a Republican if it makes you feel better.” What do you care what I think? What do you call yourself, Eric F? That’s what matters.

Eric F@43 doubles down. Nonetheless, despite the historical lineage the Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of 1861, no more than the Republican Party of today is the Republican Party of 1861. That’s like saying the Southern Baptist Convention or the Roman Catholic Church are the same institutions today that they were then. If it were, then an honorary Republican might think, since today’s Democrats are cultural Marxists, then Jefferson Davis launched Red Revolution.

If the Republicans are the positive end of a battery, then the Democratic Party in the United States is about halfway toward the negative end.

Nowhere near the end. If they come out with full throated support for a publicly funded healthcare system, they’ll still be dead center for the rest of the world.

Paying attention to metaphors matters.

By the way, a Democratic administration at least countenanced and at worst initiated the surveillance and intimidation of MLK Jr. in the early sixties. The trouble is that no conservative complained about it then, and I absolutely doubt the sincerity of any conservatives that say they do now. I remember how they reacted when he was shot by a Wallace Democrat.

“ they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.”

Sure people lie or are misinformed all the time. So what?

While searching for an objective perspective, I somehow thought of looking up Ben Shapiro …

Somehow?

How? How does somebody who is searching for an objective perspective think of looking up Ben Shapiro?

Hopefully this serves to illustrate how a coherent right-wing perspective can exist, even under Trump, that is distinct from a left-wing perspective, and is not just about rationalizing evil desires (or whatever the pop-psychological theory of the right might be). I mention this because a few of the responses to my comment accused me of both-sides-ism in a situation that is supposed to be asymmetric, in which truth and justice are much more on one side than the other.

Some situations are asymmetric, and sometimes truth and justice is more on one side than the other. You seem to be thinking that if you can show that there are people on both sides who think they are on the side of truth and justice, that’s enough to show that this is not an asymmetric situation. But that’s not a sufficient basis to establish the conclusion. There is little more mundane or less surprising than a situation where both sides think they are in the right but in fact one is in the right and the other in the wrong. Just because both sides have their own perspective doesn’t mean there’s no valid way of choosing between them. If you personally find yourself in a position where you don’t feel comfortable making a choice, maybe that’s an indicator that you should reassess your own personal position.

(I think Clinton might have carried Arkansas bc that was his home state, but that was an exception.)

Since it’s been mentioned: in 1992 the Democratic ticket carried Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Georgia; in 1996, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Florida; in 2008, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina; in 2012, Florida and Virginia; in 2016, Virginia; in 2020, Virginia and Georgia; in 2024, Virginia.

(The States I have mentioned are all ones which joined the Confederacy; there are multiple other definitions of what constitutes ‘the South’, some more inclusive and some less.)

AlexSL @ 13 “However, Laban at 3 has inadvertently illustrated one way in which MAGA is, in fact, very much like the Nazis. The commonality is the nostalgia for a past economic system combined with a seemingly earnest ignorance of how the contemporary economy functions and what constitutes national strength in the contemporary economic system.”

This is hardly novel or specific to Trump and Hitler. Classical liberals pine for the political and economic system that prevailed before WWI and the Great Depression. The french pine for the ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’. US Democrats pine for the New Deal era of a strong regulatory state and powerful industrial unions. Trump, having grabbed support of the private sector working classes, actually has much in common with the American left on this issue. FDR, recall, put Japanese Americans into internment camps, threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to (successfully) intimidate them, and had authorities haul the CEO of Montgomery Ward out of the office for his refusal to obey FDRs edicts. And ran for office not just 3, but 4 times.

If you think Hitler is the key to understanding what Trump will do, who was the historical precedent for understanding what Hitler would do? Mussolini? Stalin? Napoleon? None really quite fit or would have generated much understanding at the time, would they? And who were the historical precedents for Stalin, Mussolini, and Bonaparte key to understanding their trajectories?

“Political parties’ orientations change over time.”

Yes, and I believe they changed dramatically (not suddenly, but quantity into quality) again, in 2016.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin.” — Chuck Schumer in 2016.

If the 1964 theme was Republican “Southern strategy”, then 2016 had to be a Democratic “suburban strategy”. Just as dramatic, if not more so. I’m pretty sure it’s relevant to the main thesis, but I’m not in which way.

steven t johnson @60
I’d be willing to wager that almost every scholar who’s written about Woodrow Wilson in the past quarter-century has criticized him for re-segregating the federal civil service. So I don’t agree with your flat assertion that Wilson “is a beloved figure amongst political scientists…” It’s true that Wilson himself was an academic political scientist (and university president) before going into politics, but that doesn’t mean that he’s “a beloved figure” among contemporary political scientists. Have other disagreements with your comment @60, but in the interests of time will leave it at that for now.

@stj 60: I can’t comment an everything you mentioned (I’ll have to look up how close Burr and Jefferson actually were), but a couple things jump out.

“That said, I do not see how simply dismissing Jefferson as terrible doesn’t also simply dismiss the Declaration of Independence as another atrocity, not to mention the First Amendment.)”

A lot of great writers and inspiring thinkers were monsters in their private lives (Neil Gaiman being the latest heart-breaking example for me). In most cases, the author isn’t so “dead” that you can’t see glimpses of their inner darkness in their public correspondence (true for less-terrible people as well), but you can regard a work as having its own meaning and value aside from the author’s thoughts, intentions, and context. Writing for an audience is a dialectic between an idealized self (every author has a “voice”) and an abstracted “imaginary other” (as well as actual pre-readers and editors). The tendency to aggrandize the self and flatter the other can, in the hands of a talented writer (which Jefferson undoubtedly was) produce a work that is rather more principled, inspiring, humane, and consistent the author’s “inner” thoughts would be. A work like the Declaration can be seen as representing the ideals and aspirations of the whole political community it was intended for — a revolutionary zeitgeist that remains genuinely compelling — rather than the specific terrible author who in other contexts and for other audiences does indeed sometines come across as the braying jackass many of his contemporaries describe.

“What all this has to with the other f-word? Historically, fascism proper appeared as a morbid disorder of defeat in war, especially in the aftermath of the defeat of revolution (most notable in Spain and Germany, the ideal types.)”

All of this wrong. The ideal fascist type can only be Mussolini’s Italy as they were first and the only one that had a “Fascist Party” by name. And of course, Italy (and Japan), picked the winning side in WWI. Mussolini’s grievance and the “stabbed in the back”/”sacrificed too much” myth was based on feeling cheated over their “rightful” share of the territory and spoils of war. Hitler’s grievance was actually diametrically opposed and it would have been impossible for both nations to get what they “deserved” at the same time. They became allies of convenience when they could just as easily have started killing each other over Tyrol, Dalmatia, East Africa, etc. Spain didn’t take part in WWI at all. I’m not sure the bloody nose they got in the Rif War can entirely explain Franco’s coup which seems more like the inevitable confrontation of the “two Spains” that had been at each other’s throat since at least the Carlist Wars if not the Bonapartist occupation.

mw at 59,

I have not made the claim, nor would I ever, that one can exactly predict what Trump will do based on what other fascists have done. I was merely responding to Laban’s statement that one part of Trump’s coalition is trying to reindustrialise the USA by pointing out the parallel to part of the Nazis movement trying to reagrarify (if that is a word?) Germany. There are parallels that make it logical to call contemporary movements fascist, but there are also differences because it isn’t 1925, and the world has changed since then.

Not all nostalgia is equal. It is, at least to me, legitimate to consider current economic and social policies to be bad and to consider the policies they replaced to have been better. For example, I would like to revert to the mixed economy, strong financial regulation, union power, and high tax rates that created a considerably more equal income distribution in the decades after WW2 than we have now. Call me a New Deal nostalgic, if you will, although I am not in the USA. But those are all policy decisions; a democratic government could make all of that happen if we had the will to elect one that does. In contrast, it would be very silly of me to ask to revert my area of work (science) to the way it worked before we had Powerpoint, Zoom meetings, and DNA sequencing. Nobody is going to make those go away, at least not without Pol Pot levels of totalitarianism and societal regression.

And that is the equivalent to what the we want manufacturing back part of Trump’s coalition demands: they aren’t just saying, let’s make gay marriage illegal again and take health care away from the poor (to use as examples vile but, and this is the important point here, realistically achievable policy decisions). They are demanding that factories and mines reopen in Middleofnowhere, PA, that have become completely uneconomic in that town due to progress in transport technology, in that country due to global economic specialisation, and at current technological development due to automatisation. Frankly, the only way to maintain a factory in that town would be a communist command economy, but that runs counter to their identity, so they keep falling for con men who promise something that cannot happen.

I don’t expect the High Command to step in, short of truly extremely fraught cirumstances, or existential threats to their existance or ability to properly defend the country and its core interests.

However, they are expert in playing beaureacratic games and can probably delay certain illegal orders (invade Greenland or whatever) a long time (Yes Sir, but it will take us at least 12 months to put the logistics in place” or whatever.)

Also, I can imagine, behind the scenes and never written down to be a part of history — the High Command saying “Hey if you order us to do this we might have to refuse, and you get what that means”. The Turkish Army did this several times — look up “Turkish memorandums”.

But still… the High Command is pledged to defend the Constitution (“aginst all enemies, foreign or domestic”) , not the Commander-in Chief.

The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. The High Command surely goes by this rule.

So what happens if the Supreme Court declares that the president is not obeying the Constitution, notwitstanding that they have no physical power to back that up.

Interesting question, not that I expect the High Command will actually do anything, and maybe — maybe — that’s all to the good.

@’If you think Hitler is the key to understanding what Trump will do, who was the historical precedent for understanding what Hitler would do?’

There is this theory that everything Hitler did was a reaction to his rejection at the Wiener
Kunstakademie – like the reaction of Trump when he overheard at Studio 54 that ‘his ass can’t dance’!

LFC @62 “FDR didn’t disobey and/or ignore court orders in the way the Trump admin is doing.”

What FDR did was arguably worse — after losing several USSC cases that invalidated New Deal legislation, FDR proposed a ‘court reform’ proposal that would have packed the court with FDR loyalists who could be counted on to vote the ‘right’ way. Almost immediately, the court stopped invalidating New Deal legislation, in a move that was, at the time, sardonically referred to as ‘the switch in time that saved nine’ — though it is disputed by historians whether or not this was genuinely a case of the court ‘rolling over’. In either case, FDR was not above trying to bully the courts — far from it.

“Re Japanese-American internment: the Sup Ct upheld it in a terrible decision, so that isn’t an instance of defying the courts.”

And Japanese-American internment had public support as well (like the roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants does now). If the current court ultimately upholds the deportation of alleged MS-13 gang members, I doubt anybody who is now opposed is going to say, “Well, OK then”. Instead, I’m pretty sure they would then switch back to excoriating the court and the conservative justices rather than back off their criticism of Trump.

The more I think about it, the more I think FDR is the most apt historical analogy. Both FDR and Trump were/are old, strong-willed New Yorkers in a hurry to fundamentally transform the US government and economy near the ends of their lives. Both have a folksy ability to connect with supporters. FDR was at least a mild anti-Semite and mild supporter of eugenics, but obviously nowhere remotely close to Hitler. Some of his programs did have distinct Fascist tendencies, but again nothing at Hitler’s level. Like Trump, FDR pushed through some wrongheaded economic, destructive policies that would directly harm consumers and the economy (in FDR’s case, wage and price controls, allowing managed ‘fair’ competition between corporations, and paying farmers to leave fields fallow, in Trump’s case, the tariffs, tariffs, tariffs). FDR did not have anything like brown or black shirts engaging in street violence, did not shut down the opposition press or arrest political opponents or try to have anybody assassinated. His agents did not burn the Capitol building. He was not a militarist who sought to start wars of aggression. And Trump is not going to do any of these things either.

Given how much has changed in US’s economy, government, and culture in 90 years (not to mention the myriad other difference between the two men), there are definite limits to how far the analogy can be pushed. But still I would say, look to FDR, not Hitler, to get an idea of how far Trump may go and also what kinds of actions are simply off the table.

“He was not a militarist who sought to start wars of aggression.”

Wasn’t he and didn’t he? More like seeking to provoke, I suppose.
Anyhow, Trump seems way more isolationist and ‘jaw-jaw’ than Roosevelt.

mw @73

“…both old… New Yorkers”
It’s a side point, but FDR was not old, certainly not by today’s measures. He died at 63. His health was not good in certain respects (but health and age of course are different things).
https://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/exhibits/death-president-roosevelt-april-12-1945/

re: some programs had “distinct Fascist tendencies”
Sen. Robert Taft and certain others of his opponents charged him w/ dictatorial etc. tendencies, but that NRA poster you link is not esp. strong evidence, istm.

May also be worth noting, as I think others in this thread might already have done, that FDR presided over a period of genuine national emergency (Depression followed by world war), unlike Trump whose claims of a pre-existing “emergency” are unpersuasive — to the extent there is an emergency it’s almost entirely of his own creation.

That said, I don’t think I would use the phrase “totalitarian state” to describe the current U.S. situation. The situation is v. dire, and the abductions and deportations, e.g., are from the totalitarian playbook, but there is starting to be resistance, and it’s beginning to look as if some of the worst outcomes may (emphasis on “may”) be averted. That remains to be seen of course.

P.s. Speaking of health, have a nasty cold that may preclude further participation in this thread.

Fake Dave@65 Keeping this relatively short, but not cryptic?

Re Jefferson, quite a few people do in fact reject everything produced when they deem the creator a monster, which is to my why an unqualified dismissal of Jefferson is not good. This is all the more true because the Declaration is not regarded as fundamental to the understanding of the Constitution even by the Supreme Court in the same way as The Federalist Papers. The tacit or even explicit rejection of the Declaration (as by John Calhoun,) still plays a role in conservative thinking. The decision whether to regard the Declaration as now meaningless propaganda or as a promise to keep still faces thoughtful citizens. At least, those who do not simply reject the treacherous words of the monster Jefferson.

Re fascism, the claim that Nazi Germany is not fascist is a bold use of the rhetoric defining fascism out of existence. I do not see how German fascists could legitimately be required to borrow the Roman fasces as their propaganda symbol to count as fascists. The logo is not the substance. The presumption that it was Mussolini’s personal grievance that Italy didn’t get enough is incorrect: The Italian ruling class invaded Libya and Ethiopia before Mussolini borrowed the Roman fasces. The defeat of the Biennio Rosso allowed the Italian ruling class to resort to the most extreme methods and goals, hence their recruitment of Mussolini as strong man. Imperial Japan today is not generally regarded as fascist. Carefully nobody asks why it was so common for people on the scene to do so. The great defeat Spain suffered was el Desastre of 1898. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was sequelized (to coin a verb) by his son founding the Falange, a fascist party. The CEDA under Gil Robles also functioned as a fascist party in my view. The defeat of the revolution in Asturias further enticed the Spanish ruling class for extreme measures, leaving conditions ripe for Mola’s coup to succeed where Sanjurjo’s didn’t. (Franco succeeded Mola after Mola’s death in a plane crash.) Sorry I don’t think I got it all wrong.

mw@73 “What FDR did was arguably worse — after losing several USSC cases that invalidated New Deal legislation, FDR proposed a ‘court reform’ proposal that would have packed the court with FDR loyalists who could be counted on to vote the ‘right’ way.” Arguably, the moon is made of green cheese. Perhaps you should propose this as a debate topic at the next Federalist Society forum?

wrd0@75 FDR discovering neutrality meant treating a military coup against the legitimate government in Spain required a so-called neutrality was or is not politically conservative enough?It was too provocative!? Personally I think WWII should be dated as starting with the invasion of Ethiopia, and certainly by 1937 after the Marco Polo Bridge “incident.” Undeclared naval war against Nazi Germany does irritate, I suppose. As for Trump, my view is economic warfare is war. Withdrawing from JCPOA to target Iran is hybrid war. No I don’t agree Trump is isolationist, war against every other country that doesn’t bow in submission isn’t isolationism. Yes, I am aware my view isn’t the orthodoxy.

Although I haven’t commented on Crooked Timber in years, I’ve kept checking it now and then as a sort of intellectual comfort food. That may sound like I don’t take seriously what is written here in the posts and comments, but I always have and always will. To do otherwise would be akin to tearing up my party card—something that, if I actually had a party crd would be unthinkable. Anyway, the fountains of consternation, condemnation, and the calls to (virtual) arms appearing here lately are much appreciated. Good sense in times like these is hard to find, and when it is found, as it often is here, it feels like one ought to grab it and hang on.

If the 1930s weren’t warning enough about the faultlines in our civil society emulations of Enlightenment principles, the 2020s should remind us once again of our unfinished business. (I’ve recently been reading Mieville’s A Spectre Haunting. His tender, yet unblinking evocation of the communist’s dilemma hints as well as anything recent does at what I mean by unfinished business.) What conditions, besides a general prosperity that provides economic security to all, will we need to pacify the recurrent rages that give us what we got in, say, 1938, and what it looks increasingly like we’re about to get today. That is, or should be, what we’re after, assuming enough of us survive the present rage to contribute to a new attempt at it.

“Trump (and particularly the libertarian-leaning judges whose selection he seems to have absent-mindedly outsourced to the Federalist Society during his first term)”

Aw please. Please stop. There was nothing absent-minded about it. The initiative there was not Trump’s. Trump didn’t hire the Federalist Society, the Federalist Society hired him.

mw,

Not really. Funny how you picked out of the policies I wrote the one where you can pretend that it is not in the hands of the legislature – people just don’t want to become union members! And yes, without the mass of unskilled labourers, we will not see a resurgence of the old labour movement as it was. But there is no reason why service workers should not be unionised. The main issue we have today in this regard is the normalisation of gig jobs where the worker is technically a contractor, not an employee. That arrangement is unnecessary, it should be illegal, and it could be made illegal. There is no new economic system about it, it is just hollowing out labour rights under the same economic system, because the food delivery driver is still, in reality, a dependent employee. How much power unions have is also legislated. In Germany, there are Betriebsraete and Tariffreiheit, in some other countries, not so much.

And you ignored the others, presumably because it would be extremely difficult to argue that factory robots make it impossible to have state-owned trains, separate investment banking from savings accounts, and have billionaires pay their taxes.

Glen Tompkins,

You are making an excellent point: compared to parliamentary republics, a presidential republic like the USA is easier to turn into a dictatorship. The office of the president has over the decades been loaded with ever-increasing powers. The range of things the president can do with executive orders is ridiculous, as are their right to impose tariffs or their ability to bomb random civilians in other countries. The presidency is very close to a four-year dictatorship already unless it is possible to remove a president for doing very unpopular or illegal things, and that has apparently become nearly impossible. That being said, a lot of Trump’s actions nonetheless, as far as I understand, go far beyond what any other recent president did.

I am still not convinced that the current rage is about economic insecurity, so I don’t think that more economic security will cure it (as much as I despise contemporary levels of inequality and would like to live in a society where the CEO of Tesla earns no more than, say, four times of what a toilet cleaner earns). The core of Trump’s support, of Brexit voters, of the far right are not insecure gig workers, poor immigrants waiting tables, or the unemployed. It is secure retirees who want to see fewer dark immigrants like how it was when they were teenagers (but the good ones can stay!), small business owners who want to be able to say the n-word and be able to harass young female employees again without getting into trouble, young men who are angry that too many women dye their hair and want a partner who treats them with respect, and young men who want to get rich quick as crypto or AI “entrepreneurs” instead of working a five-day job for forty years.

Even the re-industrialisation discussion from higher up is a distraction in this regard. Yes, there is a part of Trump’s coalition, including him, who have an ideological commitment to bringing back manly factory and mining jobs. But recently, a survey was published that asked people first if they wanted the USA to have more such jobs, and then if they themselves wanted such a job. The results are highly amusing. There is a nostalgic constituency for making the USA more manly in theory. There is virtually no constituency that is unemployed and wishes, themselves, to have a 1950s factory job to get out of unemployment.

While searching for an objective perspective, I somehow thought of looking up Ben Shapiro

Looks like “Mitchell Porter”‘s ideas are all worthless trash. No need to read the rest.

“Well, I think you underestimate his social status in the past.”

Doesn’t matter, not to Trump. He’s a man whose dissatisfaction is stamped visibly all over his physical self. If he’s not a true snob, he gives an excellent and continuous impression of being one, and if he is a true snob, he follows the Groucho-Marx rule of never wanting to be a member of the club which will let him join, only seriously and not as a joke.

As for the US being different after FDR equalling the US being different after Trump — you seem to be confusing building things up with tearing them down. I can’t figure out why; you’re smart enough to know that no matter what you say, these two things will never be the same.

“one thing he [Trump] can’t emulate is throwing tradition to the wind and getting himself elected a 3rd and then a 4th time”

He can certainly try and he probably will. There’s no guarantee that he won’t succeed. There’s only a piece of paper in the way, and it’s a piece of paper to which he almost certainly attaches no value. Once again I’m puzzled: I don’t know why you’d assume that Trump (of all people) would decide that in this case and in this one case alone, the rules finally apply to him.

J-D @ 88 “If I were standing trial for a crime, evidence that other people had committed the same or similar crimes would have no exculpatory value. ”

Of course. I’m not arguing that what Trump is doing is OK because of similarities to FDR. I’m arguing that FDR is a much better model than Hitler when trying to guess at the limits of the changes that may result from Trump’s presidency. I’m not making any argument about whether those changes are positive or negative in both cases (which surely depends the viewer’s politics).

“Franklin Roosevelt strove to use the powers of the President to make people’s lives better; Donald Trump is striving to use the powers of the President to make people’s lives worse.”

Again, this is dependent on the viewer’s place on the political spectrum. I am quite sure Trump voters don’t think he is intentionally striving to use the presidency to make their lives worse. And the same goes for supporters of FDR, but obviously FDR’s critics saw things very differently (then and now, in both cases). The New Deal greatly expanded the size and power of the federal government. Surely you understand that there are many who do not regard this as a uniformly positive development that only works to make everybody’s life better.

bekabot @ 89 “He can certainly try and he probably will. There’s no guarantee that he won’t succeed. There’s only a piece of paper in the way”

All laws in every country are just “pieces of paper”. But the US courts (including a Supreme Court that’s full of ‘conservative’ justices) are not going to sign off on that. They’re not going to require states to put ‘Donald J Trump’ on their 2028 ballots. Of course supporters at his rallies will shout, “Four more years!”. But Obama supporters also did so. Trump will leave office no later than January 2029.

wrdo@90 My answer to the explicit question is, of course I’m serious. The legal, therefore legitimate by conventional standards, government of Spain was the Loyalist government. The very name assigned to that side highlights this. For England, France and the US to suddenly decide, legalities be damned, we’ll treat them as somehow equal. The proper isolationist course would have been to deny any legitimacy to the military coup and continue dealings with the legitimate government, including arms sales. So-called neutrality in this instance was an intervention, on the side of the fascists against the dubiously left-wing Loyalists.

You may not be American, so the precedent set by England (and France) in the US Civil War, when they recognized the Confederacy as belligerents, is instructive. This was potentially a step toward open intervention in support of the dismemberment of the US (and an attack on excessively left bourgeois democracy too.) The euphemism of the day was mediation. As it turned out, assigning belligerent status to the Confederates entailed certain legal consequences to the naval blockade that ended up overall helping the US…but that was not the intent. The US government properly deemed the English (and French) to be fundamentally hostile, much more hostile than the populace at large. It was not an accident that tensions with England ran so high. And it was why there was a real threat of war with England (and France) as a consequence.

As to the implicit question about why ignore FDR’s sanctions on Japan, I thought it obvious that if you forget the official dating of WWII, the Japanese war on China and its expansion to French Indochina as well as the Nazi onslaught on any humanity within reach, meant there were no provocations in the sense of, starting trouble. The war was already on, and these were responses. The position that, sure, fascist victory in world war isn’t a problem, was common then, not least among fascists. Personally I thought neutrality proper meant not taking sides in wars between legitimate governments, like Japan and China. Selling oil to Japan (or to Nazi Germany via Franco’s Spain) is not neutrality in my view.

And I also thought it obvious that if you want to talk provocation, FDR’s undeclared naval war against Nazi Germany was serious provocation. And the destroyer deal and Lend-Lease was also an intervention and provocation against Nazi Germany. There seems to be a boomlet in people arguing that Hitler made a mistake in formally declaring war on the US as a fit of madness. But it seems more like a recognition of reality, plus there was the clause in the Tri-Partite Pact if I recall correctly. As it turned out, Japan had already been defeated by the USSR, so that Japan couldn’t help the Nazis.

But they didn’t know that in 1941. At that point, the Nazis may even have thought it essential positioning for world affairs after their victory against the USSR. We know now that Germany had already lost any real prospect of victory…but there are quite a few people who won’t accept that now, much less grasp it then.

In my view, you are the one who is not serious, not if the word means, sensible.

Of course. I’m not arguing that what Trump is doing is OK because of similarities to FDR. I’m arguing that FDR is a much better model than Hitler when trying to guess at the limits of the changes that may result from Trump’s presidency. I’m not making any argument about whether those changes are positive or negative in both cases (which surely depends the viewer’s politics).
…
Again, this is dependent on the viewer’s place on the political spectrum. I am quite sure Trump voters don’t think he is intentionally striving to use the presidency to make their lives worse. And the same goes for supporters of FDR, but obviously FDR’s critics saw things very differently (then and now, in both cases). …

I am, naturally, well aware that people’s evaluations differ.

If somebody said ‘Some people have a positive opinion of Adolf Hitler and some people have a negative opinion of Adolf Hitler’ and did not go on to say anything about what their own opinion of Adolf Hitler was, what conclusion would you draw? What conclusion do you think I would draw?

I know that some people have a positive opinion of Donald Trump and some people have a negative opinion of Donald Trump. Do you think I’ve made clear what kind of opinion I have? Do you think you’ve made clear what kind of opinion you have?

I don’t know whether it was your intention, but the impression you have made is that you are systematically avoiding expressing any evaluation of Donald Trump’s Presidency. I can think of an explanation for this, but it’s one that is not to your credit.

mw @91: one of Trump’s personally-stated plans is for Vance to run for President in 2028 with Trump as VP, then have Vance resign (after and if elected) so Trump becomes President for a third term, assuming he lives that long. (The amendment only says he cannot be elected to a third term.) Given all the other things the Supreme Court has swallowed, I doubt that the conservative majority would strain at that.

As for personal preferences, I would prefer that Trump did not lie and continue to lie about fraud in Biden’s election, even after his own Attorney General (Barr) told him there was no such evidence; that Trump did not consider it manly to boast about grabbing women’s genitals on first acquaintance as in the Billy Bush videotape; that he paid contractors their contractual due after their work was finished instead of telling them to either sue or walk away and that the cost of suing would be the more expensive choice; that he did not cheat at golf, racing ahead in a souped-up golf cart to throw other player’s golf balls into bunkers; they he did not shout, “They’re eating the cats and dogs!” on national TV after a reporter told him there had only been one missing pet reported in the region in question, and it had returned after three days; that he did not dismantle life-saving programs at the NIH and USAID; that he did not destroy the economy with senseless tariffs based on the theory that if a pizza place sells pizza to a company but does not buy any of the companies products, a fee should be levied on the pizza deliveries entering the plant until the imbalance is eliminated; et cetera. Perhaps you do not share any of these preferences, though.

JimV @ 97 “I would prefer that Trump did not lie and continue to lie…”

The list of actions I would prefer Trump stop doing is a long one. I think he’s doing a lot of stupid things with the potential to cause serious, long-term damage. But I don’t think he’s anything like Hitler. Are those few days that were left last week to save US democracy now up yet? Trump has obviously not invoked the Insurrection Act — his latest major announcement was that he has no intention of firing Jerome Powell. Not because he doesn’t WANT to, but because he’s rightly afraid that if he crashes the markets any further and causes a recession, he’ll OWN it and his popularity will collapse. The good news is that he’s not operating outside normal political constraints, and he does seem to have a few people working for him who aren’t complete idiots.

J-D: “Franklin Roosevelt strove to use the powers of the President to make people’s lives better; Donald Trump is striving to use the powers of the President to make people’s lives worse. To disregard this difference is nonsense.”

Leaving aside that this is a matter of judgment (I agree with yours but MAGAs probably won’t), I disagree wit the way this is framed. Roosevelt did use the power of the presidency but far more than that he relied on the legislative process, proposing reform legislation that Congress passed. Trump on the other hand purports to dismantle the rule of law, change the constitution (by pretending to abolish birthright citizenship), take control of agencies that Congress explicitly removed from the president’s control, even take control of private universities, etc. without even trying to get legislative approval for any of these blatantly unconstitutional acts. That’s what makes him an authoritarian dictator. In addition to that, it matters that Roosevelt did win a landslide election victory (57% to 40%) and enjoyed popular support for his policies, none of which is true for Trump.

John Q, I’m grateful for your consistent clarity in this matter, contrary to some other prominent CT posters (Corey Robin was so consistently wrong about Trump it defies belief how a qualified political scientists could have been so consistently wrong for so long.

I thought this article fresh from today worth reading:

“Throughout the Trump era I’ve been firmly in the camp unaffectionately dismissed as ‘alarmist’ by most commentators. Put simply: It is that bad. Liberal democracy is in danger. Fascism is a reasonable term for what we’re fighting.”

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/trump-alarmists-were-right-we-should-say-so/

You need to feature a other long article by Corey Robin explaining how Trump and the Republican party are actually weak and impotent and will soon be consigned to the political wilderness.

JimV@97 (first paragraph)

That seems like rather more slight-of-hand and legal argument than is necessary for a third Trump term. Such transparent and torturous abuses of law were the means by which the Republicans reached the current situation, where laws don’t matter any more.

That [Vance being elected w/ Trump as VP and then Vance resigning] seems like rather more slight-of-hand and legal argument than is necessary for a third Trump term.
I understand the thought here. Why bother with such things? And yet, even in places where authoritarian politicians have more power and less opposition than Trump has in the US, they often do bother with such things. See, for example, Putin setting up Medvediv as his puppet (*) president while Putin served as Prime Minister, until he could have the constitution changed so that he could serve as president again, even though no one could have stopped him, and no one seriously doubted he’d get his constitutional change made whenever he wanted. Why do it that way? I really don’t know, but it’s not so uncommon that I’d just assume that Trump/Vance would simply insist that Trump could run for a third term, or just cancel elections all together. (Working to make elections unfair is obviously a different thing.)

(*) It would have been almost charming, if it hadn’t been serious, when many western commentators thought that, maybe, Medvediv would be a more liberal reformer and try to side-step Putin.

Impeachment and removal from office, with the help of congressional Republicans and people who voted for Republicans. (Not out of the question.)

The list of actions I would prefer Trump stop doing is a long one. I think he’s doing a lot of stupid things with the potential to cause serious, long-term damage.

It’s good that you’ve acknowledged that, but it would have been better if you’d done so earlier. Why didn’t you?

The good news is that he’s not operating outside normal political constraints, and he does seem to have a few people working for him who aren’t complete idiots.

If most of the people working for him are completely idiotic and the rest partially idiotic, explain to me how that’s good news.

I also, while agreeing with the urgency of the OP, strongly advise against defeatism. Court orders against Trump’s lawlessness and public disapproval may be having an effect and we need more of both!

Here’s a good article:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/against-defeatism-2

J-D @ 113 “It’s good that you’ve acknowledged that, but it would have been better if you’d done so earlier. Why didn’t you?”

Because the debate isn’t about whether or not Trump is a good president, it’ about whether or not Trump is a new Hitler and if we really have just days to save the US from dictatorship. He isn’t and we don’t (or, rather, didn’t since those few days seem to have passed). Recent polls show his current popularity is far below that of other recent presidents after their first 100 days. The only presidency with comparably bad numbers is Trump in his first term. This matters (and is good news) because even though he does not need to worry about re-election, he does very much have to worry about keeping his slim majority in Congress onside before the midterms. So either he will backpedal on the policies that are apparently most responsible for his loss of approval (likely the tariffs and ‘trade wars are fun’ idiocy along with the seemingly chaotic, ham-handed spending cuts), or his popularity decline will continue, and he’ll find himself less and less able to get his way. He’ll find himself a lame old duck yelling at clouds (when the latest poll results were released, he raged not just at the ‘liberal mainstream media’ but also at both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal).

Churchill’s quote was new to me.

“In this quarrel I was neutral. Naturally, I was not in favour of the Communists. How could I be, when if I had been a Spaniard they would have murdered me and my family and friends? I was sure, however, that with all the rest they had on their hands the British Government were right to keep out of Spain.”

I wonder what possessed him to conclude that he was safer under a fascist government than a communist one.

@PatinIowa, 119
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.
A high-profile opponent of the Bolshevik revolution, a conservative politician and a member of the British aristocracy, he absolutely would have been killed by a Communist government.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Trump is not our problem. It is the majority of our citizens who support, tolerate or are cowed by him. If we come out of this it will be due to some heroic self sacrifice by a few and organized public protest by the rest of us.

Trump’s henchmen arrested a sitting judge specifically for not supporting Trump’s lawless ICE.

Re the discussion of Churchill above: despite some reforming moments, he was basically a conservative and a fervent defender of Empire. The Bengal famine is a big blot on his record. He was basically right in the ’30s about the Nazi threat and the geopolitical situation, and his particular skills as a politician and orator were well matched to the times in May 1940 when he became prime minister. He was on the whole a good wartime leader, though particular positions and decisions can be criticized on strategic and in certain cases moral grounds.

The quotes about Mussolini, mentioned by stj above, need to be placed in context. While I am definitely not a fan of Hillsdale College in general, when I went looking for context for the quotes, this link came up, and while I’ve only glanced at it v. quickly, it’s probably worth a look.

https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/mussolini-law-giver/

john q @ 127 is correct that they remember the poem, but for six of them, they remember it with the delighted fantasy that the other three will be taken away, and their families, and all who have ever loved or known them. they dream of issuing the order for the torture and execution. and they’re willing to do it even if, at some indeterminate future date, they get caught up “by mistake”. they’re building the kingdom of christ on earth – if a conservative dies to friendly fire as they machine gun a 14 year old trans girl in Ottumwa, it’s very sad, but there’s no other way to achieve pure bliss in heaven. there are no american conservatives who wouldn’t willingly give their life and their family’s life in order to permanently obliterate a filthy LIB.

mw@130 “… one thing, I fear, that would keep voters on Trump’s side. Anything along the lines of the George Floyd protest/riots of 2020 would be serious a mistake. Trump would be licking his chops at the opportunity to come down hard on protests with federal felony charges.” As I remember it, those were not organized protests, but a fairly spontaneous mass outrage. Instead of keeping Trump in power, though, he lost re-election. By comparison, the violence of 1/6 didn’t keep Trump from 49% of the popular vote in 2024, did it? Also, Trump made efforts to send troops into (Blue) cities, to the point of trotting out Gen. Milley and if I recall the Bible in a so-called public photo op at Lafayette Square, apparently meant to promote this. The effects of sending soldiers into cities prior to a presidential election may be contemplated at leisure? I rather think this is more Trump’s version than serious analysis.

[The complicity of Republicans in Congress and some elements of the military in carefully standing back to allow the violence was far organized than anything in George Floyd. Cheney and Kinzinger did a great service to their party in making sure the select committee didn’t look into that, though Trump inevitably despised them for it. Again, the presumption that the People are innately innately patriotic, as in, obedient, is taken more from Trump than facts, I think.]

mw,

Your endgame assumes that there will still be meaningfully free elections. Maybe there will. Or maybe a combination of shutting down non-conforming media, arresting candidates, intimidating and suppressing voters, and incompetence of the opposition will ensure that Republicans cannot lose a federal election for the next thirty years even if the public swings >60% against them. As per my earlier comment, after all they have done already and on projection of what they will probably continue to do, Republicans can be assumed to be extremely motivated to never again see a Democrat be in charge of investigations and prosecutions of federal crimes, corruption, and violations of due process.

So, one should at least be clear what will be needed to return to democracy and the rule of law in that case: “heroic self sacrifice by a few and organized public protest by the rest of us”. (I am not in the USA, so not part of ‘us’; just quoting.)

I fear that 51 (or so) pro-Trump former intelligence officials might produce a document stating that all anti-Trump allegations look exactly like hoaxes produced by Iranian intelligence. And that this ridiculous document will be trumpeted by the mainstream media, and swing the election.

mw@136 “…I see no reason to think this would consign Democrats to lose elections *forever *— why would it?” Italics added. What a conveniently high bar to erect, for Trump supporters at least.

The second paragraph doubles down on the proposition that the George Floyd protests played into Trump’s hands and increased his support, which is why Biden won the 2020 election.

Third paragraph? https://thehill.com/media/5247488-trump-says-cbs-should-lose-license-after-60-minutes-segments-on-ukraine-greenland/ But that’s not actually shutting it down, right? And excluding AP from the White House briefings because of the Gulf of America doesn’t shut AP down either? Again, a conveniently high bar. Sensible commenters are busy taking Sharpies to all the maps in their house, scribbling patriotic corrections I suppose, which is why Trumpery is so sadly underrepresented here?

Seconding bekabot at 138

“[Churchill] was basically right in the ’30s about the Nazi threat and the geopolitical situation, and his particular skills as a politician and orator were well matched to the times”

You could say the same of Stalin. After all, the USSR “won.” There are even people who will say that The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a clever ploy on his part. (Ugh.) That doesn’t make him any less an anti-semite, tyrant, and mass-murderer. And as bekabot suggests, Churchill’s success as Britain’s wartime leader doesn’t make him any less an imperialist (I’d say, “white-supremacist”).

I’ve been to the Hillsdale Churchill site a few times. It’s to be trusted to the same extent as, say, you would trust Aleksandr Dugin on Stalin. Not entirely useless, but be super-careful.

“On this issue, Trump hasn’t yet sunk to the (low) Biden level”

Or maybe Trump and Biden are two different guys who were or are after two different things. Maybe what Biden wanted was to institute a policy and to do it without arousing too much opposition or fuss. You might not like the policy or its method of installation but that’s what it was — a policy. It wasn’t personal payback or retribution for perceived insults which were taken to be personally meant. Maybe the first deed was the work of a man who could think systemically, while the second was the act of a man to whom systems are opaque and therefore scary. Maybe Biden was trying to get out in front of a problem and prevent it, on the theory and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and maybe Trump was trying to impose a punishment, full stop. Maybe these two things aren’t comparable. Maybe, just maybe, there are some things you can’t analogize.

140: “Nor is jawboning about CBS’s license the equivalent of actually yanking its license.”

CBS 60 minutes producer was forced to quit (https://apnews.com/article/60-minutes-cbs-producer-quits-4c7729507684fa516391a7022d27586b) and quite a few other journalists have been fired by different news outlets specifically in order to appease Trump. Paul Krugman left the NYT after 25 years because editors increasingly pressured him to publish less criticism of Trump (https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times). Jeff Bezos directly intervened in editorial decisions at Wapo to appease Trump, whose ass he kissed in a humiliating ritual, and the owner of the LA Times did the same. Nothing to see here, move on?

Trump threatens the media and (most of) the media obey, that is very obviously what is happening. It is correct to point out that the media could have refused to bow to Trump and dared him to follow through on his threats. They are cowards, and in some cases have economic reasons not to annoy Trump (and some, like the NYT’ Sulzberger, are simply assholes who voluntarily align with Trump because they share his narcissism, see https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219). But the fact remains that Trump threatens and bullies and blackmails the media and other institutions of civil society on a daily basis, attacks press freedom, academic freedom, freedom of speech in general, and now even the independent judiciary, in obvious and utterly unprecedented violation of the constitution.

P. S. It doesn’t surprise that this apologist of fascism doesn’t shy from repeating the most ridiculous Trumpist lies about Biden. I’ won’t take the bait.

They are already trying what they can do come next election. I just saw this at The Hill:

“The House GOP’s campaign arm in recent weeks has successfully pressed three advertising companies to pull down Democratic billboard displays bashing vulnerable Republicans over Medicaid — a setback to Democratic campaigners hoping to make health care a liability for battleground Republicans around the country.”

So, now the governing party can threaten billboard companies into censoring the election messaging of the opposition party whenever it criticises the governing party, because criticising them is ‘defamatory’. It is a standard SLAPP tactic, but now it is credible enough a risk that the billboard companies feel they have to comply.

As I have been arguing here for months regarding the future of the USA, modern dictatorships generally do not cancel elections. They have elections, but those elections are like races in which the opposition starts fifty meters further away from the finish line and has to carry a millstone along. That then makes it easy for some of the commenters here to decry those who call it a dictatorship as alarmists. Because, sure, the governing party has filled the police, army, judiciary, and administration with its loyalists who constantly obstruct, harass, and intimidate journalists, academics, and businesses into compliance, but look, there are still elections.

It is only a dictatorship if it comes from the Tyranie province of France, otherwise it is a sparkling republic.

BUT NOW
as Trump has kept Canada Liberal – will he do the same for Australia and Germany too?
And doesn’t that make up for the self destruction of the brand ‘America’?

I have settled on two questions that I think I ought to answer.

@J-D #21 “Do you actually think there are actual examples of authoritarianism and lawlessness from the other side?”

@bekabot #23 “what would be helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump regime administration is about?”

For authoritarianism, I would first point to Glen Tomkins #78, or to the fact that “imperial presidency” has been a concept since the 1960s. The US president has possessed a lot of power for a long time, and that will look authoritarian when you’re on the receiving end. I seem to remember that Trump, Biden, and Obama all liked to use executive orders. Trump’s “father of the nation” personality does take it to another level, I’ll admit that.

For lawlessness, I’m going to go with BLM and people crossing the southern border. (I’m sure I could dredge up examples involving spies and soldiers too, but being near the edge of the law, or way outside it, will always be an occupational hazard of those professions.) BLM and the border crisis aren’t examples of lawless actions by an administration, but the lawfulness of executive actions is always going to turn into a battle of lawyers. Whereas I think BLM and the border are more to the point, they are perceived as actual breakdowns of law and order that were allowed or encouraged by Democrats.

For understanding the Trump administration… I don’t know, Trump as the Joker pretending to be Batman? More seriously, if you really want to understand them, I think reading what they and their supporters say could be illuminating. I found The Atlantic’s recent interview with Trump quite informative. Also, a Trump supporter recently told me a few things which might convey the mindset. He said, Trump receives plenty of pushback from his own supporters. But they support him because he’s the only politician they see, genuinely trying to address their issues.

@ 151

When I asked what would be helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump regime is about, what I meant to ask was what would be helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump regime is actually about. Not in fantasy, but for real. We already know what they think they’re about and what they say they’re about, but even their own followers know better than to take that stuff seriously. I don’t see why those of us who are Trump skeptics should start to take it at face value.

A man who pretends to be the Joker pretending to be Batman is delusional, and to attempt to understand him too deeply is to participate in his folly. To do that is to offer oneself up as a willing co-dependent. To do that is to become part of the problem, and the problem is already (God knows) severe enough. As a society, collectively, we’re in the process of OD’ing on lunacy, with no Narcan in sight. As a society, collectively, what we need is less poison and not more.

Michell Porter @41 “Having stirred things up a bit at #17, I guess I should attempt some kind of follow-up.”

A swizzle stick relative to “stop a totalitarian state in the US”.

“stop a totalitarian state in the US” is not a Ross–Littlewood paradox.

Mitchell Porter @151 Category error example;
“The US president has possessed a lot of power for a long time, and that will look authoritarian when you’re on the receiving end.”
“Trump’s “father of the nation” personality does take it to another level, I’ll admit that.”

False equivelance
“For lawlessness, I’m going to go with BLM and people crossing the southern border.” @41 “The appeal to the Insurrection Act was to deal with hundreds of thousands of foreigners flooding into the country, not to institute arbitrary personal power.”

I’d be LMFAO if your statement wasn’t such a dog whistle Mitchell.

“In late September 2021, in a grossly dehumanizing manner, U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback chased Haitian migrants back to the Mexico side of the Rio Grande River. Dramatic video and photos showed the agents slinging their horses’ long reins around the migrants and violently grabbing at least one man by the shirt. Significantly, Black Lives Matter (BLM) immediately joined the chorus of outrage condemning the Border Patrol’s “slave-catching” style “rooted in white supremacy.” With the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and other Black migrant-led social justice groups, BLM demanded that the Biden Administration “grant humanitarian parole to Black asylum-seekers” and to cease their expulsion. BLM reminded readers that “[w]hen we say #DefundThePolice, we mean all the police, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
https://www.racism.org/articles/citizenship-rights/immigration-race-and-racism/12584-black-migrants-and

Or this Mitchell… “In many ways, Mexico is behind the U.S. and other parts of the world when it comes to racial justice. In fact, this year marks the first time ever that Black people in Mexico could identify as Afro-Mexican on the census. Finally, Mexico’s Black population will be officially counted.” … “Inspired by this year’s large wave of protests for racial justice that are sweeping across the U.S. and other parts of the world, activists in Mexico have begun the work of confronting racism and police brutality in their own communities.” … “In Tijuana, the Black Lives Matter movement is taking root.”
…
https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2020/10/14/port-entry-podcast-black-lives-matters-movement-cr

Mitchell, insightful… “For understanding the Trump administration… I don’t know” @17 “but I don’t know if what he’s doing actually runs that deep.”

No insightful, yet good newspeak @41
“negative ions are good and positive ions are bad”
Mary Midgley; “The preliminary outward movement of thought—holism—is everybit as necessary as the inward, atomizing one and in any investigation it usually needs to come first.” Are You an Illusion (2014). 30.

“An analogy I use a lot is a battery”
Haven’t heard of a Trump or DOGe short circuit? What about the system the battery is a part of Michell.
“This would again be like saying that the carburetor had won the race, instead of the car of the driver. Carburators do not even know how to enter races, let alone win them. Winners need carburetors, and thinkers (including neurologists) need brain cells.”
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 172.

Last word to “bad Jim” 07.20.20 at 6:02 am
“First, the obligatory joke: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/07/20/the-republican-phase-transition/#comment-802774

@KT2

If what you want to point out is that we’ve had — well, call ’em imaginative — Presidents in office before now, you’re right. What we haven’t had, though, is a man who transparently hates the country he’s undertaken to lead and aches to destroy it. That’s a new experience for us. Trump is working toward the downfall of this nation and he’s not doing it by accident. That alone turns him into a nonpareil of a kind and separates him from all of his predecessors. It’s why it’s such a mug’s game to try to compare him to them. American Presidents before Trump had a job to do and did it either well or badly, but they weren’t trying to wreck the entire firm. That’s where Trump is different. He wants to implode the whole structure and leave a ruin in its stead. That’s his chosen monument to his accomplishments in life.

So, if you think, as he does, that that’s kind of a cool idea, then I suppose you sympathize. But if you think it’s not a cool idea and if you’re not a nihilist — you don’t.