A democratically elected, convicted felon for president; a neutered Supreme Court; a rubber-stamp Congress; a normalizing, compliant media and business community: What else can go wrong?
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If Donald Trump has a single virtue, it’s that he’s completely open about where he’s coming from and what to expect. The mystery is why anyone else thinks that he is in any way acceptable. Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote sounded amusing at first. Now, it has become an axiom, explaining America’s sudden, inexplicable leap toward ultimate destruction. The most profound question, I think, is: Why? Why are we doing this to ourselves? It’s a question that thus far remains unanswered.
Trump is clearly emerging as a tyrant-in-waiting. What separates him from other tyrants who operated in secret is that Trump is completely out there. Everything he says sounds outrageous until you realize that he is absolutely serious. Parts of Trump’s coronation address Monday sounded delusional and messianic. Does Trump really think that God saved and chose him to show America how to live?
Trump’s pardoning of more than 1,500 perpetrators of the January 6 assault on the Capitol leaves little doubt that, despite his supposed title as commander in chief, Trump was behind or at least supported the failed attempt at insurrection against the United States.
As for the US Constitution, which has held the country together until now, Trump, like most would-be tyrants, sees it and the rule of law as impediments intended to slow him down.
Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from international efforts at controlling climate change — and to isolate us from the World Health Organization, which coordinates the planet’s response to pandemics caused by species-jumping viruses like COVID-19 and H5N1 flu (which is carried by the annual migration of birds) — threatens to cut the US off from the rest of research and knowledge on crucial issues that affect life and death.
As for the US Constitution, which has held the country together until now, Trump, like most would-be tyrants, sees it and the rule of law as impediments intended to slow him down.
Regression on Steroids
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that all societies have to go through a period of regression from time to time in order to free themselves from the restraints of institutions so that they can move up the evolutionary ladder to a new dimension that better fits the current state of affairs. That might be. But that grand, abstract view of societal evolution is cold comfort to those caught up as victims of a “regression” of the magnitude and ferocity planned by Trump and his minions.
Trump aimed to begin his second term as president with shock and awe. He succeeded but, in doing so, he immediately raised questions about his intentions for the job. The president is expected to preside over the government, not wreck it. Trump is clearly incapable of focusing on the nuts and bolts of government that make it actually run. It seems he can’t wait to eliminate the people who actually know how things work.
He picked incompetents to head critically important government agencies because he wanted to get these agencies to do his bidding. Choosing weak figures to head the agencies makes them dependent on him personally. But though Trump imagines himself omnipotent, no amount of imagining can make him omniscient. Running the government requires the expertise and knowledge of thousands of civil servants who really do know what they are talking about and doing.
Enter Elon
Trump’s infatuation with Elon Musk, and his readiness to let Musk tamper with the structure of government, are equally unsettling. Musk is basically an entrepreneur, a bold thinker in certain fields, and a risk-taker extraordinaire. He may be great at thinking out of the box, but governments depend day-to-day on a steady hand.
Especially in the nuclear era, it is usually a good idea to minimize risks, not exaggerate them. In many respects, Musk is like a four-year-old who takes a clock apart and can’t figure out how to put it back together again. His record at Tesla is mixed: Even with a soaring stock price, many shareholders, not to mention workers, were not fans.
His record at X/Twitter is catastrophic, at least as far as the company’s internal functioning is concerned. Musk may have made money manipulating the company’s stock, but little was left of the origina Twitter once he had finished with it; in its place, a far-right propaganda platform.
His record in space is one of hiring experts who really do know what they are doing and then siphoning off taxpayer money to become the world’s wealthiest individual. He is doubtless a shrewd investor, but that hardly makes him an expert when it comes to actually handling the nuts and bolts of management, much less government and public policy.
The Trump Challenge
With his cynical war cry “Make America Great Again” (America was great when Trump first arrived to peddle his false vision of American failure and carnage), what Trump has really done is present America — and, more to the point, Americans — with an ultimate test. Trump is challenging all of us to decide what we want America to be.
The original European immigrants to America were mostly interested in land, which had been the key to power in feudal Europe. The king granted land to his nobles, who then guaranteed that serfs — essentially slaves to the land — would make it productive. Their production financed the king and the realm through taxes. Eventually, the peasantry objected to being slaves, and a series of progressive rebellions led to new ideas on how to structure society, such as the “social contract,” which were articulated by thinkers in the 17th and 18th century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.
America, through the War for Independence, became an experiment in putting into practice some of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, most notably, if imperfectly, the idea that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those basic rights and the belief in equality are what Trump is challenging.
Trump is gambling that few Americans today have studied their own history or know much about civics. It’s a very good bet.
His argument is that greed is good. What we have is for ourselves, and everyone else should be excluded. Globally, we don’t need the rest of the world. We are fine on our own. Domestically, what he advocates is a new, more modern feudalism, the president as king, the billionaires as his barons, and anyone not with the program might just as well be serfs.
This was not the idea of the Founding Fathers, but Trump is gambling that few Americans today have studied their own history or know much about civics. It’s a very good bet.
The greatest challenge is to key Republicans in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, and on the Supreme Court. They presumably do know the difference between our nation’s founding principles and Trump’s, his medieval regression. They are not uneducated and they are not stupid. Will they buy into Trump’s self-serving pitch, or will they do their job and stand up for America?
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may be the person to watch. McConnell became responsible for neutering the Supreme Court when he refused to acknowledge Barack Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland to be a justice of the court. (Garland later served as Biden’s attorney general and showed extreme restraint when it came to holding Trump responsible for crimes that just about everyone acknowledged.) McConnell also did his best to festoon the federal courts with judges favorable to Trump.
He is, to a large extent, responsible for the current shitstorm. McConnell may have been Machiavellian, but that does not mean he cannot recognize extreme attempts to trash the Constitution; and he is still in the Senate, with no concerns about reelection. If Trump goes completely off the rails, will McConnell exercise his responsibility as a senator to say no?
This goes for a number of other senators and members of the House. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) seems responsible and well-balanced. What will he do when the country’s future is at stake? All of these politicians may have gone along with Trump until now, but will they continue to do so in the future? Indefinitely?
The same is true for the Supreme Court justices, who have lost credibility as a consequence first of McConnell’s actions and then of their own. But the new justices picked by Trump are not stupid. They are also Americans. At some point, they will have to choose between loyalty to Trump or loyalty to the rule of law and the United States.
Trump is not the first American to steer the country in a drastically wrong direction. Aaron Burr served as vice president and then tried to organize a coup to seize control of the western territories. His dream was to declare himself emperor in the style of Napoleon. After killing Alexander Hamilton in an illegal duel, Burr was indicted for murder in both New York and New Jersey. He nevertheless continued to make appearances in Congress, until finally he fled to Europe.
Benedict Arnold, the hero of the Battle of Saratoga against a British army, had so little confidence in the future of the United States that he soon after sold the British the Continental Army’s plans for attacking West Point. Like Burr, he escaped to Europe and died in exile.
Trump’s future remains to be seen, but it is up to the rest of us to define what America will become in the coming years. The future of America has always been a cliffhanger, a test of what people really believe and stand for. The current situation is no different, except that the cliff is an awfully high one.
