Trump Is Well on His Way to Establishing a "Soft" Mussolini-Style Fascism in the US
December 9, 2019
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
In a prescient March 2017 article — “How to Build an Autocracy” — in the Atlantic Magazine, David Frum summarized a key section from the Federalist Papers, revered by conservatives:
Congress enacts laws, appropriates funds, confirms the president’s appointees. Congress can subpoena records, question officials, and even impeach them. Congress can protect the American system from an overbearing president.
“But will it?” asked Frum, an author and former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Frum has been an anti-Trumper conservative for some time. He foresaw, back in 2017. the need for Congressional action to counter an authoritarian Trump, who firmly believes in unitary executive authority. In fact, Frum’s Atlantic article predicted how Trump would incrementally implement totalitarian rule.
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It’s rather chilling to witness Frum’s forecast portentously played out, as Trump has created a cult that includes nearly every Republican member of Congress energetically backing Trump’s grandiosely fraudulent false narratives. With William Barr’s appointment as attorney general, Trump has an official government consigliere (complimenting Trump’s private consigliere, Rudy Giuliani) protecting his lawlessness. Barr, with his expansive efforts to bend the law for Trump even as he gallivants around the globe to try and prove “deep state” InfoWars conspiracy theories, is further proof that much of Trump’s despotic rule is, quoting Frum, to enhance Trump’s “power to protect the guilty.”
Of course, at the core of this historical moment, no one in DC is more guilty of corruption and the degrading of democracy than Trump. As Frum observes, “A president determined to thwart the law to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.” Even now, facing impeachment, Trump has an unmovable electoral base and Republican backing in the Senate that positions him to try and brazenly steal the 2020 election without any counter-balance to keep him from doing so. That is because it is highly unlikely that the Mitch McConnell Senate will convict him at the end of an impeachment trial.
Even back in 2017, Frum predicted of Trump that,
He will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
If Congress is quiescent, what can Trump do? A better question, perhaps, is what can’t he do?
Yes, the Democrats under the now determined leadership of Nancy Pelosi, who has emerged as an effective spokesperson who can “counterpunch” Trump, a disarming voice the Dems have sorely lacked for years, are skillfully and with focus exposing one relatively small piece of Trump’s massive corruption of the presidency. However, Trump is still, as the impeachment inquiry proceeds, further proceeding with a “soft” transition into unrestrained executive power rule, without checks and balances. He is stonewalling, obstructing justice, with Congress, and expecting his 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court to back him up on many of his lawsuits to prevent his accountability.
Brett Kavanaugh, in particular, wrote a law review article, a few years back, in which he strongly asserted that unitary executive authority should be protected. This, mind you, is a viewpoint articulated by a man who was a chief aide to Ken Starr in his unrelenting and finally successful effort to entrap Bill Clinton in order to refer him for impeachment to Congress. In fact, Kavanaugh wrote much of the Starr report and was unsparing in advocating that the Clinton administration should comply with Congressional subpoenas, which it did.
That was then, and now is now, which means Constitutional “optics” change when an authoritarian who backs a right-wing judiciary and core right-wing policies is in office. This is the fundamental basis of most despotic regimes, in Trump’s case it is slightly altered to: God, guns, “Family Values” (how ironic), abortion prohibition, rule by the plutocrats and white nationalism.
Frum concludes his incisive analysis of our descent into a Trump “soft” dictatorship (which could become a “hard” totalitarianism at any time, through a national “crisis” or through the slowly boiling frog analogy (and we are now parboiled) with both an ominous warning and a call to action:
Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.
Since Frum’s 2017 article, we have seen his predictions and trenchant analysis prove sorrowfully true. The impeachment inquiry provides, and the disciplined Democratic messaging by Pelosi and Schiff, offer hope that a counter-narrative to Trump’s Mussolini-style demagogic narrative might prevail in 2020.
However, there are still dismal signs that Trump can maintain the support of his cult following through wily manipulation, as his base of support remains relatively unmoved by the impeachment hearings. Even after all the testimony, advocates of impeachment still remained at just over 50%, which is a significant number but not enough to change the outcome of a fixed GOP Senate “trial.”
Furthermore, as previously posted on BuzzFlash, a December 3 Esquire article by Jack Holmes pointed out an alarming poll finding that 43 percent of Republicans “say the country’s problems could be addressed more effectively if presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’”
Either that’s a sign that we are slouching toward a Mussolini-style government and corporate media (amplifying Trump messaging in its own oligarchical interests), or a wake-up call that the opposition to Trump must be galvanized so that Democratic voter turnout is so great that Trump cannot get within striking distance of stealing the antiquated Electoral College.
Democracy, hangs in the balance, and it is still an open question whether the will of the people can overcome the absolutist power of an entrenched demagogue who has been inching the nation toward fascism.
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