From Mother Jones:
Will Democracy Survive Another Trump Win?
“Autocrats learn from their mistakes,” warns one expert.
Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.
Trump is promising to do things in a second term that he didn’t get close to achieving in his first: rounding up, detaining, and deporting millions of immigrants, using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, and deploying the military against Americans he’s identified as “the enemy from within.”
“Usually, it’s worse.”
It’s an agenda much bolder and much more authoritarian than what he accomplished in his first term, when low points included a ban on people from certain Muslim countries from entering the US, family separation at the border with children held for weeks in cells, withholding weapons from Ukraine in an attempt to get dirt on his political opponent (the reason for his first impeachment), and a bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The finale was a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. (Hence the second impeachment.)
But there is another, frightening list of the things that Trump wanted to do, but, thanks to hurdles in his own administration, he wasn’t able to. He wanted to deny disaster relief to California because it’s a blue state. He wanted the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs. He wanted the military to seize voting machines after he lost re-election.
There was also significant pushback to Trump from outside the government. There were massive popular protests, and a torrent of litigation from groups like the ACLU. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post added a slogan to its homepage and print editions: “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a phrase Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had borrowed from a speech by Bob Woodward.
Some of that opposition to Trump is alive and well. Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, went on the record warning that Trump is a fascist. The Cheneys are voting for Harris. But some things seem to have changed in recognition of what Trump might do if re-elected. The Post opted not to endorse a candidate this year, a decision that came fromBezos, who has lucrative Pentagon contracts. The Los Angeles Times, also owned by a billionaire, likewise declined to endorse. It’s a chilling sign if acquiescence is already the response of America’s richest men.
To get a sense of what a second Trump term would be like, and what guardrails would remain to box in his authoritarian ambitions, I spoke to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt. We spoke on Friday, when Levitsky and Ziblatt published a New York Times op-ed chastising America’s business and religious elites for sitting on the sidelines during this momentous election. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We already lived through one Trump term. Why should we be expecting, possibly, a dramatically different result in a second Trump term? The consensus among experts in authoritarianism like yourself is that a second could prove really catastrophic.
Just to begin, several cases immediately come to mind—Nicaragua and Hungary—where the second term around was considerably worse than the first. Autocrats learn from their mistakes. Folks whose primary goal is to concentrate power learn how to do it. In the case of Trump, we have to remember he didn’t expect to win in 2016. He had no plan. He had no experience. He had no team. Very importantly, he relied heavily on mainstream Republican Party officials and technocrats to govern. He had no clue how to manipulate the machinery of government. In fact, he was shocked and appalled to learn that the machinery of government didn’t just operate at his whim, that he was unable to manipulate a range of state institutions for his own political and personal ends.
Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, was his first chief of staff. He used to apparently dissuade Trump from his worst impulses by telling him they would do it “next week.”
Exactly. There were adults in the room who prevented him from doing a lot more damage, who found ways to to distract him, or to dissuade him from his worst instincts. He learned that he if he’s going to wield the machinery of government for his own ends, he needs to purge and pack the government with loyalists, as much as he possibly can. It’s much more likely that he’ll be able to wield, for example, the Justice Department against critics and rivals. He’ll be able to launch investigations and even prosecutions, often for petty infractions against all kinds of people, hundreds and even thousands of people.
I don’t think Trump’s control over the courts will be sufficient for him to actually jail his rivals, but you can do a hell of a lot of damage investigating and trying and attempting to prosecute people. You can dissuade hundreds, even thousands of people to stay out of politics, to avoid the kind of harassment that a federal investigation can involve.
The largest difference, though, is that now Trump thoroughly controls the Republican Party. He did not have that control in 2016 but now there is no other faction outside of MAGA. His cabinet will be a Trump loyalist cabinet, which is not the case in 2016. It’s very unlikely that you will see much pushback from the Senate or the House, and there is a very good chance that if Trump wins the presidency, the Republicans also win the House and the Senate. You’ve got a pretty friendly Supreme Court. He’ll have a better sense of what he wants to do. This is really night/day from 2016.
Some of the people that have come out and called Trump a fascist have been generals who worked for him, Mark Milley and John Kelly. Kelly cited Trump’s threat to use the military against the “enemy within” as a reason he spoke out. Trump has said he wants to send the military into Democratic cities. Is the military an area where you see susceptibility to authoritarianism, or would it be more of a bastion against crossing certain lines?
We don’t know, because we haven’t seen anything like this, perhaps since the Civil War, where you have a professionalized military that’s asked by a civilian leader to to violate the Constitution or to help him abuse power. That puts military leaders in a terrible bind, because, on the one hand, in a professionalized military, you’re duty bound to both the Constitution and the president, and when the President is asking you to choose between the Constitution the president, it’s a very, very difficult bind. It’s really hard to anticipate how the military will respond.
I think the military itself will find itself divided. It’s very hard to say whether Trump will make the effort to pack the military. The military commanders are still going to be adults, certainly relative to the people in the Trump cabinet. I think they’ll be much more difficult to push around than Trump’s cabinet. But at the end of the day, if he insists, and they are trained to obey civilian authorities, so if Trump orders them under the Insurrection Act to go and shoot protesters in the legs like he wanted to during the Black Lives Matter protests, the military is going to have a hard time disobeying it. Until he’s stopped by the courts or by his own people, if the President wants to try to turn the military into a weapon, yeah, he may be able to go part of a ways towards doing that.
I read the New York Times piece you published today on the role of civil society. It doesn’t seem like you’re very impressed with what civil society has done so far. Do you believe it would still be a guardrail in a second Trump presidency?
The US has a pretty vibrant civil society and it played a pretty important role in the first Trump presidency. We created pro-democracy organizations, bankrolled by wealthy business people. There was a lot of societal pushback in 2016 and 2020.
We are concerned that a lot of church leaders and business leaders, politicians and university leaders, too, are just fearful and wanting to accommodate themselves. They’re trying to position themselves so that they don’t have it too bad under a Trump presidency. That kind of uber pragmatism, when democracy is on the line, is very dangerous. It’s not a great sign that somebody like [JPMorgan CEO] Jamie Dimon, who has a lot of influence in financial circles, is unwilling to come out and repudiate Trump as an authoritarian. This guy should be a business leader. The private sector should be standing up. Most CEOs are going to vote for Harris, but they’re unwilling to take a strong public position, and that may have some effect in the election, because voters still do respond to elites. If all the elites who say in private how terrified they are of Trump, if they were all to hold a press conference and say it in public, it would move the electorate enough to hand the election clearly to Harris. So it matters that these guys are behaving in such a fearful, hyper pragmatic way.
And it’s a bad sign for what will happen if Trump wins the presidency. It suggests that, much like we’ve seen in other countries like Hungary and Turkey, you’ll see an awful lot of business people willing to be co-opted and unwilling to bankroll opposition organizations. I think the private sector and our civil society is big, diverse, and wealthy enough that you’re going to see a pretty healthy opposition. But not enough. To see how influential university presidents, Catholic leaders, and business people remain on the sidelines is worrisome.
What is your best case scenario for a second Trump presidency?
The best case scenario is that we muddle through. That Trump lacks the energy or the ambition to fight too many fights, that his performance in office is somewhere between poor and mediocre, [Republicans] lose the midterm elections, and we have a dysfunctional four years. And he can’t get JD Vance or his son or whoever he wants to be the candidate in the 2028 election.
I think about who would run in 2028 since Trump is disqualified from a third term.
There’s a decent chance we’ll see a President Vance in the next four years if Trump is elected.
Mike Pence turned out to be one of those guardrails on January 6. Vance has said he would have approved the fake slates of electors.
Vance has a better grasp of reality than Trump, which, I suppose, is comforting. We know he’s a hyper pragmatist. He will say anything to further his ambitions. I mean, that’s true of all politicians, to a degree, but this guy really takes it to the next level.
There’s one world where this new rightwing Catholic ideology and blood and soil nationalism that he’s grasped on to in recent years, that he really believes that stuff, and that he’s pretty ideologically driven. You combine somebody with actual talent and discipline and skill with an ethno-nationalist ideology, and it’s scarier than Trump, because at least Trump is inept and has no discipline or patience.
Or, he may just want power, and may decide that the safest route, the more pragmatic route, is to sort of head back to more traditional Republican territory. I have no idea which of those two scenarios would happen.
Countries that have gone the authoritarian route, they still have elections, but they aren’t really fair elections, where people can actually express their preference or have it be accepted. Could that happen in the US in four years?
I have no doubt that if Trump has a horse in the 2028 election, that he will try to use the machinery of government to tilt the playing field, and that you may see some real abuse in Republican-controlled states. There could be a certain amount of unfairness. I don’t think there’ll be anywhere near enough unfairness that people will be not be able to express themselves at the ballot box.
The Democratic Party has the advantage of being a unified opposition party, which you don’t see in places like Hungary or Nicaragua or elsewhere. It’s an electorally viable party. It has a shitload of money. And that’s not going to change. Trump is not, I think, going to be able to do what Putin did, or Orban did, or Chavez did, which is squeeze the private sector, all the private sector so much that nobody is willing to finance the opposition. That’s a really critical thing to be able to do. You can really tilt the playing field when you do two things: when you get the media to self censor, either because you put your guys in control of the media, private or public, and you bully the private sector into not financing the opposition or media. When you can do that, then you really have tilted the playing field. I don’t think Trump’s gonna be able to do that. We may well slide into a mildly authoritarian regime. I think Democrats will be able to contest and and quite possibly win.
There are voters who are really disaffected. I’m thinking particularly of young voters who say democracy isn’t working for them. They don’t have faith in the system, and they’re thinking about voting for Trump, or not voting, or voting a third party, because they just want to burn the whole thing down and start over. Is there any plausible way that electing Trump does that? And a better government, like a Phoenix, rises from the ashes?
What do you mean? What Phoenix?
I don’t know. Is there a lesson from history that would show that if Trump wins, then maybe we can get something better out of it?
Usually, it’s worse. With a populist, you’re just pretending to burn the house. You’re basically just punching the establishment in the gut. Just watch them squirm. But most of the time, people elect a populist, and the populist is predictably mediocre or poor in their performance, and the really discontented people who voted for him end up in a slightly worse place. Once in a while, though, the populist will be so bad, it will kind of cure people
Pfft..he will only be impeached or jailed upon conviction for his crime spree regardless if he's in office. Other than that he will just get a bunch of people sued, jailed, and killed. Remember, it was his own supporters that suffered the most. All this will be turned upon their heads.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese panda is laughing. That's something that people don't think about. How even one party states view the Trump clown show. They're saying to people, "Is that what everyone wants in their country? Chaos and dysfunction?"
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