America’s Battle To Save Its Democracy From Trumpism

Can America Stop Trump’s Plan To Install an Autocracy?

MSNBC

In case you didn’t hear yet, today Donald Trump received a letter. But not just any letter. From Special counsel Jack Smith — informing Trump that he’s a target. For indictment. In the Jan 6th investigation. That’s a big deal, even in these grim times — and a necessary one, at least if democracy’s to prevail. Trump, for his part, released a statement full of histrionic I’m-being-victimized — the kind that by now he’s well known for.

This comes hot on the heels of another development. The New York Times revealed Trump’s plans to basically enact an authoritarian-fascist agenda if he returns to power. Of course, that’s something that critics have long accused him of. But to have actual details of such an agenda is something else entirely — it puts paid to the rumors and suspicions, if you like.

What kind of plan is it? To basically make the President something much more like a dictator, a tyrant — and autocrat.

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

How far does this plan reach? It involves putting government agencies — like the FTC, FDA, the FCC, the EPA, under direct Presidential diktat. That’s already a huge chunk of government itself. These agencies are independent, to a degree — they’re supposed to be apolitical, and of course, the lunatics on the authoritarian side will complain that doing things like enacting climate regulations is “political,” but it’s not — it’s precisely what a sensible government agency should be doing given that, hey, look, the planet’s on fire.

The plan also involves “impounding” funds — basically, a President “refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.” So imagine that Trump comes to power, yet by 2026, by some miracle, Congress, in saner hands, passes a Green New Deal. Sorry, funds impounded. 

Of course, that’s an extreme example, here’s a much simpler one. Schools teach lessons the lunatic right doesn’t like — anything from “women should have rights” to “it’s totally OK to be LGBT” or “supremacy leads to ruin” to “Jan 6th really happened, and it was an attempted coup.” Sorry, schools — funds impounded. You can see how dangerous this can get — in the blink of an eye, and how much overweening, centralized power it gives a President.

And of course the plan includes the idea to strip civil servants of protections, letting the President fire them at will. “He plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” This part of the plan is a putsch. Or series of them.

Now, this might all be dismissed as outlandish fantasizing, but the problem is that it’s a very real plan, and it has something that you need in the weird wilderness of American politics to make one real. A theory.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

The way that Americans politics works — and this is part of the reason why it imploded into the mess it currently is — is that if you have a theory, you can get away with almost anything. A theory is what’s taken into courts, to justify agendas, radical, bizarre, destructive — and the American legal system being what it is, gives the stamp of approval to such agendas just because they have such theories. 

If you think I’m kidding, consider how America’s the only nation in the rich world that has effectively no public goods — no universal healthcare, affordable education, retirement system, anything. Why is that? Because in the Reagan years, the right wing cooked up a theory, that said all that would make consumers worse off, by robbing them of choice and freedom and so forth. Of course, today, we don’t have to look very hard to see that the theory is abject nonsense, pure bunkum: Americans have shockingly low standards of living compared to other rich nations. But to the courts, even now, the theory is all that matters.

And in this case? Trump has courts, right up to the Supreme Court, stacked with fanatics who are all too eager to use such a theory, nonsensical as it is, to centralize power in his hands — so that their great project can be enacted, the one of making America an authoritarian fascist society.

So. What does all this really mean?