The point of no return
Only days left to stop a totalitarian state in the US
Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.
The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.
The one exception is that I expected Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day 1. Instead, perhaps to preserve a veneer of legality, he has commissioned a report from the Secretary of Defense (Hegseth) and the Secretary of Homeland Security (Noem), due by 20 April. 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.
Meanwhile, two other crucial issues are coming to a head. First, Trump is openly defying the courts over the illegal deportation and imprisonment in a concentration camp of legal migrant Abrego Garcia and others and is now threatening the same even for native-born US citizens. Second, elements of civil society (notably universities and law firms) that have previously engaged in shameful capitulation are now standing up.
If Trump is defeated on all three fronts, there is a good chance that US democracy could survive his onslaughts, though it will take many years to recover. But victory on even one of them will spell the end. Defeating the courts would render any legal constraints on his power irrelevant. The Insurrection Act would permit him to use troops to suppress protest and to arrest his political opponents. A victory over civil society would turn the US into a totalitarian state, in which all organisations are controled by the Leader and his followers.
I can’t see this happening. 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. And while it would only take a handful of Republicans in Congress to change sides and stop him, there is no sign that this will happen.
Once Trump’s dictatorship is established there is no way back within the current US system. When his regime finally collapses the models for reform (some successful, some not) will be those of post-war reconstruction of a defeated and discredited state).
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(Flailing about looking for a silver lining here..) The good news is that Trump’s approval rating is only about 42%, markedly below that of all other recent Presidents at the same points in the election cycle, trending down, and now in negative territory. This bridegroom is not enjoying a star-struck honeymoon. The bad news is that Trump’s approval rating is still as high as about 42%, when his malevolent unfitness has been on prominent display every day of his term of abuse of office. Tragically, large parts of his agenda of racism, corruption, vengefulness, corruption, ignorance, xenophobia, isolationism, arrogance, wanton cruelty and (I insist) idolatry are actually welcomed by a large minority of the American people- but not everything.
His Achilles’ heel is the economy. Neo– and paleo-liberals alike reject Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy, too much of a revolution against long-received ideas. Main Street is battening down the hatches and rightly fears the coming recession, or worse. Wall Street is split. Rosy-spectacled bulls still think the fascism is a performance for the rubes, and that conventional plutocracy will resume Any Day Now, while merely myopic bears dimly perceive that the Cauliflower Trust has lost control of its puppet Arturo Ui and now dances to his strings. Contrast the calibre of the conservative technocrats Hitler could rely on in the 1930s - Schacht, von Seekt - with hapless bumblers like Bessent, Hesgeth, and Rubio, and lunatics like Navarro and Musk. The only hope left for democracy is that the economic failure will advance faster than the undermining of institutions.
In he summer of 1941 the old anti-Boshevik warrior Winston Churchill did not hesitate to offer Stalin’s Soviet Union a firm alliance against the greater and more immediate evil of Nazi Germany. In this spirit we really have to back China to win the trade war. Paul Krugman’s column today on China’s ban on the export of essential rare metals to the USA is thus cheering:
“Even relatively sophisticated Trumpers like Bessent are still thinking in terms of Chinese access to the markets of the United States and our imagined trade war allies, when the real issue now is whether China can strangle the U.S. economy by disrupting our supply chains.“ https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-trump-will-lose-his-trade-war
Trump grovels to Put , a better performer of theatrical machismo. Perhaps Trump is about to find out who the real hard man is, and what it means to kowtow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow
I simply do not understand why the armed forces wouldn’t move against given the constitutionality of his actions. Secondly, in a country notorious for knocking off presidents surely it can’t be long until another shooter appears and this time they don’t miss.