Even today, the mainstream news media, including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt — and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help him do it.
...
Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all.
...
... this is going to be a battle of two tested and legitimate presidents.
Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent...It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.
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Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.
...In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. ...
Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. ...it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.
It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. ...But that doesn’t mean it works.
Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. ...He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.
And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. ...Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.
If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office.
... Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court?
[This isn't long enough is it? You can read the whole thing, by Robert Kagan here.]
Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy...That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. ...If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.
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As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as president.
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...Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it...We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to
“root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”
[Kagan doesn't say it but that could have been lifted lock, stock and Sieg Heil! from Hitler's speeches before and when he became German chancellor.]
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But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted.
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How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening...
The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. ...if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.
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Americans might take to the streets. ...But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W. Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to the streets....
And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers? That seems unlikely....
Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system. ...
[It is??? I didn't know that.]
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This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No.
[Coulda fooled me! Coulda fooled Chief WaPo's lede writer: "A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending."]
Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay
[Here! unfortunately]
...will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.
Are we going to do anything about it? ...
[What Kagan's doing about it is write interminable op-eds for the Washington Post.]
...every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway...
[Like writing Post op-eds. I, Kagan, write my own op-eds for the blog near-equal of the Post. Can I go now?]
... just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome....
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors...
Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.
[Such as? YOU, Kagan?]
Man, I hated that tome. I hate tomes like it that state the obvious on description and next to nothing on prescription.