I do not imagine that there are more than a handful of Salon readers who are not familiar with the danger of electing Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States for a second time. It is not hyperbole for me or anyone else to write that the upcoming 2024 presidential election will be the most dreadful election since the one of 1860. In that election, and again in 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s victory heralded the end of slavery and the beginning of the Civil War. A victory next fall by the former president would portend the end of American Democracy as we have known it for some 250 years and the instigation of a new illiberal democracy or autocracy.
The GOP’s assault on the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law combined with a Trumpian desire to censor the fourth estate, restructure democratic institutions, and weaponize systems of power are all in sync with a rising wave of anti-democratic and authoritarian movements worldwide.As a kleptocratic and wannabe authoritarian dictator, Donald Trump and the US are not alone in the contemporary world of neoliberal, illiberal, and authoritarian regimes engaged in various geopolitical struggles between competing democratic and autocratic styles of governance. These battles are commonly immersed in nationalist and/or populist movements of xenophobia. Most of the nations involved – democratic or authoritarian — are also trending towards fascism, standardization, and disinformation. During Trump’s recent Veterans Day speech, for example, the Insurrectionist-in-Chief used everyday parlance that echoed those authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930s.
Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, there is President Putin invading Ukraine and promising another Russian Empire. In Brazil, there was former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro elected to office in a landslide in 2018. Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, had surfed the anti-corruption wave promising to put an end to the “old politics” only to be narrowly defeated in 2022 by the progressive and former jailed President Lula da Silva. In Argentina there is right-wing libertarian and newly-elected President Javier Milei, a 53-year-old economist and former TV pundit promising to reduce the size of government and three decades of triple-digit inflation. To most people’s surprise, Milei at least temporarily has broken the hegemony of the nation’s two leading political forces, the Peronists or left of center party and the older conservative party, the Union Civica Radical. In the Netherlands, there is also the newly elected anti-immigrant Geert Wilders promising “to break a few rules, shake up democratic institutions and spread a populist message.”
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In MAGA America, there is demagogue Trump who has hijacked and broken the Grand Old Party. Trump has been all too willing to exploit aggrieved voters and disavowed crowds of citizens who espouse conspiracies while he gaslights everybody else. Like Adolf Hitler in post-World War Germany, there is the racist, homophobic, and misogynistic Trump who also refers to people of color, homosexuals, leftists, progressives, and communists as vermin who are busy poisoning the blood of America and who need to be rooted out and destroyed. Trump, similar to another celebrity turned dictator with a “cult of personality” fanbase and a fascination with violence, elicits the performative style if not the self-discipline of Benito Mussolini — the man known as The Leader during post-World War Italy.
Among other things, déjà vu Trump has once again been promising to overturn Obamacare, ban Muslims, and to make America great for a second time. Hopefully, not like when he was screwing up the USA’s security responses to COVID-19 and needlessly facilitating the death of a quarter of a million Americans.
As Barton Gellman reflects in The Atlantic as part of its “If Trump Wins” special issue, Trump “tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs.” We also know from the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, that on 10 occasions, Trump tried to obstruct justice. These failed attempts to violate the law, like Trump’s failed coup, were stymied because other officials such as Vice President Pence refused to go along with Trump. Should Trump regain the White House in 2025, not only will there be no persons or officials left to stymy Trump in his second administration, but there will only be Trumpists left in the House, if not, the Senate too.
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In the fall of 2023, one year out from the 2024 election, Trump and his minions, joined by the newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson – an ultraconservative and right-wing Christian from Louisiana – are promising to return God-fearing heterosexual Americans to the mythical days of a glorious white supremacist past. At the same time, these Trumpists have been uniformly calling for revenge and seeking retribution from all those people standing in the way of the former president’s treasonous rebellion masquerading as some kind of revelatory salvation or patriotic revolution. For the criminal record, it was the mild-mannered Republican speaker from the Bayou State who wrote the amicus legal brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of the failed Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 presidential election.
In brief, today’s Republican Party is a de facto political crime organization and three years after his failed coup attempt to remain in power, Boss Trump is still in charge. The former president rules this organization through fear, intimidation, and the threat of violence from Mar-a-Lago, his golf club and winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. As Robert Kagan, a Washington Post contributing editor and author of the forthcoming “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again” has argued, “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.”
If this were not bad enough, America’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, likely a sociopath – if not a psychopath. In starker terms, Trump has shown himself to have a “diseased mind, which in turn amplifies his already corrupt morality and ethics, attraction to violence,” and capacity for wickedness.
After Thanksgiving and the publication of Thomas Edsall’s essay in The New York Times on the state of Trump’s mental health, Chauncey DeVega underscored that “Trump’s aberrant behavior is getting worse” and he questioned, “Why are Americans ignoring his decline?” Not to be too reductionist, I would contend that this is because absent his legal troubles and polling numbers the mass media with the exception of MSNBC is no longer paying much attention to Trump, let alone, covering him 24/7 as they had previously done for more than five years.
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