Trump’s tactics not new to U.S.

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This article was published 29/12/2023 (979 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Few American politicians have spread fear and paranoia more than Donald Trump. For the past eight years, he has stoked fear through lies and alleged conspiracies and portrayed himself as the only person who can save the U.S. from the looming apocalypse and “make America great again.”

Long ago, Louis Brandeis, who served as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939, recognized the lethal combination of fear and paranoia. “Fear breeds repression: that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government,” he wrote in a 1927 judgment.

This is why many American politicians, commentators and others are now distressed, if not rightly terrified, of a second Trump presidency. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative scholar and Washington Post contributor, says that there a is a “clear path to (a Trump) dictatorship in the United States.” He argues that if Trump becomes president again, he “will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law.”

Canadian-born David Frum of The Atlantic adds “When people wonder what another Trump term might hold their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.”

Trump, if anything, is transparent about the authoritarian world leaders he admires, like Hungarian Prime Minister Vicktor Orban, China’s Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Russia, and his future intentions. Over the past month, he has denounced his opponents as “vermin,” a term used by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and similarly stated (more than once) that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Asked by Sean Hannity of Fox News whether he will be a dictator if he wins a second term, he replied that he’d only do it “on Day 1.” That’s hardly reassuring because “Day 1” could turn into a much longer period than that.

What is most worrisome is that this fascist rhetoric does not dissuade millions of Republicans (and others) who cling to Trump no matter how frightening his vision or declarations. In fact, according to U.S. author Matthew MacWilliams, an expert on authoritarianism, national surveys undertaken in 2016 and 2017 indicated that 46 per cent of Americans “are inconsistent supporters of democracy and democratic institutions” and that 31 per cent “agree that having a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections is a good way of governing the United States.” Such views mirror a worldwide trend that indicates in the past six years the popularity of authoritarianism has steadily increased.

Still, the U.S. may not be doomed. This is not the first time in American history when authoritarianism has gripped part of the country.

In his 2020 book On Fascism, MacWilliams points to 12 significant historical moments when democracy was threatened but ultimately survived. Among the cases he chronicles were the Palmer raids that triggered the Red Scare of 1919. A series of deadly bombings by anarchists led then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to launch a war on radicals, socialists and “Bolsheviks,” which caught in its net thousands of innocent immigrants and union leaders, many of whom were deported.

Three decades later during another Red Scare, Sen. Joseph McCarthy employed Trump-style tactics to cause hysteria about communists taking over the U.S. In his quest to be relevant — also, like Trump — McCarthy lied, attacked the press and ruined the reputation of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

MacWilliams also points to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the implementation of the U.S.’s Patriot Act, parts of which only expired in June of 2015. It gave the government sweeping powers.

As troubling as MacWilliams’s historical examples are, none was as all encompassing as what Trump has in mind for his second presidential term. As former congresswoman Liz Cheney has warned, if Trump is elected president again, “he would try to stay in power forever.”

That’s the bad news. The good news is that none of what scholars, pundits and others are fearfully predicting is written in stone. Despite recent polls that give Trump a slight edge nearly a year before the November 2024 vote, President Joe Biden, assuming he is the Democratic Party candidate, can defeat Trump, as he did in 2020. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Trump is ineligible to be on the state’s primary ballot for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Moreover Trump could be convicted in one of his many criminal trials, upsetting his electoral chances. And, it is not out of the realm of possibility that Nikki Haley could defeat Trump in her bid to become the Republican party presidential nominee — admittedly a long shot.

The numbers are on Biden’s side. Trump Republicans amount to at most 40 to 45 per cent of U.S. voters (as difficult as that is to believe). True, the results in the key five or six swing states are always up in the air. Ultimately, however, the choice between supporting Biden and maintaining democracy or opting for Trump and authoritarian government will be up to American voters—Republican, Democratic and independent.

To paraphrase the Grail Knight at the end of the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, here’s hoping they choose wisely.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.