Just How Dangerous Was Donald Trump?
He failed to bend the
state to his will, but he still broke the country.
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec.
14, 2020
Throughout
Donald Trump’s presidency, there’s been an argument on
the left over the sort of threat he poses.
The
American left’s most famous figures — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky —
saw Trump as an authoritarian who could, if re-elected, destroy American
democracy for good. But another strain of left opinion viewed Trump’s fascistic
gestures as almost purely performative, and believed his clumsiness in
marshaling state power made him less dangerous than, say, George W. Bush.
A
leading proponent of this position is the political theorist Corey Robin,
author of an essential book about right-wing thought, “The Reactionary Mind:
Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” In an interview with
the left-wing publication Jewish Currents, he argued, “Compared to the
Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s was
significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured.”
The day when the Electoral College meets to ratify Joe Biden’s victory seems
an appropriate one to revisit this debate. Trump tried, in his sloppy, chaotic
way, to overturn the election, and much of his party, including the majority of
Republicans in the House, and many state attorneys general, lined up behind
him. Yet he failed, and it’s unlikely that he will follow calls from
supporters, like his former national security Adviser Michael Flynn, to
declare martial law.
So what
matters more, the president’s desire to overthrow American democracy, or his
inability to follow through? Just how fascist was Trump?
Part of the answer depends on whether you’re evaluating Trump’s
ideology or his ability to carry it out. It seems obvious enough that the
spirit of Trumpism is fascistic, at least according to classic definitions of
the term. In “The Nature of Fascism,” Roger Griffin described fascism’s
“mobilizing vision” as “the national community rising phoenix-like after a
period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” Translate this
into the American vernacular and it sounds a lot like MAGA.
Fascism
is obsessed with fears of victimization, humiliation and a decline, and a
concomitant cult of strength. Fascists, wrote Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy
of Fascism,” see “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male),
culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the
group’s historical destiny.” They believe in “the superiority of the leader’s
instincts over abstract and universal reason.” This aptly describes Trump’s
movement.
Yet Trump was only intermittently able to translate his movement
into a government. The national security state was more often his antagonist
than his tool. There were Justice Department investigations of the president’s
political enemies, but they mostly came to nothing. The
military was deployed against protesters, but only once.
Trump celebrated what may be the extrajudicial killing of Michael Reinoehl, an
antifa activist wanted in a fatal shooting, but such killings weren’t the norm.
He put children in cages, but was pressured to let them out. And in the end, he
lost an election and will have to leave.
The
damage he’s done, however, may be irreversible. On Twitter, Robin argued,
correctly, that George W. Bush, far more than Trump, changed the shape of
government, leaving behind the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland
Security. Most of Trump’s legacy, by contrast, is destruction — of even the
pretense that the law should apply equally to ruler and ruled, of large parts
of the Civil Service, of America’s standing in the world. (If mainstream
liberals are more deeply horrified by Trump than some leftists, it could be
because they maintain greater romantic attachments to the institutions he’s
defiled.)
Most
consequentially, Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of
reality. Other presidents sneered at the truth; a senior Bush official, widely
believed to be Karl Rove, famously derided the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind.
But Trump’s
ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush
administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist,
after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they
obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that
the war was a disaster.
No such
consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his
calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves
behind a nation deranged.
The
postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle
Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is
a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to
democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with
America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country
doesn’t see it.
In May, Samuel Moyn predicted,
in The New York Review of Books, that if Biden won, fears about American
fascism would dissipate. Complacent in their restoration, he wrote, those who
warned of fascism “will cordon off the interlude, as if it was ‘an accident in
the factory,’ as Germans after World War II described their 12-year mistake.”
As American electors gathered — with the police offering armed
guards and Michigan’s capitol closed by “credible threats of violence”
— Moyn’s words, meant cynically, seem too optimistic. Trump failed to capture
America, but he may have irrevocably broken it.
