America’s Wannabe Autocrat Is in the Home Stretch. How
Worried Should We Be?
Beware
a despot when he’s cornered.
Opinion
columnist
·
June 21, 2020
Two weeks ago, I wrote that perhaps, at long last, we had reached a
tipping point in Trump’s popularity, and I stand by it. On Thursday, a poll
conducted by Fox News (Fox!) showed him trailing Biden by 12
percentage points; the Tulsa arena hosting his comeback rally on
Saturday was two-thirds empty.
The man is ripe for the ultimate “Downfall” video. Especially given his recent sojourn
in an actual bunker.
Yet it’s precisely because Trump feels
overwhelmed and outmatched that I fear we’ve reached a far scarier juncture: he
seems to be attempting, however clumsily, to transition from president to
autocrat, using any means necessary to mow down those who threaten his
re-election.
Whether he has the competence to pull
this off is anyone’s guess. As we know, Trump is surpassingly incapable of
governing. But he has also shown authoritarian tendencies from the very
beginning. For over three years, he’s been dismembering the body politic,
institution by institution, norm by norm. What has largely spared us from total
evisceration were honorable civil servants and appointees.
Trump
has torn through almost all of them and replaced them with loyalists. He now
has a clear runway. What we have left is an army of pliant flunkies and toadies
at the agencies, combined with the always-enabling Mitch McConnell and an
increasingly emboldened attorney general, William Barr.
Will Barr’s depredation ever approach
some kind of asymptote? Doubtful. Last week, his Justice Department argued in court for John Bolton to heed its temporary emergency restraining
order and pull all copies of his memoir from the shelves ahead
of its publication this week. (It was denied.)
Barr then tried to replace Geoffrey S.
Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, with a Trump
loyalist who had zero prosecutorial experience — at a time when Berman was
actively investigating Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and a Turkish
bank that Trump suggested to Turkey’s
president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he’d try to protect. (Berman
stepped down, but Trump did not get the appointee he desired.)
That was all on Friday and
Saturday. Just Friday and
Saturday.
What else this past week? Trump’s
handpicked head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — an ally of Steve Bannon,
by the way — purged the heads of Radio Free Europe and its
three siblings, in what seemed like an unnerving bid to make his own version of
state-run TV.
Then Trump tweeted out a video he knew had been doctored by a
meme-generating supporter, a supposed scare segment from CNN about a racist
baby. (Twitter first stamped a “manipulated media” warning on it, then disappeared it entirely.)
That was all on Wednesday and
Thursday. Just Wednesday and
Thursday.
In recent months, Trump has escalated
his war on both the safeguards of American government and his own citizenry. In
April and May, he got rid of five inspectors general.
He has replaced intelligence community veterans with partisan loyalists
who’ve raised questions about the
validity of the Russia probe. He’s threatened to use the military to
quell civic unrest. He used pepper balls and smoke canisters on
protesters for a campaign photo op.
In
her new book “Surviving Autocracy,” Masha Gessen points out that our
system of government is more prone to an “autocratic attempt” than one might
assume. Our other two branches of government should theoretically check
executive power. But that executive power sometimes spills into their turf. The
president appoints federal judges, for instance, stocking the bench with his
favorites like so many farm-raised trout, and the Justice Department is part of
the executive branch, not the judiciary, meaning there’s nothing stopping a
capo like Barr from behaving as Trump’s personal advocate rather than a
custodian of the public trust. “Its independent functioning is determined by
tradition,” Gessen writes. Not design.
The cabinet departments and agencies
recently denuded of their inspectors general are likewise part of the executive
branch. How can they oversee presidential excesses if the president isn’t
acting in good faith? The system is predicated on good faith.
We may yet find it. Of all people,
Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stood between
Trump and his mad lunge for power in the Southern District, saying he’d allow
New York’s Democratic senators to veto Trump’s pick.
(Let’s see how long that holds.) Joe Biden could of course win, and he could
spend his first year in office not just restoring norms but codifying them.
But the true stuff of my nightmares —
and the ultimate authoritarian ambush — would be a move by Trump to suppress
the vote by a means I haven’t yet imagined. (Voting is left up to the states.)
He’s already thrown his weight behind fund-raising efforts to aggressively “monitor” polling places, supposedly to
weed out fraud, an almost nonexistent threat.
Three years ago, a friend of mine
shrewdly pointed out that Trump’s election would be like one long
national Milgram experiment,
the famous psychological study from the 1960s that revealed just how
susceptible people are to authority, how depressingly willing they are to obey
even the most horrifying commands.
Participants were told by a researcher
to administer shocks of increasing intensity to test subjects every time they
answered a question incorrectly. Two-thirds of those participants allowed
themselves to deliver the maximum punishment, 450 volts, though the test
subjects were screaming in pain.
Luckily, the test subjects were actors
and the electric shocks were fake. But Trump’s enforcers are real. And so are
the shocks to our system.
Jennifer Senior has been an Op-Ed
columnist since September 2018. She had been a daily book critic for The Times;
before that, she spent many years as a staff writer for New York
magazine. Her best-selling book, "All Joy and No Fun: The
Paradox of Modern Parenthood," has been translated into 12
languages. @JenSeniorNY