We Can’t Let Trump Run America Like His Business
It would be an autocracy
like we’ve never seen.
MAY 13, 2024
THE SCHOLARS AND DOOMSAYERS ARE
RIGHT: Autocracy is the correct word for what Donald Trump has
in mind for a second presidency, should our nation be accursed enough for him
to get one.
I don’t say this lightly. It seemed to
me, going back to the 2016 campaign, that some Trump critics used the word
loosely. I have avoided characterizing Trump as an aspiring autocrat with
dreams of controlling his very own autocracy.
But things have changed. It’s now
clear we have gone way beyond the creepily disturbing dictator worship that’s
marked Trump’s political career, way beyond installing daughter Ivanka and son-in-law
Jared Kushner in the West Wing as presidential advisers. We’re even way beyond Trump’s
successful coup to make his daughter-in-law Lara co-chair of the Republican
National Committee, and her vow that the RNC would spend “every single penny” to get her father-in-law
elected.
Now we have headlines like “Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results.” And “What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign.” And “Barron Trump makes political debut as Florida delegate for GOP convention.” Those three headlines above were lumped together at the top of the Washington Post homepage and phone app last Thursday:
That was the tipping point for me, and
I’m betting that other holdouts trying to temper their alarm are not far from
tipping points of their own.
The most routine news was the
Republican Party of Florida’s list of delegates to the national convention
in Milwaukee, and yet it was anything but routine. Barron, age 18, was the tip
of a Trump contingent that still includes three of his half siblings—Don Jr.,
Eric, and Tiffany—along with longtime Don Jr. fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, who
is on the RNC committee writing the 2024 Republican platform, and
Tiffany’s husband Michael Boulos. Barron’s launch as a member of Team Trump lasted only
two days, until his mother issued an opaque statement about “prior commitments,” but by then the news had been
splashed across front pages all over.
Lara Trump, already making the rounds of state GOP conventions, will of course be highly visible at
the national convention in July. Add in close, longtime associates, operatives,
and allies, and the family extends much further. And now come reports that
Ivanka and Jared, who left politics in 2021, are returning to the fold. Puck reported
that Ivanka is looking to help her father’s campaign and
possibly return to the White House, while Reuters
scooped that Jared was reaching out to donors ahead of a Manhattan
fundraiser for Trump this week. (One cohost was Jared’s father Charles, whom
Trump pardoned in 2020 for crimes including tax
evasion and witness retaliation in a case Chris Christie called “one of the most loathsome,
disgusting crimes” he’d ever prosecuted as a U.S. attorney.)
This show of family force immediately
brought to mind how Hope Hicks described the Trump Organization in her
testimony at the hush money trial in New York: “Everybody that works there in
some sense reports to Mr. Trump. It’s a very big and successful company, but
it’s really run like a small family business in certain ways. And Mr. Trump and
Don and Eric and Ivanka were very involved in the business, and so people
reported to the four family members.”
A penny-pinching, media-obsessed micromanager dad with three children as his
trusted lieutenants is running a family business, no matter how large it is.
What do you call it when you transfer that model to the nation’s highest
office—a micromanager president attended by five or six family members at his
beck and call, both inside and outside the White House, with broad and largely
undefined political, policy, or legal roles and limits, running a country of
330 million people? That’s an autocracy—“government by a single person or small
group that has unlimited power or authority, or the power of authority of such
a person or group.”
You don’t need much imagination to
envision how this would work. In fact, the Post exclusive on
Trump’s meeting with oil CEOs lays it out in all its excruciatingly
transactional detail: They’re at Mar-a-Lago in a room with a view of the
(warming, rising) ocean. One of them complains about the burdens of President
Joe Biden’s climate policies and regulations. Trump tells the CEOs they should
raise $1 billion to return him to office and he’ll immediately reverse dozens
of Biden environmental rules and block new ones. He tells them it will be a
“deal,” the Post reported, “because of the taxation and
regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”
Trump obviously does not anticipate
problems getting this done. After all, he has a plan to dismantle much of the federal civil service
and replace government experts with partisan loyalists. And so what if some say
his meeting with the oil company CEOs sounds like a corrupt quid pro quo, or suggest he may
have violated a federal bribery law? Other analysts say the meeting
likely was legal, and it’s not like judges and justices have
been rushing to hold Trump accountable—for anything.
He already has shown that he can
effectively manipulate Republican lawmakers when he wants or needs something.
They acquitted him in two impeachment trials, killed a landmark bipartisan
border security package because he told them to, and as Joe Perticone reports,
they are already laying the groundwork for 2024 election
denialism. Compliance levels are high and unsurprising, given the threats and
menace—both implicit and explicit—of Trump-era politics.
Speaking of transactions and
compliance, Stormy Daniels on the stand at the New York “hush money” trial
seemed to be as stunned as some of the oil CEOs at Trump’s unsubtle demands.
She thought she’d accepted a dinner invitation to Trump’s penthouse hotel
suite. She testified that she didn’t get dinner, but she did get a sexual
encounter after Trump suggested she should appear on his TV show, The
Apprentice. Daniels says she was too shocked and insecure to decline the
sex—in part because Trump was older, bigger, had a bodyguard, and implied sex
was part of a deal she didn’t realize she’d agreed to. “This is the only way
you’re getting out of the trailer park,” she said he told her. And “I thought you were serious about what
you wanted.”
Every day we learn more about how
Trump intends to command a global superpower the second time around. Every day
it looks more like how he ran the Trump Organization. And in the same way that
“there’s always a tweet” from Trump for any
occasion, or a joke from The Simpsons, the hush
money/election interference trial is delivering a vivid series of darkly
frightening insights about Trump and the way he does business, both his own and
America’s.