On a Sunday Like This, Have You Ever Wondered Why God Doesn't Strike Down Trump And His Enablers?

"The 4th Reich" by Nancy Ohanian

Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, bit his tongue for a long time in regard to how he found Señor Trumpanzee. Unlike Bill Barr, my guess is that Kelly, more of a patriot than the kind of party hack Barr is, won’t be voting for Trump in November. “The depth of his dishonesty is just astounding to me… He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” Probably someone who Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, wouldn’t find suitable for another 4 minutes in the White House. In fact, after Trump’s attempted coup and the J-6 riot, Kelly said Trump just be removed from office. “What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday is a direct result of his poisoning the minds of people with the lies and the frauds.” Later he said what most people who have come in touch with Trump know, though few care to mention publicly, namely that Trump is “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

Yesterday, Jamie Raskin told his followers that “As president, Donald Trump trashed every principle and ideal set forth in our Constitution and every rule of decorum and politeness we have in America. He used the government as an instrument for private self-enrichment and profit-making, relentlessly sought revenge against his political enemies, viciously attacked the civil liberties of women and minorities, and incited a violent insurrection against the Vice President and Congress to overturn the results of a free and fair election.”

Trump, who models himself, not just on Hitler, but also on old time mobsters, usually buys loyalty from his underlings— exactly what he has done with Peter Navarro, currently sitting in a prison cell rather than testify against Trump. Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley reported yesterday that if he manages to get back into office, Trump will pardon him and give him another job for not ratting him out. Theywroter that “Over the past several months, Donald Trump has told some of his advisers and friends that federal clemency for Navarro, if Trump is back in office, is a ‘very good idea,’ … [Señor Trumpanzee] as some of his former staff say, often speaks in vague and thinly-coded terms that they refer to as ‘mob speak.’ Like a number of former Trump advisers, Navarro received a subpoena to testify before the House Jan 6. Committee about his work attempting to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, and his role in producing a series of reports with bogus allegations of mass voter fraud during the election. Unlike most of his former colleagues, however, Navarro openly defied the subpoena, leading to a criminal referral by the committee, an indictment from a federal grand jury in June 2022, and his conviction in September last year. He received a four-month prison sentence, which began in March.”

In the years since Biden’s inauguration, Navarro has surfaced on Trump and the MAGA elite’s informal shortlist of who should expect job offers for senior roles in a second Trump administration, according to numerous people familiar with the vast government-in-waiting preparations.  

As Navarro’s legal odyssey has unfolded, Trump has privately marveled at the extreme loyalty of the former White House trade adviser whom Trump has affectionately referred to as “my Peter.” The former president has said that once Navarro is out of prison, “we’re going to take care of him,” a source with direct knowledge of this comment says. The ex-president has also repeatedly asked confidants how Navarro is doing behind bars, this source, and another person briefed on the situation, add. 

…As candidate Trump plots a return to the White House and faces his own criminal charges across four separate cases, he has expressed a desire to hand out jobs to former aides who have faced criminal charges while working for him. Among those are former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark, both of whom Trump has privately said he wants posted in his potential second administration.

Last year, Rolling Stone reported that Trump had privately pitched the idea of issuing a wave of pardons, if he secures another term, of his high-profile allies who face criminal charges from the Biden Justice Department, including charges stemming from the federal probe into Trump and other Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election outcome. Trump has proposed even doing this near the very start of a possible second White House term. “This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ’s work on these investigations— and be an opening shot in his next war on the ‘Deep State,’” a source familiar with the matter said at the time.  

This would be on top of his repeated public vow— on which he is currently campaigning for the presidency— to pardon scores of Jan. 6 rioters. 

Navarro’s decision to defy the Jan. 6 committee during its investigation into the insurrection baffled some Trump aides and close associates, who told Rolling Stone they believe he did not have to place himself in the position of open defiance of the investigation. A number of Trump aides who remain in the former president’s good graces either complied with the committee’s subpoenas or invoked their fifth amendment rights not to incriminate themselves in testimony. Only Navarro and his fellow former White House aide Steve Bannon stonewalled the committees so completely that they both earned criminal convictions and four-month prison sentences for contempt of Congress.

While it may have been an ill-advised legal move for Navarro, his willingness to risk prison in support of his former boss has not gone unnoticed among the upper ranks of MAGAland. In recent weeks, Trump has joked behind closed doors that Navarro is so loyal to him that somebody could waterboard his former White House aide, and Navarro still would refuse to “rat” on him, according to a Republican source who was privy to the conversation.

The new issue of the New Republic is dedicated to painting a picture of the incipient fascist state Trump will create in America if he isn’t stopped. There are two essays I want to highlight, the first by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, The Permanent Counterrevolution— On politics and government in a fascist America. In way of introduction, she wrote that “During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment and the economy. Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as ‘a shock to the system’ that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.”

She noted that “The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do. Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to ‘[d]ismantle the administrative state’ and ‘decentralize and privatize as much as possible,’ allowing the American people to ‘live freely.’ ‘[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,’ Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts told the New York Times in January. ‘And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.’ The solution to this ‘slow start’— code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy— is counterrevolution. The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion.”

The counterrevolution will be televised. Given Trump’s repeated threats to carry out “retribution” against his enemies, expect prompt and showy announcements of trials and investigations of the political opposition, members of the January 6 Select Committee, and anyone who sought to hold him accountable. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be at the top of the list,” said Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff— a man not given to hyperbole, who understands how autocrats operate.

Authoritarianism is a political system in which the executive branch of government is able to exercise disproportionate or total power over the legislature and the judiciary. This gives the leader the ability to minimize or abolish restrictions on his behavior and also avoid accountability for his corrupt and violent actions. Maintaining that culture of impunity is why strongmen go after the press, prosecutors, opposition politicians, and judges, all of whom can expose their crimes or send them to jail, and why their personality cults present them as victims of “witch hunts” meant to stop them from saving the nation. Project 2025 takes an openly autocratic stance in asserting an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” in America, as though the nation would fail if the democratic system, which is built on checks to presidential authority, were to continue.

Trump has worked hard since 2015 to condition the public to see the strongman brand of leadership as the only choice for America. To that end, he has repeatedly sung the praises of authoritarians around the world. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a muse of Trump, the GOP, and the Heritage Foundation for his success at a brand of authoritarian governance that Trump’s first administration introduced to America and his second administration would seek to consolidate: personalist rule.

Personalist leaders organize government institutions around their self-preservation. Their private interests and needs shape party politics, legislative action, and national policy, just as their relationships with foreign autocrats influence foreign affairs. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who served as the translator of Vladimir Putin’s views and desires in Europe for a decade, was able to personalize Italy’s foreign policy. He excluded Italian diplomats from meetings with Putin, allowing only his private translator-envoy, Valentino Valentini, to be present. An Italian parliamentary investigation later revealed that Berlusconi would have received a kickback from the profits of a planned Italy-and-Russia-built South Stream pipeline.

Trump holds a similarly proprietary vision of governance, which is why classified national security documents ended up in the bathroom of his private residence in Florida. Like most autocrats, Trump sees holding public office as a means of personal enrichment. That is why he spent one-third of his time between 2017 and the end of 2019 visiting Trump-branded properties. Such self-dealing would likely expand massively in a second administration, given his boasts on the campaign trail about receiving more than $7 million from China and other foreign governments for “doing services” while he was president.

…Americans may believe that all this sounds fantastical. Yet the strongman’s special talent is to bring the unthinkable into being. People around the world and throughout history have been caught by surprise at their methods and the scale at which they operate. Bannon, Roberts, Stephen Miller, and other American incarnations of fascism are convinced that counterrevolution leading to autocracy is the only path to political survival for the far right, given the unpopularity of their positions (especially on abortion) and their leader’s boatload of legal troubles. This is why Project 2025 declares that that there is an “existential need” to make “aggressive” use of executive power. The alternative could be defeat.

Mussolini understood that situation well. In 1923, when he was still prime minister of a democracy, he mused about the problem of having one’s destiny decided by the whims of an electorate. “Consent is as changeable as the sands of the seashore,” he wrote, noting there was only one way to deal with “discontented people” who might vote you out: “You prevent it by means of force; by surrounding the mass with force; by employing this force without pity when it is necessary to do so.” Less than two years later, Il Duce announced the start of dictatorship in Italy, ending the right of the population to express its political will.

From the noisy crowds with MAGA hats that fill Trump’s rallies to the quiet fanatics in suits such as Miller and Roberts to a party leader who announces he will act as a dictator on “day one” of his administration, Trumpism is what fascism looks like in twenty-first-century America. If Trump returns to the White House, get ready for a new round of “shocks to the system.” Authoritarians often tell us what they are going to do, and Trump, the GOP, and the political operators of Project 2025 are open about their plans to occupy power and carry out a counterrevolution designed to keep them there indefinitely.

The second essay is by Iranian-American Kian Tajbakhsh, A Cowed Normality— On daily life in a fascist America. He wrote that “By all accounts, even in Nazi Germany, for most of the population not officially persecuted, everyday life could be quite normal, even if many knew about the concentration camps. Iranians know that their country discriminates legally against religious minorities and women as second-class citizens and rejects in principle political and ideological pluralism, and a large number would likely prefer it were different, but most do not think or talk much about it… [E]veryday life is much more important for most people on the planet than ideas or political principles or even politics. Most people would prefer to live under a system they can trust, to be free from arbitrary arrest, and to feel proud to be a member of that system. But most people also want to be left alone to focus on family and children—which is hard enough—and live in an environment that enables that. In my experience, streets and public spaces in Tehran are clean and safe and orderly— much more than, say, New York City, where I live. Comparing the two makes me cringe.”

Cowed normality, to be sure, is not an appealing state. But Americans concerned about rising authoritarianism in our own country may have reason to hope that it, rather than something worse, could be the fate of many, and we are already becoming accustomed to it.

…[T]here is a frighteningly imaginable scenario of things getting even worse in America. The chasm between the world views of left and right during the first Trump administration, especially in summer 2020, has not closed. Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic has argued that Trump’s promised policies toward “blue cities and states could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.” Trump might seek to use federal authority, including military forces such as the National Guard, to deport millions of undocumented migrants, round up homeless people, fight crime, or quell protests— in short, to make war on Blue America. There could be actual standoffs between local police and National Guardsmen.

Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s prediction of “chaos, confusion,” and “massive demonstrations” in the face of such attacks is plausible. As an urbanist, I fear the urban “doom loop” of ever faster declining and failing cities, greater crime and disorder, and loss of services for cities that are recovering. It would scar cities and American society for years to come. Daily life in struggling cities would become harder. I would leave New York, and many others would, too, and an important part of American life would atrophy.

Those with money will retreat even more into their private residences, workplaces, and cars, exacerbating social divides. Many Americans lack Iran’s advantage in a strong and large familial and community support system. A Trump protectionist economic agenda would likely slow down economic growth and opportunity, and the many losers in the economy would suffer. America’s labor market, though more flexible and efficient, offers fewer employment protections compared to Iran’s rigid and inefficient government-dominated economy. The country’s population will polarize even more into very rich and very poor.

I hate to give any theoretical pleasure to the intelligence officer who asked me when I thought the United States would collapse. But here I am contemplating unfathomable future scenarios. If the worst comes to be, and democratic liberalism begins to fray in America, daily life will always go on, as it did under the worst regimes in history. But ultimately, I fear, in daily life Americans are not going to be as resilient to fascism as Iranians are, for all the reasons I spelled out. We’re going to live through it, but it’s going to be harder on us.