A Feeble Reaction to an "Increasingly Inevitable" Dictatorship
If Robert Kagan and his recyclers truly believe that democracy is on the verge of extinction, shouldn't they be more serious about saving it?
Last evening, I happened to see, albeit only at a glance, an MSNBC segment titled “Trump Against America”. That has suddenly become a ubiquitous theme. The spark was a long, long, long op-ed by Robert Kagan, published in the Washington Post less than a week ago under the ominous heading “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” For the benefit of any reader who hasn’t seen either the original or any of the innumerable knock-offs, I’ll quote a few paragraphs:
It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him – pots, pans, candlesticks – in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up [emphasis added; we will come back to this sentence]. But that doesn’t mean it works.
Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.
And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers. . . .
If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive – powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades – but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president [the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt might beg to differ], fewer even than in his own first term.
What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice – all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?
A little later, the paranoid style blooms in full, as we are informed that, should Trump desire a third term –
would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more importantly, for his devoted supporters?
My intention here isn’t to argue about the substance of such hysteria but to call attention to what is not there. If the author and the legion of progressive commentators who are furiously recycling his fears believe what they write (and I imagine that they do), why have they overlooked the most straightforward way to thwart Trump redux? The reason why the former President has any prospect of winning the next election is that, barring the intervention of the little gentleman in black velvet, Joseph Robinette Biden is currently even more of a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination than Donald John Trump is for the Republican. And Joe Biden is the one opponent whom Trump can beat. Mr. Kagan devotes considerable space to explaining why that is so. Yet he never suggests that the Democratic Party should stave off the death of democracy by selecting a different nominee. Nor do the recyclers.
Certainly, it would be difficult to force the incumbent President from his post. But what about, “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him – pots, pans, candlesticks – in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up”? When ships are on the verge of sinking, sailors jettison even the most valuable cargo. Is the present emergency, on Mr. Kagan’s account, any less dire?
If Donald Trump’s prospective nomination is attributable to fanatical supporters, what is the explanation for Biden’s? It is not as if Mr. Kagan thinks that he has been an effective President:
Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.
He notes, too, “the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age”. He doesn’t elaborate; there is no need to.
So, the marauder is crashing through democracy’s house, and we are to send in an elderly, infirm policeman who can barely lift his gun, much less shoot straight?
This refusal to consider any alternative comes naturally to Joe Biden, a lifelong amalgam of Walter Mitty and Baron Munchausen. At a fund raiser yesterday, the President told the well-heeled faithful, “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running”, but, with Trump in the race, there was no other choice, because the Democrats “cannot let him win”. In Biden’s eyes, he is the unique champion who can slay the dragon. Like the aged Beowulf, he will don his armor again.
Old men are entitled to their fantasies, but why do the thegns who can see the weakness of the fading warrior entrust their kingdom to his failing hands? It is a mystery to me.