President Donald J. Trump—Part ll
Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2024 6:14 am
I know AF is, but I'm still not convinced he's going to make it. There are still four months for Trump to self-destruct, and still four months for the Dem machine, which you have to think is running 24/7, pushing the super-charged horsepower engine to the very limits of capacity, sifting through and vetting October Surprises--or one for each month remaining till election day, or every week even. I'm sure there's no shortage of potentials with this guy. In any event--and along those lines, here's a think piece from today's Boston Sunday Globe.
=============================
IDEAS
Donald Trump wants to destroy American democracy. He will fail.
Reports of the republic’s potential demise are greatly exaggerated.
By David Scharfenberg Globe Staff July 7, 2024
Late last year, in an essay in The Atlantic about the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy, writer David Frum warned against a failure of imagination.
The former president, he wrote, “operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior — never mind normal political behavior — that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly.”
In the months that followed, this became the essential argument of the #2024Resistance:
When Trump tells us he will be an autocrat in a second term, believe him.
Believe him when he threatens to deploy troops on domestic soil. Believe him when he promises to jail his political enemies. Believe him when he pledges to sweep millions of undocumented immigrants into sprawling detention centers.
The message feels even more urgent after the last couple of weeks.
Trump’s trampling of a feeble Joe Biden in their debate seemed to edge him closer to the White House. And the Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution encouraged his worst instincts.
Now a question that once felt distant has crept uncomfortably close: Could this be it?
Could Donald Trump actually topple American democracy?
The answer, you may be relieved to learn, is almost certainly not.
Cruel policy won’t break us
The defining feature of the reporting and commentary surrounding a second Trump term is its sweep.
The Atlantic published the Frum essay in an issue devoted entirely to the dangers of a restoration.
There were pieces on the lapdogs Trump would install in the upper reaches of government, on the folly of pulling out of the NATO alliance, on the specter of unchecked misogyny, and on the consequences of a retreat on climate.
This, to be clear, is how the press should be writing about the former president. It’s the only way to convey the breadth and ambition of the Trump project.
But the mash-up coverage has had an unintended consequence, conflating bad policy with lasting threats to American democracy.
Immigration is the signal case.
Any ambitious piece on Trump’s autocratic tendencies inevitably turns to his pledge to round up the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, toss them into detention centers, and ship them back to their home countries.
The Orwellian elements are undeniable.
Surveillance. Cruelty.
Trump, if he has his way, will pull apart huge numbers of mixed-status families and decimate entire communities.
But his plan does not, ultimately, pose an existential threat to the American way — for two reasons.
The first is practical: It’s wildly implausible.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, doesn’t have anything approaching the staff required to detain millions of people.
Trump’s allies have suggested he could deploy the National Guard, but federal law bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. And any move to deputize large numbers of local police officers or FBI agents would encounter sharp resistance.
“Imagine the political scandal when a desperate parent goes to the FBI and says, ‘My daughter has been kidnapped, what are you going to do?’ and the FBI says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t help you, all of our agents are involved in going around and arresting grandmas,’” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
And even if the federal government somehow managed to find and arrest all of the people who are here illegally, it would have to funnel them into an immigration court system that already has a backlog of 3 million cases.
The typical wait for a hearing, says Reichlin-Melnick, would be 15 to 20 years.
There are other considerations, too — the optics of detaining children would be awful, and the economic hit would be significant.
Pulling thousands of strawberry pickers and broccoli cutters out of the fields would send food prices soaring.
Little wonder that Trump never followed through on the mass deportation promises he made in his 2016 campaign.
But even if Trump pulled off a smaller, still-harrowing campaign of expulsion — and this is the second point — he would not be meddling with the basic machinery of American democracy.
Mass deportation may be cruel. But it is lawful.
And the republic has survived centuries of misguided, and often nakedly racist, immigration policy — from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which herded large numbers of immigrants into wire-fenced camps and then marched them across a scorching desert to Mexico.
Admittedly, these are among the most shameful chapters in American history. And Trump may very well write another.
But as long as citizens opposed to his immigration policies — or for that matter, his abortion and climate policies — can stage protests, elect representatives and senators of their choosing, and, eventually, pick a new president, democracy will survive.
Troops and prosecutions
Trump is threatening maneuvers that would cut closer to the democratic core.
And in some cases, it must be said, those maneuvers could succeed.
Among the most worrisome possibilities: sending US troops into American cities.
When protests over the murder of George Floyd erupted near the end of his first term — most of them peaceful, but some quite destructive — Trump appeared in the Rose Garden and declared that if local officials refused “to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he would “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
He eventually backed down in the face of heated opposition from figures like Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But “if I had it to do again,” Trump told a pair of Washington Post reporters after leaving office, “I would have brought in the military immediately.”
There’s reason to think he will be more aggressive in a second term. He’s determined to surround himself with more pliant advisers.
And if he wanted to use troops to quell unruly opposition to his administration, he would have some legal cover.
Although deploying soldiers for domestic law enforcement is generally prohibited, the Insurrection Act gives the president broad authority to act in emergency situations.
Still, any talk of armed intimidation of political adversaries would breed intense opposition.
Governors and police chiefs and editorial boards would raise fundamental concerns about free speech and the American creed.
But they’d also point out — as Trump’s own aides argued when he was considering a crackdown on the Floyd protests in his first term — that a military presence is likely to swell the ranks of the demonstrators.
Escalation may not be an immediate concern for Trump and the loyalists he installs in the Cabinet.
But there would be deep anxiety up and down the military’s chain of command about a confrontation with tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens. Some officers might refuse to carry out what they considered unlawful orders.
The fight over the legality of military deployments would play out in the courts, too.
The American Civil Liberties Union is already preparing litigation arguing that the Insurrection Act wasn’t designed to curb protest.
The military is not the only force Trump would turn into an attack dog.
He’s also pledged to sic federal prosecutors on prominent figures like President Biden.
But if he moved in that direction, he could expect massive resistance.
Lawyers at the Department of Justice would threaten to resign en masse, just as they did at the end of his first term when he considered installing an attorney general who would pursue his baseless claims of election fraud.
And ultimately, bogus cases would fail in the courts.
This is not Russia.
As the judiciary showed time and time again during Trump’s first administration, it will not hesitate to toss out meritless claims — even when a conservative judge sits on the bench.
Biden, in particular, would have little to fear in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official acts.
The Department of Justice is just one of the agencies Trump and his allies want to bring to heel in a second term.
Citing a Reagan-era argument for a “unitary executive,” they have argued that the president should have complete dominion over the executive branch.
This used to be a fringe theory. Congress has long enjoyed broad power to shape the government — and that has included endowing executive agencies with a measure of independence from the president. It’s part of the checks and balances at the heart of the American system.
But the courts have been more sympathetic to presidential prerogative in recent years. And Trump may very well have the legal runway to intervene with traditionally independent agencies.
There are practical limits to his power, though.
Take the Federal Reserve.
It is responsible, among other things, for setting interest rates. And Trump has long made it clear he prefers those rates to be as low as possible. He would surely feel tempted to tamper with them in a second term.
But the next president will appoint only two members of the Fed’s seven-member board of governors, limiting his sway.
And even if Trump could somehow force the panel to cut interest rates, he might think better of it. He’d risk inflaming the markets; highly politicized rate decisions are no one’s idea of sound fiscal management. And keeping rates too low for too long would ramp up borrowing and spending and send inflation soaring.
The cost of being tagged as the president “who caused gas and grocery prices to spike by hijacking the Federal Reserve might be pretty high, even for a relatively shameless administration,” wrote Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in an email to Globe Ideas.
A second term for Trump would be worrisome in other ways as well.
He’s talked, for instance, of cleaning out thousands of career employees and appointing loyalists in their place.
And he could quash a media merger if he didn’t like the players.
Kash Patel, a one-time Trump aide who remains close to the former president, recently suggested that a new administration might even prosecute individual journalists. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But First Amendment protections are strong.
And anyone who thinks serious journalists would stop investigating the Trump administration in the face of that kind of intimidation doesn’t know any serious journalists.
Take all we know, then, about Trump’s most troubling plans for a second term, gauge his prospects for success, and in the end, you get something far short of the end of democracy.
A truly scary troop deployment or two. Some upsetting incursions on the independence of federal agencies. Fizzled prosecutions. A big backlash at the polls in the 2026 midterm elections. And ultimately, an end to the tumult in four years.
Of course, it’s possible — even likely — that Trump is secretly harboring a more ambitious plan to obliterate the checks on his power and stay in office for years on end.
But here, the argument for an end to American democracy grows even more tenuous.
‘Democracy’s Resilience’
Trump’s rise in 2016 spawned a big, nervous literature on democracy’s fragility. Books and magazine features and academic treatises.
The concern wasn’t that generals around the world were rolling over presidential palaces in armored tanks. That was a rarity.
The real threat, we were told, was the charismatic populists who were winning election as president or prime minister and then destroying their countries’ democracies from the inside.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. This was the new face of authoritarianism. This is what we had to worry about here.
But a little-noticed book published in January, “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat,” makes a convincing case that the popular narrative is, if not all wrong, then deeply misleading.
Orbán and Erdoğan are worrisome cases, writes Kurt Weyland, a University of Texas at Austin professor of government.
But they are the exception, not the rule.
Weyland carefully examined 40 cases of populists with authoritarian aspirations stretching back to the 1980s and found that just seven managed to kill democracy.
Countries like the United States, with strong institutions, proved especially resistant.
But even in places with wobblier courts and constitutions, populists managed to topple democracy only under extraordinary circumstances.
Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori is the paradigmatic case.
He came to power in 1990 amid not one but two major crises — Peru was reeling from hyperinflation and living in fear of Maoist insurgents who had massacred civilians with hatchets and assassinated rivals with impunity.
Fujimori, a former agricultural engineer, had astonishing success on both fronts. A sharp neoliberal turn tamed runaway prices, and he quickly put the guerrillas on the run.
The president seemed a kind of miracle worker. And when he moved to disband Congress and shutter the courts in the spring of 1992, a remarkable 80 percent of the country was behind him.
This kind of overwhelming acclimation, Weyland found, is necessary if a populist is going to obliterate a country’s democratic institutions.
And it’s rare.
Rightist contemporaries in Argentina and Colombia were quite popular. But they successfully managed single crises — rather than the dual crises Fujimori mastered. And they were never able to match his lopsided majorities.
Each won a second term in office but had to step down when it was complete.
Crisis, it should be said, is not the only springboard to autocracy. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez used a surge in oil prices to build a socialist dynasty that lasted until his death.
But none of this is especially replicable in a place like the United States.
The American economy is too large and too diverse for a hydrocarbon windfall to transform the country’s politics; the fracking boom of the 2000s, you’ll notice, did not make George W. Bush king.
And the country’s wealth and stability prevent the kind of catastrophe — never mind dual catastrophe — that can turn a populist into a savior.
Hyperinflation is not a thing in the United States. Neither is guerrilla insurgency. And with the glaring exception of 9/11, the homeland has been safe for generations.
Even if Trump faced a string of monumental crises, he would have to handle them ably — even heroically — to have a shot at the kind of popular support he’d need to turn the United States into an autocracy. He hasn’t exactly impressed as a manager.
And the country is so polarized — and so divided over Trump, in particular — that it’s virtually impossible to imagine even great success garnering approval ratings in the 80 or 90 percent range.
Another safeguard against despotism: the checks and balances of the American political system.
The United States has two houses of Congress, often at odds with each other. It has two parties, often at each other’s throats. And it has a Constitution that is very difficult to amend. Those constraints can be maddening at times, preventing much-needed policy change. But they also make it exceedingly difficult for a figure like Trump to rewrite the rules and cement his own power.
In Europe’s parliamentary system, it’s much easier for a dangerous populist to command a majority in a unicameral legislature and push through the kinds of changes that can extend his run of power indefinitely.
Thus, writes Weyland, a figure like Orbán, the most prominent Western authoritarian, could “asphyxiate liberal democracy in perfectly legal ways.”
Restraint
This is not to say Trump has no chance of asphyxiating liberal democracy here.
He does pose a risk, even if it’s small.
This is a man who incited a violent, if ham-handed, coup after he lost his last election — and who is openly vowing “vengeance” on his enemies if he wins the next one.
Electing him president of the world’s most important democracy — again — would be a little mad.
There is value, then, in the anti-Trump crowd’s insistence that we imagine the worst.
But thankfully the Founders did the same. And the system they built to restrain tyranny should hold.
David Scharfenberg can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @dscharfGlobe.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/07/ ... democracy/
=============================
IDEAS
Donald Trump wants to destroy American democracy. He will fail.
Reports of the republic’s potential demise are greatly exaggerated.
By David Scharfenberg Globe Staff July 7, 2024
Late last year, in an essay in The Atlantic about the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy, writer David Frum warned against a failure of imagination.
The former president, he wrote, “operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior — never mind normal political behavior — that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly.”
In the months that followed, this became the essential argument of the #2024Resistance:
When Trump tells us he will be an autocrat in a second term, believe him.
Believe him when he threatens to deploy troops on domestic soil. Believe him when he promises to jail his political enemies. Believe him when he pledges to sweep millions of undocumented immigrants into sprawling detention centers.
The message feels even more urgent after the last couple of weeks.
Trump’s trampling of a feeble Joe Biden in their debate seemed to edge him closer to the White House. And the Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution encouraged his worst instincts.
Now a question that once felt distant has crept uncomfortably close: Could this be it?
Could Donald Trump actually topple American democracy?
The answer, you may be relieved to learn, is almost certainly not.
Cruel policy won’t break us
The defining feature of the reporting and commentary surrounding a second Trump term is its sweep.
The Atlantic published the Frum essay in an issue devoted entirely to the dangers of a restoration.
There were pieces on the lapdogs Trump would install in the upper reaches of government, on the folly of pulling out of the NATO alliance, on the specter of unchecked misogyny, and on the consequences of a retreat on climate.
This, to be clear, is how the press should be writing about the former president. It’s the only way to convey the breadth and ambition of the Trump project.
But the mash-up coverage has had an unintended consequence, conflating bad policy with lasting threats to American democracy.
Immigration is the signal case.
Any ambitious piece on Trump’s autocratic tendencies inevitably turns to his pledge to round up the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, toss them into detention centers, and ship them back to their home countries.
The Orwellian elements are undeniable.
Surveillance. Cruelty.
Trump, if he has his way, will pull apart huge numbers of mixed-status families and decimate entire communities.
But his plan does not, ultimately, pose an existential threat to the American way — for two reasons.
The first is practical: It’s wildly implausible.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, doesn’t have anything approaching the staff required to detain millions of people.
Trump’s allies have suggested he could deploy the National Guard, but federal law bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. And any move to deputize large numbers of local police officers or FBI agents would encounter sharp resistance.
“Imagine the political scandal when a desperate parent goes to the FBI and says, ‘My daughter has been kidnapped, what are you going to do?’ and the FBI says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t help you, all of our agents are involved in going around and arresting grandmas,’” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
And even if the federal government somehow managed to find and arrest all of the people who are here illegally, it would have to funnel them into an immigration court system that already has a backlog of 3 million cases.
The typical wait for a hearing, says Reichlin-Melnick, would be 15 to 20 years.
There are other considerations, too — the optics of detaining children would be awful, and the economic hit would be significant.
Pulling thousands of strawberry pickers and broccoli cutters out of the fields would send food prices soaring.
Little wonder that Trump never followed through on the mass deportation promises he made in his 2016 campaign.
But even if Trump pulled off a smaller, still-harrowing campaign of expulsion — and this is the second point — he would not be meddling with the basic machinery of American democracy.
Mass deportation may be cruel. But it is lawful.
And the republic has survived centuries of misguided, and often nakedly racist, immigration policy — from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which herded large numbers of immigrants into wire-fenced camps and then marched them across a scorching desert to Mexico.
Admittedly, these are among the most shameful chapters in American history. And Trump may very well write another.
But as long as citizens opposed to his immigration policies — or for that matter, his abortion and climate policies — can stage protests, elect representatives and senators of their choosing, and, eventually, pick a new president, democracy will survive.
Troops and prosecutions
Trump is threatening maneuvers that would cut closer to the democratic core.
And in some cases, it must be said, those maneuvers could succeed.
Among the most worrisome possibilities: sending US troops into American cities.
When protests over the murder of George Floyd erupted near the end of his first term — most of them peaceful, but some quite destructive — Trump appeared in the Rose Garden and declared that if local officials refused “to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he would “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
He eventually backed down in the face of heated opposition from figures like Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But “if I had it to do again,” Trump told a pair of Washington Post reporters after leaving office, “I would have brought in the military immediately.”
There’s reason to think he will be more aggressive in a second term. He’s determined to surround himself with more pliant advisers.
And if he wanted to use troops to quell unruly opposition to his administration, he would have some legal cover.
Although deploying soldiers for domestic law enforcement is generally prohibited, the Insurrection Act gives the president broad authority to act in emergency situations.
Still, any talk of armed intimidation of political adversaries would breed intense opposition.
Governors and police chiefs and editorial boards would raise fundamental concerns about free speech and the American creed.
But they’d also point out — as Trump’s own aides argued when he was considering a crackdown on the Floyd protests in his first term — that a military presence is likely to swell the ranks of the demonstrators.
Escalation may not be an immediate concern for Trump and the loyalists he installs in the Cabinet.
But there would be deep anxiety up and down the military’s chain of command about a confrontation with tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens. Some officers might refuse to carry out what they considered unlawful orders.
The fight over the legality of military deployments would play out in the courts, too.
The American Civil Liberties Union is already preparing litigation arguing that the Insurrection Act wasn’t designed to curb protest.
The military is not the only force Trump would turn into an attack dog.
He’s also pledged to sic federal prosecutors on prominent figures like President Biden.
But if he moved in that direction, he could expect massive resistance.
Lawyers at the Department of Justice would threaten to resign en masse, just as they did at the end of his first term when he considered installing an attorney general who would pursue his baseless claims of election fraud.
And ultimately, bogus cases would fail in the courts.
This is not Russia.
As the judiciary showed time and time again during Trump’s first administration, it will not hesitate to toss out meritless claims — even when a conservative judge sits on the bench.
Biden, in particular, would have little to fear in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official acts.
The Department of Justice is just one of the agencies Trump and his allies want to bring to heel in a second term.
Citing a Reagan-era argument for a “unitary executive,” they have argued that the president should have complete dominion over the executive branch.
This used to be a fringe theory. Congress has long enjoyed broad power to shape the government — and that has included endowing executive agencies with a measure of independence from the president. It’s part of the checks and balances at the heart of the American system.
But the courts have been more sympathetic to presidential prerogative in recent years. And Trump may very well have the legal runway to intervene with traditionally independent agencies.
There are practical limits to his power, though.
Take the Federal Reserve.
It is responsible, among other things, for setting interest rates. And Trump has long made it clear he prefers those rates to be as low as possible. He would surely feel tempted to tamper with them in a second term.
But the next president will appoint only two members of the Fed’s seven-member board of governors, limiting his sway.
And even if Trump could somehow force the panel to cut interest rates, he might think better of it. He’d risk inflaming the markets; highly politicized rate decisions are no one’s idea of sound fiscal management. And keeping rates too low for too long would ramp up borrowing and spending and send inflation soaring.
The cost of being tagged as the president “who caused gas and grocery prices to spike by hijacking the Federal Reserve might be pretty high, even for a relatively shameless administration,” wrote Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in an email to Globe Ideas.
A second term for Trump would be worrisome in other ways as well.
He’s talked, for instance, of cleaning out thousands of career employees and appointing loyalists in their place.
And he could quash a media merger if he didn’t like the players.
Kash Patel, a one-time Trump aide who remains close to the former president, recently suggested that a new administration might even prosecute individual journalists. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But First Amendment protections are strong.
And anyone who thinks serious journalists would stop investigating the Trump administration in the face of that kind of intimidation doesn’t know any serious journalists.
Take all we know, then, about Trump’s most troubling plans for a second term, gauge his prospects for success, and in the end, you get something far short of the end of democracy.
A truly scary troop deployment or two. Some upsetting incursions on the independence of federal agencies. Fizzled prosecutions. A big backlash at the polls in the 2026 midterm elections. And ultimately, an end to the tumult in four years.
Of course, it’s possible — even likely — that Trump is secretly harboring a more ambitious plan to obliterate the checks on his power and stay in office for years on end.
But here, the argument for an end to American democracy grows even more tenuous.
‘Democracy’s Resilience’
Trump’s rise in 2016 spawned a big, nervous literature on democracy’s fragility. Books and magazine features and academic treatises.
The concern wasn’t that generals around the world were rolling over presidential palaces in armored tanks. That was a rarity.
The real threat, we were told, was the charismatic populists who were winning election as president or prime minister and then destroying their countries’ democracies from the inside.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. This was the new face of authoritarianism. This is what we had to worry about here.
But a little-noticed book published in January, “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat,” makes a convincing case that the popular narrative is, if not all wrong, then deeply misleading.
Orbán and Erdoğan are worrisome cases, writes Kurt Weyland, a University of Texas at Austin professor of government.
But they are the exception, not the rule.
Weyland carefully examined 40 cases of populists with authoritarian aspirations stretching back to the 1980s and found that just seven managed to kill democracy.
Countries like the United States, with strong institutions, proved especially resistant.
But even in places with wobblier courts and constitutions, populists managed to topple democracy only under extraordinary circumstances.
Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori is the paradigmatic case.
He came to power in 1990 amid not one but two major crises — Peru was reeling from hyperinflation and living in fear of Maoist insurgents who had massacred civilians with hatchets and assassinated rivals with impunity.
Fujimori, a former agricultural engineer, had astonishing success on both fronts. A sharp neoliberal turn tamed runaway prices, and he quickly put the guerrillas on the run.
The president seemed a kind of miracle worker. And when he moved to disband Congress and shutter the courts in the spring of 1992, a remarkable 80 percent of the country was behind him.
This kind of overwhelming acclimation, Weyland found, is necessary if a populist is going to obliterate a country’s democratic institutions.
And it’s rare.
Rightist contemporaries in Argentina and Colombia were quite popular. But they successfully managed single crises — rather than the dual crises Fujimori mastered. And they were never able to match his lopsided majorities.
Each won a second term in office but had to step down when it was complete.
Crisis, it should be said, is not the only springboard to autocracy. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez used a surge in oil prices to build a socialist dynasty that lasted until his death.
But none of this is especially replicable in a place like the United States.
The American economy is too large and too diverse for a hydrocarbon windfall to transform the country’s politics; the fracking boom of the 2000s, you’ll notice, did not make George W. Bush king.
And the country’s wealth and stability prevent the kind of catastrophe — never mind dual catastrophe — that can turn a populist into a savior.
Hyperinflation is not a thing in the United States. Neither is guerrilla insurgency. And with the glaring exception of 9/11, the homeland has been safe for generations.
Even if Trump faced a string of monumental crises, he would have to handle them ably — even heroically — to have a shot at the kind of popular support he’d need to turn the United States into an autocracy. He hasn’t exactly impressed as a manager.
And the country is so polarized — and so divided over Trump, in particular — that it’s virtually impossible to imagine even great success garnering approval ratings in the 80 or 90 percent range.
Another safeguard against despotism: the checks and balances of the American political system.
The United States has two houses of Congress, often at odds with each other. It has two parties, often at each other’s throats. And it has a Constitution that is very difficult to amend. Those constraints can be maddening at times, preventing much-needed policy change. But they also make it exceedingly difficult for a figure like Trump to rewrite the rules and cement his own power.
In Europe’s parliamentary system, it’s much easier for a dangerous populist to command a majority in a unicameral legislature and push through the kinds of changes that can extend his run of power indefinitely.
Thus, writes Weyland, a figure like Orbán, the most prominent Western authoritarian, could “asphyxiate liberal democracy in perfectly legal ways.”
Restraint
This is not to say Trump has no chance of asphyxiating liberal democracy here.
He does pose a risk, even if it’s small.
This is a man who incited a violent, if ham-handed, coup after he lost his last election — and who is openly vowing “vengeance” on his enemies if he wins the next one.
Electing him president of the world’s most important democracy — again — would be a little mad.
There is value, then, in the anti-Trump crowd’s insistence that we imagine the worst.
But thankfully the Founders did the same. And the system they built to restrain tyranny should hold.
David Scharfenberg can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @dscharfGlobe.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/07/ ... democracy/