Do not be intimidated by the constant threatening roars of a would-be dictator and the cruelty of his incompetent lackeys. A lot of things have to line up for one of these weak bastards to become an actual authoritarian leader of a longtime democracy, no matter how badly they may want to be one. The man who dictated The Art of the Deal to his ghostwriter appears a less and less likely American Putin.
Our boy just got Epsteined by Putin up in Alaska, which Trump said the other day was part of Russia. It might as well have been, Putin stepped up to the mic and began speaking in Russian before his host, the American president, could get a word in. “Next time in Moscow,” said Trump’s murderous, kidnapping, war criminal buddy Vladimir, in English, with a little smile, pantsing Trump again at the end, getting the last word as well as the first. Here’s how the NY Times laundered the story on its front page:
Heh, just a couple of old pals who couldn’t agree about how to end the unprovoked slaughter one of them is committing on the sovereign territory of a neighbor. Got to love that Grey Lady.
Meanwhile, DC gets its illegally removed chief of police back, and the guy who threw the Subway sandwich at the ICE agent, who Pam Bondi fired and wanted locked up for 8 years, is going to have an excellent wrongful termination case against DOJ, if he feels like bringing it. Everything these MAGA zealots do is for the optics, and they keep screwing the optics up. The horror of Epstein’s crimes, and Trump’s repeated lies about releasing the files, and the attempted cover up of those lies, are not going anywhere. His reflex to constantly double down keeps making his position worse. What does Trump say about the teenage girls who were victimized and traumatized for life by his teenager raping, blackmailing, best buddy Jeff? The so-called victims, he claims, are Democrat plants who are trying to make him look bad, and getting paid to lie about him, a guy whose redacted name is only in the Epstein files a few hundred times, at most. America’s greatest winner is always the most tortured victim ever, nobody has ever suffered like him.
In a democratic republic the first step to seizing absolute power is getting the right person elected to a high enough office to claim dictatorial power when the time is right. Having organized, violent shock troops on the ground, beating up political opponents also helps. Exploit a national emergency to pressure parliament/congress into immediately passing a law enabling unfettered emergency executive powers. Election, violence, emergency, enabling act granting absolute power, police state, et voila, dictatorship.
Here’s a textbook case, though, keep in mind, it was during a worldwide Depression and shaky, liberal German democracy was less than twenty years old (in contrast to a 227 year-old emergency powers law Trump is currently exploiting in his bid to be an authoritarian).
In the 1932 German elections Hitler’s Nazi party, with organized shock troops actively beating up opponents in street battles across Germany, captured a plurality in the Reichstag with a solid Trumpian 37% of the vote. The arrangement the other far right parties made when Hitler was appointed chancellor left him supposedly well under the control of the president of Germany, 85 year-old Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg, as president, had the absolute right to fire Hitler, who came into the government demanding the dissolution of the parliament (Reichstag) and passage of an Enabling Act to allow him extra-constitutional powers. Hindenburg refused, until after the Reichstag was set on fire on February 27, 1933, and in an atmosphere of Nazi intimidation, the Enabling Act was passed by the Reichstag, and signed into law by Hindenburg. Chancellor Hitler now had emergency powers and democracy in Germany was over. The Nazi party, soon the only legal party in Germany, was able to rule unopposed under the Enabling Act, without having to touch another word of the Weimar constitution. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined his office with the presidency and declared himself Führer. The rest, sadly for humanity, is history.
Think of the sweeping extra-constitutional emergency powers contained in the massive Patriot Act signed into law here six weeks after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Bush and Cheney were not yet in position to become dictators, because our democratic checks and balances were still intact. American fascist billionaires got to work fixing all annoying impediments to permanent one party rule. But all the stars have to come into alignment before their dream can come true, including having an ideal front man as dictator. Is the increasingly faltering Trump really the man for the job? Peter Theil’s handpicked best boy, repellant chameleon JD Vance, clearly isn’t.
All of the illegal and extralegal Article II powers Trump has claimed in his second term are based on fake “emergencies” that supposedly trigger these constitutional exceptions to congressional and judicial limits on the Executive’s power. None of these are actual emergencies, but if the 6-3 Koch Supreme Court allows you to continue wielding emergency powers, until they eventually rule on the actual merits of the individual cases against invocation of each specific emergency power, and if Congress, even by one vote, doesn’t stop you — emergency powers it is!
Fucking 19 year-old Big Balls, the most famous of Musk’s hackers who infiltrated government databases, fired civil servants and deleted whole agencies that threatened Musk with investigation, gets assaulted in DC at 3 a.m. by a pack of teenagers? Emergency Powers! Federal law enforcement in the streets of burning criminal cesspool DC! (where, as Kashyap announced recently, violent crime is at a 30 year low). Members of a violent Venezuelan gang present in the US? Emergency War Powers, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, based on the Tren de Aragua invasion! Mass ICE arrests and planeloads of asylum seekers and other dangerous committers of misdemeanors sent, without any kind of judicial process, to an El Salvadorian torture prison, to Sudan, for indefinite imprisonment. Now he wants to do the same to citizens for the crime of homelessness. He’s had his federal goons seize their tents in DC, throw their meager possessions into garbage trucks. Being poor and smelly is an unpardonable crime. Trade imbalances with foreign nations? National economic emergency! Congress loses all power over taxation! What’s the logic of Trump’s solution, tariffs? Tariffs for everyone! Article II. China will pay for them, Mexico will pay, build big beautiful tariffs in every city, like walls, or lobbyists!
It’s hard to think that any of this incoherent bullshit will actually fly, as baseless and stupid as so many of the Trump administration’s moves have been. Trump said, prior to being elected the first time, that in order to always be the smartest man in the room, important for a certain kind of boss, he surrounds himself with people who are not as smart as him. Imagine how smart Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kashyap Pramod Patel, Kristie Noem and the rest of them must be. I take the tragically insecure Trump at his word about his hiring genius, and he seems to be demonstrating that principle every day. If nobody in his administration is smarter than him, and he’s neither very stable nor that much of a genius, his word, like his idol Mr. Hitler’s, remains the last lying word on all policy, in which case, in the long run, our democracy should be OK.
On the other hand:
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