ICYMI Dept: Trump's Second-Term Dictatorship
Go ahead; try to 'balance' this argument by making points in favor of authoritarian rule
ICYMI Dept: Trump’s Second-Term Dictatorship
By Todd Lassa
Donald J. Trump did everything he could to tear up the Constitution in his first term, including desperate attempts to procure a concurrent second term. The Washington Post last week outlined in an expose how “Trump and his allies plan to use a second term to wrest control of and politicize the Justice Department to target his political foes.” The analysis piece, by Aaron Blake, notes this is “hardly the first evidence of the plans for a consolidation of power and a more authoritarian second term.”
“Authoritarianism” does not go quite as far as “dictatorship,” but a potential dictatorship is what it is. So notes Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, which on its front page at presswatchers.org offers readers the chance to “Read the full transcript of (Trump’s) fraud-trial testimony.” If the authoritarianism isn’t enough, this transcript offers insight into how unhinged Trump is.
Froomkin told WNYC’s On the Media that “elite journalists in our top institutions lack the vocabulary and the mechanics necessary to accurately cover Trump right now.” Responsible media outlets that endeavor to present straight news objectively – among them, WaPo, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS News, ABC News and NBC News. They are mired by covering him with “false equivalency,” as if there is a counterpoint to authoritarianism. [It should be noted that CNN’s new CEO, Mark Thompson, told staffers on his first day at the office not to be “distracted by complicated arguments about balance or whataboutism or false equivalency.”]
Trump is no Vladimir Putin, dictatorship-wise, though as told by sources to WaPo his second term would be in the same class as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Poland’s recently defeated Andrzey Duda. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been working on consolidating his power by kneecapping Israel’s judiciary, also could be included in this discussion.
This is what Trump and his loyal enablers have planned for 2025, according to WaPo:
•Use the Justice Department for political purposes. (Including prosecution of his former allies such as Bill Barr, who did much of Trump’s bidding as attorney general until Christmas 2020, just before the Capitol insurrection.)
•Purge the government and install loyalists.
•Consolidate power in the presidency.
•Pardon January 6 insurrectionists.
•Crack down harder on immigrants, with extraordinary tools.
On that last point, the NYT reported Sunday that Trump plans an “extreme expansion” of his first-term crackdown on immigrants, “including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.”
This would destroy our democracy. All Trump needs next November is his MAGA core, roughly one-third of the electorate, plus a substantial share of swing voters and a majority of mainstream Republicans cowed by the threat coming from Trump’s power grab – or maybe no more than a handful of election officials in swing states who are willing to do his bidding.
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