Earlier this month on Bluesky, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote this of Donald Trump:
Last year, in a bid to shield Trump from the legal consequences of his own criminal activity, his Supreme Court essentially ruled he is a king. And now that he’s wormed his way back into power, he’s behaving like one.
Pay attention here: We are, right now, barreling toward nothing less than the end of the American experiment in liberal democracy. That’s what the current regime is trying to engineer, the enterprise it’s trying to extirpate. If Trump succeeds, your constitution is gone, a dead letter. Your freedom, what you fancy are your inalienable rights, your ability to freely discuss things, to choose your own leaders, to have a say in how you’re governed — all these things you idealize and for which you strive, what of them you already have and perhaps even take for granted — will either be gone or left a shadow resting on sand with a future measured in minutes. If your institutions have failed to alert you of this or instill in you sufficient alarm at the development, they have failed you quite badly.
Even while, turning on his firehose of falsehoods, Trump has sometimes rhetorically feigned an enthusiasm for “returning power to the states” — mouthing the quaint bromides of the old conservatism his own protofascism entirely supplanted years ago — Trump has, since assuming office in January, worked every day to centralize more and more power in his own hands, claiming then exercising dictatorial authority he does not have, insisting he can unilaterally override state and local laws by fiat and micromanage the U.S. from the Oval Office while also insisting his actions are beyond review by the other institutions of our government, conceding no checks or balances.
After a first term spent weaponizing the state against his enemies — and with Trump, they’re always “enemies,” no space for legitimate disagreement allowed — then four years spent whining about imagined weaponization against himself, he’s adopted the pose that his “enemies” are, in fact, enemies of the state and is converting the federal government into a machine for persecuting them.
Nearly everything Trump has done so far is either completely illegal and/or blatantly unconstitutional. It would be difficult indeed to overstate this, and impossible for one article to cover all of it. The original point of this piece was to provide an overview of these activities but, as Trump has embraced a shock-and-awe approach that hits Americans with dozens of such outrages a day, it became quickly apparent that it was simply too large of a subject to even summarize in one but too important a one not to cover, so I’ve repurposed this as the first of — and sort of an introduction to — what will no doubt be many.
Exploiting the weaknesses of the American system, Trump has created a major constitutional crisis — not his first but by far his worst. The executive, who, under the constitution, is charged with enforcing the law and sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” the constitution, is, instead, not only refusing to enforce the law but is violating it on a daily basis as a matter of policy and asserting the power to nullify the constitution at will. Systemically, there’s no higher authority with whom an appeal of any of this may be filed. There are two other theoretically co-equal branches of government but they rely on the executive to, in the case of congress, enforce their laws and in the case of the judiciary, enforce their rulings. If the executive refuses to do this or, worse, if those other branches become complicit in the executive’s anticonstitutional power-grab — and it seems very likely that’s going to be the case — all that remains is an entirely lawless concentration of power, operating wholly outside the bounds of the instrument — the constitution — that created and defined it. An autocratic regime. A dictatorship.
And throughout all of this, Trump and his minions have, without any trace of decency or propriety and as if trying to meet an assigned quota for asininity, demagoguery and toxicity, rhetorically attacked the constitutional order, both directly and indirectly, pouring the most savage hatred and derision upon it, working to undermine and destroy the public’s belief in and support for it and convert any allegiance to it into hostility toward it.
All of this is aimed at replacing that order and the liberal democracy that underpins it with a repressive authoritarian state and status quo — at essentially repealing the American Revolution forever and erecting in its place a squalid autocracy where none of us would want to live, courtesy of a “president” for whom most voters didn’t even vote.
What happens next? Far too big a question here but one to take up later. For now, it’s enough to note that the same fundamental dysfunctionality of our institutions that gave rise to a Trump also makes coming back from him a very tough sell, in that returning to it makes for an also-unpalatable alternative. What people need is something better.
If Trump succeeds, what, if any, of our freedom that may survive him wouldn’t survive for long, as the state he’d built would follow in the unwavering tradition of such regimes and seize on his established precedents to quickly end them. Trump is a reactionary visionary; fascism is the well from which he’s drawing, with Orbán’s Hungary as the immediate model, and while the sort of regime he’s trying to impose is fundamentally contrary to America’s basic character — that’s why, among other things, he’s so spectacularly unpopular — it seems a pipe-dream to think the dysfunctional system that empowered him is going to stop him. Part of the impetus for this series of articles, in fact, was the abysmal failure, so far, of most of the “free press” — that is, in this context, the corporate press — to treat this as a five-alarm fire in the house of liberal democracy. To the extent that the press serves, either intentionally or otherwise, to normalize Trump — and many outlets have completely capitulated to him — it’s part of the problem. Meanwhile, the damage Trump can inflict and has already inflicted is incalculable. He has created the most serious internal crisis the U.S. has faced since the Civil War. He isn’t yet a king but if he and his project aren’t stopped, then drawing much of a distinction between a despotic king and what he’s making of himself will become a strictly academic exercise.
[This is, as noted above, the 1st in what will be a series of articles, an introduction to what they’ll cover in detail. Don’t know how many there will be but unfortunately, it ain’t lookin’ like a short run.]
— j.
