If Donald Trump loses the U.S. presidential election—even by a landslide—he won’t leave the White House. He has said that much and the history of the Russian revolution suggests that he may succeed in holding on to power. It is very bad news for his opponents, but the logic of revolutions suggests that many of those who will help him carry out a coup d’etat will end up paying dearly for it as well — the way various Russian socialists did, and, eventually, the early Bolsheviks.
Trump’s supporters style themselves as conservatives. Trump and his surrogates routinely attack the Democrats as socialists and declare that America will turn into Cuba and Venezuela if Joe Biden is elected.
A key reason why a sizable majority of immigrants from Ukraine, Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union support Trump is because they believe that the Democrats’ social democratic programs — from which many of them, especially the Soviet Jews, greatly benefited — will destroy America.
Soviet communism delivered the opposite of what Lenin had promised. While claiming to catapult the Russian Empire into the bright future, communism ended up recreating an absolutist monarchy and bringing back serfdom and other forms of feudalism — albeit under a different name. Even now the post-Soviet world remains backward by European standards.
With Trump, it is often the same thing, in that what Dear Leader claims usually turns out to be the exact opposite of reality. Just look at his Make America Great Again slogan and compare it to the picture of chaos, degradation, and moral degeneracy that American public life presents four years into his misgovernment.
Trumpism is certainly not socialism — even though some of Trump’s policies, such as paying subsidies to farmers, running up huge fiscal deficits and playing favorites with private companies, smack more of Hugo Chavez than Adam Smith. But it is no conservatism either. It is, as I have often pointed out, a radical revolutionary movement, and in that it is similar to Bolshevism.
It may be a coincidence that today’s Republicans have adopted the Soviet red, but there is much substance in that fact as well.
Trump has already effected a revolution. Few people will deny that America’s political system has changed radically over the past four years. In fact, it bears less and less resemblance to the American republic, with its separation of powers and division between co-equal branches of government, rule of law, checks and balances, free and fair elections, majority rule with strong protections for the rights of minorities, the free press, etc.
Vladimir Lenin rode to power on the wave of radicalization of a left-wing fringe, but he worked tirelessly to radicalize a growing share of people in the Russian Empire. Radicalization is exactly what Trump is doing at his rallies and in his Twitter account. With every passing day he moves further into the radical rightwing territory, so that nativists, QAnon morons, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and boogaloo civil war enthusiasts are now the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Conservatives today are not the mob attending Trump rallies but establishment Democrats and the handful of pre-Trump Republicans. It is above all the Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden and congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. They are the ones who want to undo the results of the trumpist revolution and go back to the America of Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama.
In this regard, they are similar to Russian monarchists, circa 1917, and as such they are a spent force. Revolutionaries are rampant among the Democrats, too, just as the White Movement in the Russian civil war consisted of a variety of rightwing radical, proto-fascist and nationalist groupings. While united against the Reds they were not interested in rebuilding the Romanov Russia.
Likewise, among the Democrats are people — mostly young, progressive, Black and Brown, environment-conscious — who disdain their elders. The last thing they want is to go back to pre-Trump America which they see as repressive and corrupt. They too are revolutionaries — but they envision a very different revolution.
Lenin’s brilliance was to insist, against the opposition of most of his comrades, that the Bolsheviks take power in October 1917. It was a clear usurpation of power but it placed him at the center and in that regard conferred a measure of legitimacy. They were issuing orders and decrees from the capital, whereas their opponents in the civil war had to declare their temporary capitals somewhere on the outskirts of the empire.
In the American Civil War, too, had the South made a play for Washington first — which was in the rebel territory, anyway — history may have been quite different.
Trump is not about to make the mistake of surrendering power after the election—and he has already warned the country about it. He will have two months as a legitimate head of state, a position that will invest even illegitimate orders from his White House with an aura of legality.
The blatantly un-American move by his party to confirm another Supreme Court justice — after the precedent of not even holding hearings on Barack Obama’s pick in the election year 2016 — will position him to be declared president by the Supreme Court. Curiously, the court has already done so in 2000, when it appointed George W. Bush to the highest office in the land — and this is the precedent which Trump will happily use.
We should be prepared for the Trump revolution to succeed. For the end of American democracy and for a transmogrification of this country into something akin not to Lenin-Stalin Russia but to Francisco Franco’s Spain at best or Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela at worst.
Meanwhile, Trump’s enablers would do well not to celebrate too noisily and keep the fate of those Lenin’s Bolsheviks, mostly executed but Stalin in 1937, firmly one mind.
