Adolf Hitler never bothered to hide his intentions. They were spelled out in a book he wrote while in jail after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. After World War II, with the Fuehrer dead and his associates strung up in Nuremberg, historians read Mein Kampf and wondered how the Germans allowed him to put his blueprints into operation.
Donald Trump has been underestimated time and time again. Most dismissed him as a malicious buffoon when he first started dabbling in national politics with his birther claims, demanding that Barack Obama produce his birth certificate. When he announced his run for president, he was roundly derided. He won’t last. He’ll be laughed off the stage in the Republican debates. He’ll never get nominated. Hillary will wipe the floor with him. It’ll be a landslide and a Republican civil war.
Now everyone is wondering how Trump will govern. He has no program and no experience, and that his appointments are completely random. He prizes loyalty, even sycophancy, not competence and is driven by peeves and perceived slights. The same people who told us that Trump had no chance are telling us now that his administration will be all over the place.
Trump is believed to be erratic and have a short attention span. I fear that he’s monomaniacal and deadly efficient.
Indeed, an old lecher who got women to vote for him after bragging about grabbing them by the pussy is no pushover. A libertine who became a hero to the evangelicals knows what he’s doing. A draft dodger who got generals to serve in his cabinet after insulting a prisoner of war and parents of a fallen hero and openly consorting with an enemy, Russia, is no run-of-the-mill politician. A racist who got any Latinos and African-Americans to support him is nothing short of brilliant. A guy who unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism and still got a Jew to back him financially and become his Treasury Secretary is a genius. A businessman mired in corruption up to his neck who got his supporters to chant “Lock Her Up” just because Hillary Clinton has been engaged in some slippery practices has to be taken seriously. A billionaire swindler who somehow persuaded ordinary Americans that he’s on their side should teach a course on scams at the Trump University.
Trump is a consummate demagogue who has displayed a remarkable ability to be dismissed as a nonentity even while marching from victory to victory. He is no idiot savant, either. He is fully cognizant of the fact that he had caught the mood of his electorate. He even admitted as much, claiming that his followers would stick by him even if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue. In line with this reasoning, he is concealing neither the main goals of his presidency nor the methods he will use to achieve them.
Trump, like Hitler, has also written a book, titled Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America, and published it last July. But future generations of historians looking back at 2016 will focus on Trump’s extensive body of tweets. As with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, they will no doubt wonder why the American people, the political establishment, the Supreme Court, Congress, the military, the FBI and other hallowed institutions stood idly by and allowed the American democracy to be subverted even though Trump has been clearly spelling out his intentions in tweet after tweet.
Trump is proposing to turn the United States into a plutocracy – a government by the wealthy. He proposes to cut taxes in the upper brackets, curb government regulations on everything from workplace and food safety to the environment, clean air and clean water, gut health care, housing and social services, smash the remaining unions and make this political order permanent, protecting it with the help of a massive police apparatus built over the past 15 years to combat terrorism and maintaining the outward trappings of democracy by holding sham Russian-style elections.
Trump himself plans to become a leading oligarch of global proportions. He is a rich man but not a good businessman. He inherited a sizable fortune and a business which allowed him to get in on the Eldorado of New York real estate early in the game. And yet, after making a bunch of dumb moves and bankrupting some of his companies he didn’t manage to rise above the 300th spot on the Forbes list of billionaires – and even that may be based on his own inflated claims.
However, judging by the way he has acted as president-elect, blatantly mixing his own business dealings with America’s national interest, in four years Trump’s businesses will prosper enormously. He may end up richer even than Putin – and his wealth will be held openly and not in some shady Panama bank.
Trump’s tweets, which have the appearance of rambling, ad hoc reactions to events, Fox News shows or articles in the press, have consistently and logically sketched out the main thrust of his policies. They should be studied seriously.
In a classic fascist move Trump last week mounted an attack on independent trade unions, coming down on the head of a Steelworkers local in Indiana who dared criticize Trump’s job-saving deal with the Carrier plant. An attack on trade unions is a time-honored tradition of all populist strongmen who claim to be the protectors of the common folks. Putin periodically does such publicity stunts, too. They are called hands-on management and are hugely popular among the masses.
Trump has been in a Twitter war with individual reporters and news organizations which apparently don’t report on him objectively. He is building on the existing distrust of the independent free press that has been hatching in right-wing circles for some time. Casting the media as biased creates a climate in which journalists are cowed into self-censorship. We already see once respectable media outlets pussyfooting around Trump, normalizing his banana republic antics.
They won’t save themselves. Trump’s relentless tweets indicate that muzzling the press will be one of his top priorities.
Although willing to play the moron while acquiring power, President Trump will stomp out all ridicule of himself, as his tweets indicate. Don’t think that Alec Baldwin will have a four-year job impersonating Trump. We’ll soon see the Trump Administration putting financial pressure on NBC to defang Saturday Night Live, which will serve as a warning to others to tone down the satire.
In this Trump will follow in Vladimir Putin’s footsteps, too. Once in power, Vlad promptly took over a TV station which ran a satirical show “Dolls,” poking fun at Russian political leaders.
Even mild criticism will not be tolerated. Trump’s Twitter came down like a ton of bricks on Boeing the moment its CEO questioned his plans to pull out of trade deals. The message is clear: as a plutocrat, your job is to sit back and enjoy Mr. Trump’s policies that will make you even richer. But piping up will have serious consequences.
It is a similar deal Hitler once offered the German people: be a proud member of the Master Race and leave all decision-making to the Fuehrer.
And if there are those who take to the streets to protest – why, Trump’s tweets have already suggested that they have been paid. No doubt such sham protests will be dealt with harshly. Those who burn the flag will lose their citizenship, Trump has tweeted. A fitting punishment: they’re not true Americans in any case, just as Jews weren’t real Germans.
And, finally, the elections. The Republicans in state capitals have already done plenty of gerrymandering and disenfranchising to eviscerate the democracy. By tweeting that millions of voters voted illegally Trump promises to go further: he’ll henceforth decide who is and who isn’t eligible to vote. In other words, he will make his American oligopoly impervious to the ballot box.
Trump’s nominations are not all over the place as some critics have claimed, but perfectly consistent, too. His nominees are either rich or bent on destroying the government agencies they’ll be heading – Environmental Protection, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor and others of the same type.
Sure, none of Trump’s appointees has government experience. But neither did the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. How did their lack of experience hinder them as they implemented their programs?
Congress is not about to stop Trump. Congressional Republicans have closed ranks behind their caudillo. Paul Ryan, one of the more despicable members of that sorry body, will pay no attention either to Trump’s massive conflicts of interest, or to his unsubstantiated claims of massive election fraud.
The Democrats, too, are hastening to find a modus vivendi with Trump. Neither Ryan nor the Democrats will save themselves by their craven acts of submission any more than media outlets will. Ryan will be punished for being lukewarm about Trump and replaced as Speaker by a loyalist. And the Democrats will be reduced to a token presence in Congress after the trumpified midterm elections.
America claims to be the home of the brave and the greatest nation on earth. But a nation is only as good as its people. In the next few months the American people will be called upon to prove whether they’re merely good enough to live in a democracy. After that it may be too late.
