Trump Wanted So Stay In Office. Long Live Trump.

[Sixties Fan]

2/2 ...this proof Trump knew he'd lost but permitted the Big Ripoff to proceed—assuming DOJ can show Trump directed/participated in the grift—is what prosecutors need to move forward. At bottom, this is just a garden variety fraud case, albeit one involving a former president.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[TNHarley]

You are either a troll or a complete moron.

 

[Lastamender]

This is from the new book by journalist Maggie Haberman:


Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.

“We’re never leaving,” Trump told another. “How can you leave when you won an election?”

Trump’s insistence that he would not be leaving the White House, which has not been previously reported, adds new detail to the chaotic post-election period in which Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat and numerous efforts to overturn the election result led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by pro-Trump rioters.

Haberman’s book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” is being released on October 4.

The revelations from the book come as investigators in the US House and the Justice Department probe Trump’s refusal to cede power after the 2020 election. The House select committee investigating January 6 is planning more hearings and a final report this fall, while federal investigators have recently served several former Trump aides with subpoenas.

Haberman, a CNN political analyst, has covered Trump for the New York Times since his 2016 presidential campaign. Her stories made her a frequent target of Trump’s vitriol on Twitter.

Haberman writes that in the immediate aftermath of the November 3 elections, Trump seemed to recognize he had lost to Biden. He asked advisers to tell him what had gone wrong. He comforted one adviser, saying, “We did our best.” Trump told junior press aides, “I thought we had it,” seemingly almost embarrassed by the outcome, according to Haberman.

But at some point, Trump’s mood changed, Haberman writes, and he abruptly informed aides he had no intention of departing the White House in late January 2021 for Biden to move in.

He was even overheard asking the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, “Why should I leave if they stole it from me?”

Trump’s vow that he would refuse to vacate the White House had no historical precedent, Haberman writes, and his declaration left aides uncertain as to what he might do next. The closest parallel might have been Mary Todd Lincoln, who stayed in the White House for nearly a month after her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated, the author noted.

Publicly, Trump dismissed questions about whether he would leave office. On November 26, 2020, he was asked by a reporter whether he would leave the White House if the Electoral College voted for Biden. “Certainly I will, and you know that,” Trump said in response, as he continued to spread lies about the election being stolen.

A longtime New York-based reporter who has worked for both of the city’s tabloid newspapers, Haberman writes that Trump’s post-election period was reminiscent of his attempts to claw his way back from dire financial straits three decades earlier, in which he tried to keep all options open for as long as he could.

But Trump couldn’t decide which path to follow after his 2020 defeat. Haberman writes that he quizzed nearly everyone about which options would lead to success – including the valet who brought Diet Cokes when Trump pressed a red button on his Oval Office desk.

The reporting provided to CNN from the forthcoming book also reveals new details on what those around Trump were doing in the aftermath of an election loss he refused to accept. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was reluctant to confront Trump on the loss, according to Haberman.

When he encouraged a group of aides to go to the White House and brief the then-President, Kushner was asked why he wasn’t joining them himself. Trump’s son-in-law likened it to a deathbed scene, Haberman writes.

“The priest comes later,” Kushner said.

Exclusive: 'I'm just not going to leave': New book reveals Trump vowed to stay in White House

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

www.cnn.com

A Trump hater has a book full of hate. What else is new?

 

[Lastamender]

You are either a troll or a complete moron.

I say he or she is both.

 

[Sixties Fan]

But all those giggles served to obscure the more pressing fact: that in a departure from all precedent, Trump had used Independence Day to stage a military display, in which M1A2 tanks and Bradley armoured vehicles rolled into Washington, while fighter jets and helicopters filled the sky. The generals, mindful of the need to separate military and political power, had long opposed this extravaganza and, tellingly, most of the joint chiefs contrived to stay away. They understood that such a pageant is the stuff of despots, not democrats.

Another image framed this split-screen 4 July: that of the children, separated from their parents, who are caged in detention camps on America’s southern border. Accounts by lawyers and doctors who were allowed brief visits to these hellish places are almost unbearable to read: children deprived of sleep, denied access to blankets or mattresses, not allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth; toddlers left alone on cold, hard floors, so traumatised they sit in stunned, tearless silence. I’m especially haunted by the report of “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches”.

This too is what dictators do: demonising a group – in this case, migrants – as an alien threat, an army of invaders, so intensely and for so long that eventually any fate, no matter how brutal or inhumane, seems deserved, even when it is inflicted on that group’s youngest and most vulnerable members. Breaking up families, caging children in hot, fetid, disease-ridden camps – this is what dictators do.

But we hesitate to see it for what it is. Again, the laughter gets in the way. So we snigger at Ivanka Trump ludicrously barging her way into a powwow of world leaders, making a meme of #uninvitedIvanka, rather than confronting head-on the reality that Trump is doing what dictators always do: he’s building a hereditary dynasty, so that his power won’t end with his death. Those images at the G20 looked absurd to us, but they will take their place in the showreel, so that, come the 2024 or 2028 elections, they can be used as proof of Ivanka’s supposed experience on the global stage.

It’s all there, if you can bear to look at it. From the kleptocratic impulse – Trump pushing to meet foreign leaders at his hotels, so that he can profit – to his undisguised admiration for his fellow strongmen. Trump can’t get enough of Kim Jong-un, handing him another propaganda gift last weekend by setting foot in, and thereby legitimising, the slave state Kim rules so bloodily – and, once again, getting nothing in return. But in Osaka, at the G20 summit, he was also palling around with Mohammed bin Salman, even though the UN and the CIA both agree the Saudi leader was directly responsible for the violent murder of US resident Jamal Khashoggi. As for the simpering deference Trump shows Vladimir Putin, it’s a wonder Trump’s supporters describe him as a strongman at all: next to the Russian president, he looked like a teenager with a crush.

Draw up a checklist of the semiotics of dictatorship and Trump ticks every one. He muses out loud about being president for life, saying it would be “great”. He’s indicated often that he would not accept the outcome of an election he lost. He’s threatened to jail his political opponents. He has the despot’s attitude to the truth – lying routinely, even about trivial matters, partly to demonstrate power. So great is his sway over his devotees, he can make them believe even what is provably false.

And he has the despot’s contempt for a free press, forever railing against the “fake news” media and all but abolishing the White House daily briefing, which at least aimed to hold successive administrations to account. Note his abuse of power to pursue vendettas against the companies that own media organisations that displease him: seeking to raise postal charges on Amazon, as retaliation against the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; and moving to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger to hurt CNN.


The most chilling moment of his encounter with Putin last weekend came when the two men bonded over their shared loathing of journalists: “Get rid of them,” Trump said to his Kremlin counterpart, perhaps envious of the toll of 26 murdered journalists notched up in Russia during the Putin years.


(full article online)

Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It’s not enough just to laugh at him | Jonathan Freedland

He cages children, he holds a military parade, he muses about being president for life. Yet we fail to see him for what he is, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

www.theguardian.com

 

[Lastamender]

But all those giggles served to obscure the more pressing fact: that in a departure from all precedent, Trump had used Independence Day to stage a military display, in which M1A2 tanks and Bradley armoured vehicles rolled into Washington, while fighter jets and helicopters filled the sky. The generals, mindful of the need to separate military and political power, had long opposed this extravaganza and, tellingly, most of the joint chiefs contrived to stay away. They understood that such a pageant is the stuff of despots, not democrats.

Another image framed this split-screen 4 July: that of the children, separated from their parents, who are caged in detention camps on America’s southern border. Accounts by lawyers and doctors who were allowed brief visits to these hellish places are almost unbearable to read: children deprived of sleep, denied access to blankets or mattresses, not allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth; toddlers left alone on cold, hard floors, so traumatised they sit in stunned, tearless silence. I’m especially haunted by the report of “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches”.

This too is what dictators do: demonising a group – in this case, migrants – as an alien threat, an army of invaders, so intensely and for so long that eventually any fate, no matter how brutal or inhumane, seems deserved, even when it is inflicted on that group’s youngest and most vulnerable members. Breaking up families, caging children in hot, fetid, disease-ridden camps – this is what dictators do.

But we hesitate to see it for what it is. Again, the laughter gets in the way. So we snigger at Ivanka Trump ludicrously barging her way into a powwow of world leaders, making a meme of #uninvitedIvanka, rather than confronting head-on the reality that Trump is doing what dictators always do: he’s building a hereditary dynasty, so that his power won’t end with his death. Those images at the G20 looked absurd to us, but they will take their place in the showreel, so that, come the 2024 or 2028 elections, they can be used as proof of Ivanka’s supposed experience on the global stage.

It’s all there, if you can bear to look at it. From the kleptocratic impulse – Trump pushing to meet foreign leaders at his hotels, so that he can profit – to his undisguised admiration for his fellow strongmen. Trump can’t get enough of Kim Jong-un, handing him another propaganda gift last weekend by setting foot in, and thereby legitimising, the slave state Kim rules so bloodily – and, once again, getting nothing in return. But in Osaka, at the G20 summit, he was also palling around with Mohammed bin Salman, even though the UN and the CIA both agree the Saudi leader was directly responsible for the violent murder of US resident Jamal Khashoggi. As for the simpering deference Trump shows Vladimir Putin, it’s a wonder Trump’s supporters describe him as a strongman at all: next to the Russian president, he looked like a teenager with a crush.

Draw up a checklist of the semiotics of dictatorship and Trump ticks every one. He muses out loud about being president for life, saying it would be “great”. He’s indicated often that he would not accept the outcome of an election he lost. He’s threatened to jail his political opponents. He has the despot’s attitude to the truth – lying routinely, even about trivial matters, partly to demonstrate power. So great is his sway over his devotees, he can make them believe even what is provably false.

And he has the despot’s contempt for a free press, forever railing against the “fake news” media and all but abolishing the White House daily briefing, which at least aimed to hold successive administrations to account. Note his abuse of power to pursue vendettas against the companies that own media organisations that displease him: seeking to raise postal charges on Amazon, as retaliation against the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; and moving to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger to hurt CNN.


The most chilling moment of his encounter with Putin last weekend came when the two men bonded over their shared loathing of journalists: “Get rid of them,” Trump said to his Kremlin counterpart, perhaps envious of the toll of 26 murdered journalists notched up in Russia during the Putin years.


(full article online)

Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It’s not enough just to laugh at him | Jonathan Freedland

He cages children, he holds a military parade, he muses about being president for life. Yet we fail to see him for what he is, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

www.theguardian.com

TLDR.

 

[Sixties Fan]

In closed-door remarks obtained by CNN, President Trump praised China's President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn't mind making such a maneuver himself.

 

[Sixties Fan]

TLDR.

Better than being brain dead like you and others.



And now, back to Trump's history of embracing dictatorship for life.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Johnston notes that personality traits like closed mindedness, along with aversion to change and discomfort with diversity, are linked to authoritarianism: “As these social and cultural conflicts have become a bigger part of our political debates, citizens have sorted into different parties based on personality, with citizens high in openness much more likely to be liberals and Democrats than those low in openness who are more likely to be conservatives and Republican.”

Karen Stenner’s seminal book The Authoritarian Dynamic describes how authoritarianism has grown more rapidly and in greater force than anyone had imagined, in the personage of Donald Trump and his norm-shattering rise.

According to Stenner’s theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or “activated” by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which brings, for them, a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order people equate with basic security.

Authoritarianism experts agree on the basic causality of authoritarianism. People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.

Amanda Tauba, writing in Vox, conducted a survey the results of which prompted her to argue the following: “The first thing that jumped out from the data on authoritarians is just how many there are. Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as ‘high’ or ‘very high’ authoritarians, with 19 percent as ‘very high.’ That’s actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare. The key thing to understand is that authoritarianism is often latent; people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social.”

The Rise of Populism​

Authoritarian populism is a significant challenge to democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic. An increasing number of extreme populist politicians are making headway across the world’s established democracies.

Western societies, including the United States, are becoming more diverse, especially in urban centers. Cosmopolitan urban centers, such as the metropolitan areas on the East and West Coasts, are seeing concentrations of economic dynamism, growth, and new opportunities. Combining diversity, openness, and economic dynamism, cities have grown into an economic and cultural antithesis of the less diverse and economically stagnant suburban and rural areas.

In the U.S. context, the rise of authoritarian populism has gone hand in hand with the decline of trust in government and political institutions; the decline in lawmakers’ responsiveness to the public’s expressed policy preferences; and the rise of ideological polarization. Taken together, these should be seen as warning signs of the declining strength of America’s democracy.

The decline of trust in the U.S. government dates back to the mid-1960s. Fifty years ago, close to three-quarters of the U.S. population trusted the federal government; that number has dropped to below 25 percent. During the first year of the Trump administration, this decline has continued. A similar erosion of trust can be seen in other areas of U.S. society— such as media, churches, corporations, and universities. This makes it difficult to see the decline of political trust as an isolated phenomenon. Furthermore, in some situations, low levels of trust in government could be benign. Citizens who are distrustful and scrutinizing, for example, might be in a better position to hold elected representatives accountable than citizens who hold a more romantic view of politics and politicians.

Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, wrote in a 2015 column for The Guardianthat “populism is an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.” This is why Kurt Weyland, a University of Texas political scientist, wrote, in a 2013 academic article, “Populism will always stand in tension with democracy.”

Populism is spreading across the globe. In Europe, populist parties have won victories in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland; and they have joined governing coalitions in Finland, Norway, and Lithuania. More broadly, strongmen with populist agendas have become president — including Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States.

Various causes lie behind populist upsurges, ranging from increased economic hardship and inequality to growing frustrations with globalization and immigration. But the consequences are worrisome, because research suggests the very real possibility of democratic backsliding worldwide. Populist takeovers are associated with dictatorships and the dismantling of democratic institutions.

Contemporary populists share the objectives of their historical predecessors in Latin America and Europe. They promote a disdain for traditional political institutions, praise the advantages of strong and decisive leadership, and vocalize deep distrust of experts and the “establishment.” Today’s populists use new tactics, however. They no longer signal a quick break from democracy, but rather set in motion a subtle chipping away at democratic institutions.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan illustrate this dynamic. Rather than gaining control through coup or revolution, which can incite domestic and international pushback, these leaders came to power via elections. Once in office, they stoked widespread discontent to undermine institutional constraints on their power, sideline the opposition, and weaken civil society. The tactics used are straightforward and subtle enough each step of the way to make it hard for supporters of democracy to take strong oppositional action.

(full article online)

Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams May 19, 2020 Part 1: The Rise of Authoritarianism and Decline of Democracy in America “ First they cam for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not […]

raywilliams.ca

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the Presidential election that Joe Biden won is an attempt to stage a coup, straight out of the dictator’s handbook. and the signs are clear. Itt’s time that people should not only take notice, but also speak out, because the implications affect the world. History has shown us that democracies can easily slide into becoming authoritarian states.

Even if Trump is unsuccessful in his efforts to hold onto power, many observers have indicated that he will continue to exert his control over the Republican party, including a plan to run for the 2024 Presidential election. And he has a large supportive citizenry which will be courted and manipulated through his powerful media apparatuses.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, “Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump?” Anne Applebaum , former editor at The Economist and The Spectator, and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post, writes:”In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations…”

“He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview. More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in once, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, ring or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy…”

“Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. Far too many Trump collaborators say to themselves ‘If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?'”

Burt Neuborne, the Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties and founding legal director of NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice and has participated in more than two hundred cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Neuborne is the author the book When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, sounds the alarm bells by drawing a parallel between Trump and Hitler. He says, “But I can’t ignore the fact that Trump’s savagely divisive political rhetoric, both as a candidate and as our 45th President, closely tracks the tropes that Adolf Hitler used from 1932-36 to persuade a critical mass of the German people to trade their democratic birthright for a Nazi pottage of xenophobia, bigotry, and scapegoats. Hitler did not take power by force…”

“Germany dropped into his maw like a piece of overripe fruit spoiled by years of poisonous, corrosive rhetoric. The real risk to American democracy posed by Trump’s talent for invective and divisiveness is not a military putsch. It is the erosion of the bonds of mutual respect and common decency that hold constitutional democracies together. One key to Hitler’s success in talking German democracy to death can be found in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, where two small green plastic cubes rest almost unnoticed on small display tables—surviving examples of the miniature radios distributed free of charge by the Nazi Party in the years following 1932.”

“Both Trump and Hitler waged war on the idea of objective truth, relentlessly disseminating a pastiche of lies and half-truths designed to persuade a populist jury of the Leader’s distorted version of reality. Hitler coined the term “lugenpresse” (lying press) to castigate the mainstream newspapers bent on exposing his lies. Trump insists that he is the target of ‘fake news’ invented by a lying mainstream press. Hitler derided scientific experts who disagreed with his crackpot racial and economic theories. Trump attacks climate scientists and economists who disagree with his policies.

“Both Hitler and Trump excelled at scapegoating. Hitler’s poisonous rants blamed Jews, Roma, and the ‘elites’ for Germany’s problems. Trump blames Muslims, undocumented immigrants from Central America, and ‘the elites’ for America’s problems…”

“Hitler hardened Germany’s border, restricting travel to and from the country, and engaging in trade wars designed to benefit German industry. Trump bans Muslims, wants to build a wall on the Southern border, and has initiated trade wars with China, India, Europe, Canada, and Mexico. Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire in 1933 to declare a ‘national emergency’ justifying the exercise of unilateral Executive power. Trump has used multiple declarations of non-existent national emergencies to ignore Congress.”

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

The Use of Government To Perpetrate Violence on Citizens

We are all familiar with Trump encouraging violence towards protestors at his rallies, and encouragement of police to get “tough” with and dominate suspects and demonstrators. And of course, his direction to use excessive force and violence including by unmarked “paramilitary or mercenary” forces to quell a peaceful Washington D.C. demonstration. This added to his comments about White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis as being “good people” emphasizes his willingness to use government security forces and violence to serve his ends.

Violence on the streets is a particular characteristic of fascism and Nazism, after World War I had really got people used to violence and military bands roaming the street beating up their opponents. That is obviously not happening in America today. I think anyone who wanted to destroy America, American democracy, and American institutions is going to use the power of the state to do so.

The Miscalculation of Trump’s and Hitler’s Character

Many people thought that Hitler was a buffoon. He was a joke. He wasn’t taken seriously. Alternatively, they thought that he could calm down when he assumed the responsibilities of office. That was a very common belief about Hitler. There is a major difference in the sense that Trump speaks off the cuff in a very unguarded, spontaneous way. I think that’s true with his tweets. Hitler very carefully prepared all his speeches. They might seem spontaneous, but they were carefully prepared.

When the character of Hitler and Trump are compared, the issue of rationality comes up .What that means is just really not adhering to the conventions of normal political life. That’s something that Hitler did. He did not rule, for example, through a Cabinet. He didn’t use the accepted institutions of government. He had a clique of people around him, Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and so on: a whole group of top Nazis who were his cheerleaders, really. They’re the ones who do the work.

Within just a few years, the Cabinet didn’t meet at all. It’s just a very informal way of ruling that of course leads to a lot of chaos, because competencies are not clearly defined and there are a lot of rivalries within Hitler’s group of leading Nazis that prove often counterproductive.

It’s interesting there again to see how the civil service, that’s the administration at every level, really, did not provide a very serious resistance to the orders that came down from above.But Hitler did bring everything back to himself. His standard speech begins with his own partly fabricated life story, where he basically was poor, and he was different. He got his identity in the war fighting for Germany. Germany instead collapsed. He rebuilt Germany and so on. It does go back to himself.

When you look at his rambling and incoherent table talk, which was recorded during the war at lunchtime and dinner times by his entourage or written down, there again it’s quite narcissistic. He’s constantly talking about himself, or he’s laying down the law about all kinds of subjects of one sort or another.

In the book Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, by the historian Henry Ashby Turner, he describes the political machinations that allowed Hitler to seize the chancellorship of Germany. In January 1933, the Nazi party’s vote share had begun to decline, and its party was undergoing a serious internal crisis, with dues falling, members drifting off, and other leaders questioning Hitler’s direction. A widely shared belief across the political spectrum at the time held that Hitler would not and could not win the chancellorship, because Germany’s revered conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg, had long vowed to deny such a position to Hitler.

Hindenburg and the German right viewed Hitler in strikingly similar terms to how Republican elites view Trump. Yes, they badly underestimated his fanaticism, which Hitler had downplayed in public. While they failed to anticipate that Hitler would launch a total war and industrial-scale genocide, they did consider him a buffoon. His appeal, the German elite believed, came from his outsider status, which allowed him to posture against the political system and make extravagant promises to his followers that would never be tested against reality. What’s more, Hitler’s explicit contempt for democracy made even the authoritarian German right nervous about entrusting him with power.

That reality is stark. Trump’s admiration for ironfisted dictators in Russia, China, and North Korea, is the ideological lodestar of his long history of political musings. Over the years, Trump has weaved left and right on health care, abortion, taxes, and even the issues currently central to his campaign, like immigration and trade, but has never wavered from his foundational belief that strong leaders are those who crush their enemies without restraint. Whatever norms or bounds that we think limit the damage a president could inflict are likely to be exceeded if that president is Trump.

Benjamin Carter Hett, professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York and author of the new book The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, argues the following: “Poor economic conditions would not have brought Hitler into power if it had not been for a number of very powerful people in high positions in government and in business. They looked around and said, basically, ‘This guy Hitler is kind of crude and he’s kind of rough — but we can use him.’ It was elite accommodation that allowed Hitler to get through the doors of power.

You could draw a kind of rough and ready analogy from that to how mainstream Republicans have found themselves either wanting Trump or feeling compelled to adopt Trump and his base as a means of keeping themselves in power…

“There is another aspect that is also a striking parallel. The Nazis were very much involved with cultivating deliberate lies for political purposes. In a way I think you could say the Nazis were the inventors of “’are news’ as a political tool. Trump had strong support from white voters across the socioeconomic spectrum. This is comparable to how Christian Germans felt about Jews in the 1920s or 1930s. This is a kind of resentment of the minority which can be mobilized as political passion. That is never going to lead anywhere good. It obviously led somewhere spectacularly bad in Germany in that era. It’s not going to lead anywhere good for us.”

In an essay at the Atlantic, George Packer describes this ominous and pitiful moment in which America under Donald Trump appears more like a failed state than a great nation.

Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign sent an email to supporters that referred to a “Trump Army,” which should not entirely be understood as a metaphor. “The President wants YOU and every other member of our exclusive Trump Army to have something to identify yourselves with, and to let everyone know that YOU are the President’s first line of defense when it comes to fighting off the Liberal MOB.”

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute has warned that Donald Trump is a sociopath (defined as psychopathic personality type) who will do anything to stay in power. Dodes also spoke about Trump’s use of the term “dominate,” and what it tells us about his desire to control the American people, the country’s elected officials, the military and other institutions of power by any means necessary. Dodes also issued an ominous warning about Trump’s character and behavior, warning that our president is a moral weakling, coward and bully who will continue to lash out at any and all people who he feels have wronged or disrespected him.

Trump’s ultimate desire, Dodes says, is to put his boot on the neck of everyone on the planet.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

 

[Lastamender]

Better than being brain dead like you and others.



And now, back to Trump's history of embracing dictatorship for life.

You stupid shill. This country is being destroyed. The crap you post is filled with lies and opinions that have no basis in fact.

 

[Lastamender]

Part 2

The Use of Government To Perpetrate Violence on Citizens

We are all familiar with Trump encouraging violence towards protestors at his rallies, and encouragement of police to get “tough” with and dominate suspects and demonstrators. And of course, his direction to use excessive force and violence including by unmarked “paramilitary or mercenary” forces to quell a peaceful Washington D.C. demonstration. This added to his comments about White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis as being “good people” emphasizes his willingness to use government security forces and violence to serve his ends.

Violence on the streets is a particular characteristic of fascism and Nazism, after World War I had really got people used to violence and military bands roaming the street beating up their opponents. That is obviously not happening in America today. I think anyone who wanted to destroy America, American democracy, and American institutions is going to use the power of the state to do so.

The Miscalculation of Trump’s and Hitler’s Character

Many people thought that Hitler was a buffoon. He was a joke. He wasn’t taken seriously. Alternatively, they thought that he could calm down when he assumed the responsibilities of office. That was a very common belief about Hitler. There is a major difference in the sense that Trump speaks off the cuff in a very unguarded, spontaneous way. I think that’s true with his tweets. Hitler very carefully prepared all his speeches. They might seem spontaneous, but they were carefully prepared.

When the character of Hitler and Trump are compared, the issue of rationality comes up .What that means is just really not adhering to the conventions of normal political life. That’s something that Hitler did. He did not rule, for example, through a Cabinet. He didn’t use the accepted institutions of government. He had a clique of people around him, Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and so on: a whole group of top Nazis who were his cheerleaders, really. They’re the ones who do the work.

Within just a few years, the Cabinet didn’t meet at all. It’s just a very informal way of ruling that of course leads to a lot of chaos, because competencies are not clearly defined and there are a lot of rivalries within Hitler’s group of leading Nazis that prove often counterproductive.

It’s interesting there again to see how the civil service, that’s the administration at every level, really, did not provide a very serious resistance to the orders that came down from above.But Hitler did bring everything back to himself. His standard speech begins with his own partly fabricated life story, where he basically was poor, and he was different. He got his identity in the war fighting for Germany. Germany instead collapsed. He rebuilt Germany and so on. It does go back to himself.

When you look at his rambling and incoherent table talk, which was recorded during the war at lunchtime and dinner times by his entourage or written down, there again it’s quite narcissistic. He’s constantly talking about himself, or he’s laying down the law about all kinds of subjects of one sort or another.

In the book Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, by the historian Henry Ashby Turner, he describes the political machinations that allowed Hitler to seize the chancellorship of Germany. In January 1933, the Nazi party’s vote share had begun to decline, and its party was undergoing a serious internal crisis, with dues falling, members drifting off, and other leaders questioning Hitler’s direction. A widely shared belief across the political spectrum at the time held that Hitler would not and could not win the chancellorship, because Germany’s revered conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg, had long vowed to deny such a position to Hitler.

Hindenburg and the German right viewed Hitler in strikingly similar terms to how Republican elites view Trump. Yes, they badly underestimated his fanaticism, which Hitler had downplayed in public. While they failed to anticipate that Hitler would launch a total war and industrial-scale genocide, they did consider him a buffoon. His appeal, the German elite believed, came from his outsider status, which allowed him to posture against the political system and make extravagant promises to his followers that would never be tested against reality. What’s more, Hitler’s explicit contempt for democracy made even the authoritarian German right nervous about entrusting him with power.

That reality is stark. Trump’s admiration for ironfisted dictators in Russia, China, and North Korea, is the ideological lodestar of his long history of political musings. Over the years, Trump has weaved left and right on health care, abortion, taxes, and even the issues currently central to his campaign, like immigration and trade, but has never wavered from his foundational belief that strong leaders are those who crush their enemies without restraint. Whatever norms or bounds that we think limit the damage a president could inflict are likely to be exceeded if that president is Trump.

Benjamin Carter Hett, professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York and author of the new book The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, argues the following: “Poor economic conditions would not have brought Hitler into power if it had not been for a number of very powerful people in high positions in government and in business. They looked around and said, basically, ‘This guy Hitler is kind of crude and he’s kind of rough — but we can use him.’ It was elite accommodation that allowed Hitler to get through the doors of power.

You could draw a kind of rough and ready analogy from that to how mainstream Republicans have found themselves either wanting Trump or feeling compelled to adopt Trump and his base as a means of keeping themselves in power…

“There is another aspect that is also a striking parallel. The Nazis were very much involved with cultivating deliberate lies for political purposes. In a way I think you could say the Nazis were the inventors of “’are news’ as a political tool. Trump had strong support from white voters across the socioeconomic spectrum. This is comparable to how Christian Germans felt about Jews in the 1920s or 1930s. This is a kind of resentment of the minority which can be mobilized as political passion. That is never going to lead anywhere good. It obviously led somewhere spectacularly bad in Germany in that era. It’s not going to lead anywhere good for us.”

In an essay at the Atlantic, George Packer describes this ominous and pitiful moment in which America under Donald Trump appears more like a failed state than a great nation.

Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign sent an email to supporters that referred to a “Trump Army,” which should not entirely be understood as a metaphor. “The President wants YOU and every other member of our exclusive Trump Army to have something to identify yourselves with, and to let everyone know that YOU are the President’s first line of defense when it comes to fighting off the Liberal MOB.”

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute has warned that Donald Trump is a sociopath (defined as psychopathic personality type) who will do anything to stay in power. Dodes also spoke about Trump’s use of the term “dominate,” and what it tells us about his desire to control the American people, the country’s elected officials, the military and other institutions of power by any means necessary. Dodes also issued an ominous warning about Trump’s character and behavior, warning that our president is a moral weakling, coward and bully who will continue to lash out at any and all people who he feels have wronged or disrespected him.

Trump’s ultimate desire, Dodes says, is to put his boot on the neck of everyone on the planet.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

Hitler? You lose this argument.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

The Slippery Slope from an Authoritarian/Autocratic State to a Fascist One​

The main problem people have in understanding Fascism is that they confuse it with Nazism. They have heard that Hitler was a fascist and so America can never be like that.

Madeleine Albright, a highly respected historian by education who served as the US secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Will we stop Trump before it’s too late?” and recently published her new book Fascism: A Warning. The book is the work of a woman who knows authoritarianism when she sees it. And she sees the seeds of it in leaders who have aimed to subvert democratic norms— Turkey’s Erdoğan, Venezuela’s Maduro, Hungary’s Orbán, and others—but also in Donald Trump, whom she calls in the book ‘the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S. history.’”

A widely accepted definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject. The exact nature of fascism and its core tenets has been debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. A significant number of scholars agree that a “fascist regime” is foremost an authoritarian form of government, although not all authoritarian regimes are fascist.

Authoritarianism is thus a defining characteristic, but most scholars will say that more distinguishing traits are needed to make an authoritarian regime fascist. Similarly, fascism as an ideology is also hard to define. Originally, it referred to a totalitarian political movement linked with corporatism which existed in Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Many scholars use the word “fascism” without capitalization in a more general sense, to refer to an ideology (or group of ideologies) which was influential in many countries at many different times.

For this purpose, they have sought to identify what Roger Griffin professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England, calls a “fascist minimum”—that is, the minimum conditions that a certain political movement must meet in order to be considered “fascist”.

According to most scholars of fascism, there are both left and right influences on fascism as a social movement, and fascism, especially once in power, has historically attacked both left, moderate right wing and the opposition in the radical right in order to maintain power.

Facism​

“Many of Hitler’s opponents did initially dismiss him as a buffoon. But one year into power? They either were dead, in concentration camps or funning for their lives.”—Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich.

“Experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.”—Montesquieu,1748.

“Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands—all too frequently—men with the mentality of gangsters get control.”—Lord Acton,1866.

“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”—Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“If this [U.S.] government every became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government cold enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”—Frank Church, American lawyer and U.S. Senator, chairman of the Church Senate Committee in an interview on the TV program “Meet the Press, ” 1975.

“When Facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flage and carrying the cross.”—Sinclair Lewis,American author of the book, It Can’t Happen Here, a novel bout the election of a fascist to the American presidency.

The Fundamental Characteristics of Fascism:​

• Right wing conservative orientation. Fascists are fervently against Marxism, Socialism, Anarchism, Communism, Environmentalism, etc.—in essence they are against the progress left in total, including moderate leftists such as social democrats. Fascism is an extreme right wing ideology, although it can be opportunistic.
• Nationalistic: Fascism places a very strong emphasis on patriotism and nationalism. Criticism of the nation’s main ideals, especially war, is lambasted as unpatriotic at best, and treason at worst. State propaganda consistently broadcasts threats of attack, while justifying pre-emptive war. Fascism invariably seeks to instill in its people the warrior mentality: to always be vigilant, wary of strangers and suspicious of foreigners.
• Hierarchical: Fascist society is ruled by a “righteous” leader, who is supported by an elite secret vanguard of capitalists. Hierarchy is prevalent throughout all aspects of society – every street, every workplace, every school, will have its local Hitler, part police informer, part bureaucrat – and society is prepared for war at all times. The absolute power of the social hierarchy prevails over everything, and thus a totalitarian society is formed. Representative government is acceptable only if it can be controlled and regulated, direct democracy (e.g. Communism) is the greatest of all crimes. Any who oppose the social hierarchy of fascism will be imprisoned or executed.
• Anti-equality: Fascism loathes the principles of economic equality and disdains equality between immigrant and citizen.Some forms of fascism extend the fight against equality into other areas: gender, sexual, minority or religious rights, for example.
• Religious: Fascism contains a strong amount of reactionary religious beliefs, harking back to times when religion was believed to be “strict, potent, and pure”. Nearly all Fascist societies are Christian, and are supported by Catholic and Protestant churches.
• Capitalist: Fascism does not require revolution to exist in capitalist society: fascists can be elected into office (though their disdain for elections usually means manipulation of the electoral system).They view parliamentary and congressional systems of government to be inefficient and weak, and will do their best to minimize its power over their policy agenda. Fascism exhibits the worst kind of capitalism where corporate power is absolute, and all vestiges of workers’ rights are destroyed.
• Militaristic: Fascism is capitalism at the stage of impotent imperialism. War can create markets that would not otherwise exist by wreaking massive devastation on a society, which then requires reconstruction! Fascism can thus “liberate” the survivors, provide huge loans to that society so fascist corporations can begin the process of rebuilding.
• “Voluntarist” Ideology: Fascism adopts a certain kind of “voluntarism;” they believe that an act of will, if sufficiently powerful, can make something true. Thus all sorts of ideas about racial inferiority, historical destiny, even physical science, are supported by means of violence, in the belief that they can be made true. It is this sense that Fascism is subjectivist.
• Anti-Modern: Fascism loathes all kinds of modernism, especially creativity in the arts, whether acting as a mirror for life (where it does not conform to the Fascist ideal), or expressing deviant or innovative points of view. Facism is also selectively anti-science, choosing to support science that supports its agenda. Fascism invariably burns books and victimizes artists; artists who do not promote the fascists ideals are seen as “decadent.” Fascism is hostile to broad learning and interest in other cultures, since such pursuits threaten the dominance of fascist myths. The peddling of conspiracy theories is usually substituted for the objective study of history.

Fascism stuns us with fresher and larger outrages, that make yesterday’s seem irrelevant, winnowing away our decency. Fascism makes it more and more costly to be your better self. This shock-and-awe strategy of moral violation was an explicit goal of the Nazis — Hitler called it the Big Lie technique, to every day tell a bigger lie, and yesterday’s would soon be forgotten. It’s also one the Russians use this technique today to first overwhelm us, until we are left numb and paralyzed by the sheer scale and scope of all these transgressions against civilization, wondering which outrage to speak out against first, and thus, we weary of morality itself.

What is its effect? It raises the cost of being your better self. Fascism depends on fear and despair and a return to the past rather than a vision for a better society. People are fearful about what will happen to them, feel disenfranchised or feel like the country no longer cares about them, and want a return to “better times” in the past.

Fascism proceeds through a series of authoritarian collapses, each one a little more severe than the last. A series of actions by the leader(s) occur, sometimes on a daily basis, so that people begin to feel like it’s the norm, or become numb because of the overwhelming stressful impact.

Fascism is just like an epidemic of a lethal virus. Those who follow the leader take their cues from him, and have license to act in the same ways because they know there will be few or no consequences. Behavior becomes viral. Sixty-eight percent of voters polled by two researchers believed the President Trump’s repeated claims that widespread “voter fraud” cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election, and 52 percent said they would support postponing the 2020 election in order to make sure only “legal” citizens cast ballots.

Fifty-six percent answered that they would support the measure if Trump and Congress approved of it. “At a minimum, [the survey results] show that a substantial number of Republicans are amenable to violations of democratic norms that are more flagrant than what is typically proposed,” wrote Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, in the Washington Post.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

 

[Sixties Fan]

You stupid shill. This country is being destroyed. The crap you post is filled with lies and opinions that have no basis in fact.

And you keep wasting your time not showing any evidence that it is not coming from Trump and those following him.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

Donald Trump, the Autocratic Ruler​

Donald Trump was a few steps from becoming an elected dictator.

Trump’s specific policies aren’t the thing that most sets him apart from the rest of the field of GOP candidates. Rather, it’s his rhetoric and style. The way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.

And, perhaps most importantly, his willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to the minority groups that authoritarians find so threatening. That’s why it’s a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won’t let “political correctness” hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear. Trump has a classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive.

There were plenty of signs that show Trump is attempting to make the U.S. into an authoritarian state, and some that frankly have echoes of a fascist nation. Here’s a few:

Systematic attacks on the media. Often referring to the news media (except his news outlet, Fox News) as the “enemy of the people,” and “fake news,” there’s little doubt that Trump and his associates have repeatedly tried to intimidate mainstream media organizations, whether through tweets deriding the supposedly “failing” New York Times, the repeated references to the “Amazon Washington Post,” or White House chief strategist and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon’s referring to media organizations as “the opposition party.”

Trump and Fox News also falsely accused the Times of thwarting efforts to kill or capture top Islamic State leaders, and the White House has arbitrarily excluded reporters of some organizations from press pools, press conferences, and other events. And in the lead up to the mid-term elections, Trump harangued his audience nonstop about the “criminal and diseased” immigrant caravan that was going to invade the U.S. and attack innocent American citizens. And that’s just a small sample of Trump’s war on the press.

Building an official pro-Trump media network: There’s little doubt Trump has tried to favor outlets that embrace him, which is why the White House gave press credentials to the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and has given the reliably wacky and pro- Trump Breitbart privileged access. And as one might expect, the Trump administration has backed the expansion plans of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. But Fox News and Sinclair act more like the administration’s publicity firms than independent news organizations.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 5

Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, or the domestic security agencies.An obvious counterweight to executive overreach are career civil servants who remain sensitive to precedents, have lots of expertise, and tend to follow the rule of law. And as Samuel Huntington, former director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter, pointed out many years ago, an important barrier to excessive militarization is having a professional military whose direct political role is limited. Trump has taken steps to politicize the civil service in various ways or turn the military and the intelligence and domestic security agencies, including the Department of Justice into tools of the White House instead of independent defenders of the Constitution.

Trump has demanded that senior officials resign or fired people who declined to do his bidding, such as former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey and more recently, independent Inspector Generals. He has declined to make top appointments in a number of agencies, at one point telling Fox News,“A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary.” Trump has also questioned the integrity of the nonpartisan and highly respected Congressional Budget Office, and recently the CDC and he crossed another line by telling uniformed military personnel to call Congress and lobby for his defence spending and health care proposals.

Enforcing the law for only one side. A systematic crackdown on left-wing opposition has not occurred, but Trump & Co. do not seem at all concerned by the growing level of rightwing extremism in the country and utterly indifferent to such tendencies abroad. Trump has been quick to condemn terrorist attacks by Muslims and the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) in June but said nothing after a disturbed right-wing sympathizer murdered an innocent black American and also when an Israeli-American teenager issued a series of bizarre threats against Jewish synagogues and community centers, and more recently death threats aimed at Democratic politicians. It is hard to escape the impression that Trump thinks the law is something that applies to other people — and mostly to those who probably didn’t vote for him.

Questioning the validity of the election system unless it’s in his favour. Trump’s current attempt to call the results of the 2020 Presidential election invalid, corrupt and claim that he won is classic dictator strategy. And he is supported by the vast majority of Republican politicians and voters.No serious scholar of U.S. voting behavior believes that electoral fraud is widespread or politically consequential, but Trump, and other Republican politicians would like to make it as hard as possible for people they deem unlikely to vote their way to actually go to the polls. He has even intimated that if he lost the election it would not be legitimate, and that his supporters would need to “do something about it.”

Fear mongering. As he did during the campaign, Trump has continued to issue dark warnings about various dangers from which he supposedly needs to protect us. His inaugural address conjured up a weird, Gothamesque description of “American carnage,” and in a speech in Poland openly asked whether “the West” still had the will to defend itself. He has continued to rail against Muslims (except for the rich ones in Saudi Arabia) and to inflate threats from North Korea and Iran. And he has stoked fear about immigrants.

Witness the fear campaign about the immigrant caravan from central America headed to the U.S. border, composed of as Trump described them, of rapists, murderers, middle eastern terrorists and disease ridden people.

Creating a scapegoats who are intent on destroying America.Trump has targeted immigrants, particularly Hispanics, and non-whites as the “enemy” who threaten American “national security” and safety. This includes the separation of immigrant children from their parents and establishing detention camps for them.

Demonizing anyone who opposes him. No American president has been as prone to treat his opponents with contempt, disregard, and blatant hostility. Trump spent the campaign belittling his Republican opponents and vowing to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. Now he is on a campaign to accuse former President Obama and his administration of “crimes.” He has continued to blame America’s problems on everyone but himself, accuse anyone who opposes him of betraying the country, and offers self-pitying “tweetstorms” about the vast opposition he faces from his supposed enemies (some of whom used to be allies).

He uses the language of “nationalism,” ignoring its connotations in history in Germany, Japan and Italy. In his America first policy, and his withdrawal from international treaties and agreements, his rhetoric and action is both insular and stokes the aggressive attitude in his followers of “us and them,” and the rest of the world being against the U.S.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca

 

[Lastamender]

And you keep wasting your time not showing any evidence that it is not coming from Trump and those following him.

Any evidence Trump has is denied by you traitors. This is a one-sided clusterfuck for you. The chaos you are enabling is devastating this country. All to make lies the truth. That cannot be done and that is why you are failing.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 6

Surrounding himself with sycophants and corrupt people who are blindly loyal and acting out of their own self gain.Trump is unwilling and unable to separate his own personal financial and personal interests (and those of his businesses) from that of the Presidency and the country, raising serious constitutional, legal and ethical concerns. His loyal followers and appointees have taken the cue from him, and have already been embroiled in corruption and unethical practices.

Seeking to operate mostly through the power of the Presidency and his administration (eg: Executive Orders and Directives). He sees the other equal branches of government (Congress and the courts) as only valid and useful if they serve his interests and agree with him.

Deliberately and frequently lying to the American public.The Washington Post, CNN and other media outlets have fact-checked Trump’s statements. The Fact Checker’sdatabase analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. As of day 558 of his presidency, he made 4,229 false and misleading claims — an increase of 978 in just two months. That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day. Autocrats and dictators throughout history have been known to use false information and lies as a way of controlling the populace.

Harvard Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have authored the new book How Democracies Die, which details the warning signs Trump showed as a candidate. In a healthy democracy, they argue, those traits should have derailed his bid for the presidency.

“Trump was easily identifiable as someone who is not committed to the democratic rules of the game,” Levitsky told Newsweek on Thursday. “There is real cause for concern for the health of our democratic institutions.”

The four markers are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rules.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

“Those are things that democratic candidates in the U.S. simply do not have,” Levitsky said. At least, until Trump. The checklist is meant to be a litmus test for candidates—not incumbents—for good reason, Levitsky said. “Once they’re in office, it’s too late,” he said. “The point is the best way to stop an authoritarian is to prevent them from getting into office in the first place. Once they get elected to office, it gets much more difficult to stop them.”

The typical paths to autocracy used to be through revolution or military coup. No longer. Today’s strongmen — Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and others — came to power through elections and then used the institutions of government to subvert democracy and expand their own powers. Trump regularly praises the current batch of autocrats and clearly longs to rule as they do.

How could an elected autocracy take hold in the United States? After all, it has three branches of government, with built-in checks and balances. But these days, it is not so clear that America’s constitutional framework could readily repel Donald Trump’s autocratic impulses, especially when supported by the Republican party determined to do Trump’s will.

Trump clearly admires foreign strongmen who have been able to dismantle democratic institutions and amass executive power. He praises them not because their policies are compatible with American interests and values, but because they repudiate those values with impunity. Trump and his allies in Congress, and potentially the Supreme Court, are laying out a path that would make it possible for him to emulate the authoritarians.

Did President Trump Want to be a Dictator? - Ray Williams

By Ray Williams November 30, 2020 Part 2 of the Article: Are Americans Becoming More Authoritarian Under An Autocratic President? Many observers have argued that America was slipping into an autocratic state under President Trump, and his current efforts to undermine the results of the...

raywilliams.ca