Part 7
As for the Supreme Court, a moment of truth is approaching.
With three Trump appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett —it is possible that the court’s conservative majority will vote to shield a conservative president and accept his far-reaching claims of executive immunity. Such an outcome would further diminish the ability of the judicial branch to check executive powers and conduct.
These developments and strategies mirror what authoritarian leaders abroad have used to enlarge and entrench their powers. They almost invariably target the three key institutions that can hold them accountable as they move to consolidate power: independent courts, a free press, and civil society organizations.
These indicators are not irreversible, but they offer alarming signs of where the US may be headed. With the Republican Senate on a path of blind support for Trump and a Supreme Court that may accept his claim of absolute immunity from any kind of investigation, the legislative and judicial branches appear to be unable or unwilling to exercise their constitutional duty to check the presidency. And now, after three years in office, Trump seems even less restrained by the norms of presidential conduct that were guard rails for previous occupants of the White House.
According to Javier Corrales, writing in the New York Times, Trump is using the legal system like an autocrat.
Presidents across the world use diverse tactics to achieve unlimited government, but a common approach is to erode the impartiality of the law. The goal is always to use and abuse the law to protect yourself and your allies. This is called “autocratic legalism.”
The impeachment outcome and the Roger Stone and General Flynn scandals tell us that the process of creating autocratic legalism is already underway. The executive branch seems to have all that is needed to use, abuse and ignore the law to reward loyalists and perhaps even punish critics.
The president has been embracing the principle of impunity to loyalists since the 2016 campaign. At a famous violent rally that year, he told a crowd of supporters: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? … I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
This is the quintessential autocratic cry: “Support me, and both the law and I will be on your side”. The biggest winner from autocratic legalism was of course the president. A famous study found that none of the 45,000 court rulings between 2004 and 2013 successfully challenged the president’s authority.
Autocratic legalism is not easy to achieve in democracies, but it is not impossible. Trump is reminding us how it is done. First, the president needs the ruling party to serve as a legal shield. Check. Then you saturate the legal system with partisan judges. In progress. Next, you begin to interfere in sentences.
Trump has already demonstrated an affinity for legal pressuring. His recent tirade against Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for being critical, demanding that they recuse themselves on all “Trump related matters,” betrays an impulse for turning the justice system into a support system.
The subsequent step in autocratic legalism is to use and abuse the law to target critics. This, too, is commonplace today among many countries with democratically elected presidents.
President Donald Trump is a most excessive person in anything he does or says. For example, he likes to take the so-called authoritarian “Mussolini pose”. He also likes to embark on totalitarian style “
purges” of persons working for the United States government who do not heel to his commands, —persons he considers his “enemies”.
He surrounds himself with hard-core sycophants, lackeys and puppets, who are expected to give him a loyalty pledge, not a pledge to the U.S. Constitution or to the American people. Consequently, it is said that the U.S. under Trump is turning into a “banana republic.”
The current American president constantly attacks the freedom of the press, which is protected by the U.S. Constitution, calling journalists “enemies of the people” —an expression used in Nazi Germany. Donald Trump also shamelessly befriends other countries’ dictators and autocrats, while making fun of democratic leaders. And, to top it all, Trump has used in public the hubristic Nazi slogan of “God is on our side”, (‘Gott mit uns’).
As an authoritarian, Donald Trump is going further and further toward turning the USA into a one-man government, with himself a dictator-in-the-making, who openly yearns for unchecked, and if possible, absolute power. His plan, notwithstanding the U.S. constitution and its founding principles, is to transform the USA into a militaristic and neo-fascist state, with all the trappings, under his control, and with as few constraints as possible.
He is, by far, the most unprincipled and the most dangerous occupant of the White House that the United States ever had. He has no qualms in bulldozing American institutions if he feels such institutions are an impediment to him exercising full powers.
David Frum, writing in The Atlantic magazine, writes, “When early Americans wrote things like “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” they did not do so to provide bromides for future bumper stickers. They lived in a world in which authoritarian rule was the norm, in which rulers habitually claimed the powers and assets of the state as their own personal property.” He goes on to argue: “If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change.
The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger culture. A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.”
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...
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