Trump Wanted So Stay In Office. Long Live Trump.

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Kruse: Is it fair to see DeSantis as a very capable, committed student, whereas Trump is more of an instinctual autocrat?

Ben-Ghiat: There are limits to the comparison because Trump truly is an autocratic individual. He was as a businessman and he has surrounded himself with people from [Paul] Manafort and [Roger] Stone to [Steve] Bannon who have decades of experience helping and working for dictators. They’re on a crusade to ruin democracy. And DeSantis had a very different career path. And so what’s notable about him is he has sensed, like all smart politicians, what you need to get ahead in today’s America, in today’s GOP, what kind of leader you need to seem to be, what policies, what talking points, [such as] election fraud. What you need to do is turn citizens against each other, which he does with the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. His election security office has a hotline where you can call and tip off your fellow Floridians doing bad things. These are in themselves all things that match up with autocratic policies. Yes, he’s a very capable student of what is going to have success in today’s GOP and with today’s electorate.

Kruse: Is Ron DeSantis the non-Donald Trump politician doing this in the most stark, arguably most effective way, or are there others that you are paying attention to?

Ben-Ghiat: There are lots of others. In terms of his policies and his aggression, Greg Abbott stands out, of course. I’ll never forget that he posed smiling with his target practice sheet and joked about shooting journalists during the Trump years. But Ron DeSantis stands out because, one, he has made clear his aspirations to national leadership, and two, he’s smooth. Just as [Viktor] Orbán is a more palatable Putin — you don’t hear about poisoning [enemies], you don’t hear about people falling out of windows — DeSantis doesn’t have all that baggage Trump has. He’s younger and he’s smoother. He’s more measured in what he says. He’s trained as a lawyer. Trump is a much more outrageous personality and that’s the source of Trump’s charisma, but DeSantis is extremely popular. And so he has his own form of relating to audiences that people like.

Kruse: Given Trump, DeSantis, Abbott and so on, is the United States of America still a full democracy?

Ben-Ghiat: It’s deceptive because Trump did an enormous amount of damage. And that was why he was there. He was there to wreck our democracy. And then he was voted out. We can never forget that in the middle of a pandemic, 80 plus million people turned out to get rid of him. And that’s very rare in history where you interrupt an autocratic personality who’s in the middle of his project. And now the individual states are continuing this. And what’s so worrying is that they’re continuing it in a very accelerated fashion.

The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End

An expert on autocracy assesses how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back.

www.politico.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

Also, the midterms are so close. I do believe if [Republicans] capture Congress after the midterms, you always have to assume the worst with people who have been very open about wanting to wreck democracy. And so that’s why they float these scary things, like making Trump speaker of the House. You have to realize that these people have left democracy, and nothing is off the table. And that’s why to go back to DeSantis, it’s very ominous that he established this office of election security. It’s very bad because it has its own prosecutors, and it makes things that used to be a misdemeanor a felony. If you look at the details of it, it’s not only an intimidation machine. It has some prosecutorial powers, and it has informing mechanisms, the tip line, and the whole idea of election integrity as this buzzword, which really means how are we going to start making elections come out the way we need to, is a very anti-democratic thing.

Kruse: So the answer I heard to the question — “Is America still a full democracy?” — was … maybe not?

Ben-Ghiat: No. David Pepper, who wrote this book Laboratories of Autocracy, has always said that many states are no longer functioning democracies. I would say that nationally, we are a functioning democracy. That’s how we got rid of Trump. But the system has been eroded and many states are shifting, are evolving over time to a condition where votes are going to mean less. And then you get into a situation which is like what happened in Hungary where over time Viktor Orbán has developed a system where it’s almost impossible for the opposition to win.

Kruse: Is it fair then to see the U.S. as an “anocracy,” neither completely democratic nor completely autocratic?

Ben-Ghiat: It’s in transition. However, I do believe it’s extremely important to never fall into fatalism. I believe it’s my job to warn people what could happen, but it’s very important — that’s why I keep bringing up the 2020 election and also the 2018 midterms — that these are recent events, and there is this energy of protest and love for democracy and freedom, real freedom, not the Republicans’ idea of freedom, that we can’t lose, because once you decide that it’s all rigged and there’s nothing you can do, then you do lose democracy.

Kruse: There has been increasing talk of the inevitability of civil strife, of civil war. And full democracies don’t have civil wars. Autocracies also don’t have civil wars, right? It’s sort of those places that are in some worrying state of transition that might be susceptible to that kind of violence. Are we on the way to civil war?

The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End

An expert on autocracy assesses how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back.

www.politico.com

 

[struth]

This is from Trump's Social Media. It tells his state of mind before the 2020 elections, during and after, to this day.

um....he'd be over 100 years old in 2048....are you all really not capable of thinking?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 5

Ben-Ghiat: I actually believe the possibility of true, active civil war — meaning violence on both sides — is not likely. It’s something that the Republicans, the right, wants us to think is happening, and they use that to get people on their side as armed up as possible, as weaponized, literally weaponized, as possible, as fearful as possible. But I don’t think that we would fall into that state. It’s much more likely that the midterms go the Republicans’ way, and you fall into a system where your vote doesn’t mean much. I do see perhaps an increase of another round of protests. Often protests, big protests, materialize around an event. So the Women’s March was the shock of Trump winning and coming to power. Then you had George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests. I respect a lot Barbara Walter, who wrote the book about our likelihood [for civil war], where we’ve passed these guardrails. But the ones who really want a civil war, it’s only the extremist Republicans. Because civil war is bad for business. Civil war is bad for health. It’s bad for the nation. And so it’s really a scare talking point.

Kruse: A scholar who studies violent conflict, Thomas Homer-Dixon, recently wrote, “By 2025 American democracy could collapse causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” Does that sound right to you or too extreme?

Ben-Ghiat: It could happen in a quieter way. I think that it’s not out of the realm of possibility, because if the Republicans tried to impeach Biden and impeach Harris, there would be protests. Whether that becomes a civil war is very different because it’s predominantly only one side which is armed, first of all. So Walter is right. She wanted to point out how far our democracy has eroded. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could end up with some kind of form of autocracy because that’s what’s being set up by all of the assaults on our electoral system. And Bannon’s been working very hard at this, too, from his own vantage point. It’s intimidation of voters, removing voters, look at all these threats to election officials — so you get them out of the system — this all corresponds to what we call “autocratic capture.” There’s a movement going on. This is what I mean by more — it’s more legalistic and quieter. And that doesn’t tend to bring out people into the streets. Because it’s an evolution and it’s happening slowly, slowly, slowly, and big protests are occasioned by an event.

Kruse: Are there signs in these developments of a particularly American style of autocracy?

Ben-Ghiat: The wild card is guns. No other country in peace time has 400 million guns in private hands. And no other country in peacetime has militias allowed to populate, has sovereign sheriffs, has so many extremists in the military, and that matters because of these other things. And in fact, if January 6 didn’t bring out a massive protest, what is going to bring out a massive protest? Because that showed that groups of people who were there were people unaffiliated with any Proud Boys or any radical group. And Robert Pape, who studied them, called them middle-aged, middle class, but they were all armed. Some of them had private arsenals and they showed up at January 6. So that’s the wild card. That’s one thing that’s extremely American, that violence, that the population believes it has the right to rebel against tyrannical government. Like Matt Gaetz says: The Second Amendment is not just about hunting. And here we go back to the idea of Biden as a dictator. And that only works if your citizenry is armed and ours is to a degree that no other country is in the entire world.

Kruse: Given the stakes, what are Democrats doing wrong right now?

Ben-Ghiat: The reason that Trump was able to shift the political culture, Trump and his allies, is that he imposed an authoritarian party culture [with] unified messaging. Propaganda needs to be repeated with small variations. All the different Fox News hosts, all the GOP politicians, you can tell when the various talking points come up, because they get echoed by all these lawmakers and throughout Fox. Now Democrats by their nature are not going to impose unified messaging. And so Democrats don’t have that force of concentration of message, that repetition, and that’s a failing in this environment.

The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End

An expert on autocracy assesses how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back.

www.politico.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

“This is genius,” former President Trump declared as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declared it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine,” he repeated. “How smart is that? And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper.”

At a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, the former president could barely contain himself: “I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

In his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference last Saturday, Trump belatedly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he doubled down on his claims that Putin was “smart” and that the leaders of Western Europe were “dumb.”

Trump’s praise of Putin isn’t surprising. Dictators — not small-d democrats — have long been his role models.

Trump knows that Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un possess power that is unchecked by legislatures, courts, and free and fair elections. They jail or kill their critics, are indifferent to the welfare of the people they are supposed to serve, and steal billions of dollars for themselves, their families and their cronies. That appears to be why he envies them.

In 2017, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly reminded Trump that Putin “is a killer,” the then-president replied, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent? … Our country does plenty of killing also.”

In 2018, despite the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in U.S. elections, Trump told reporters at the Helsinki summit that Putin “just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” During a photo-op with Putin during the Group of 20 summit in 2019, Trump referred to media criticism. “You don’t have this problem in Russia,” he said. “But we do.”

In 2020, despite substantial evidence that Russian agents had poisoned dissident Alexey Navalny with a nerve agent, Trump toed the Kremlin line: “We haven’t had any proof yet, but I will take a look.”

During his cringeworthy courtship of Kim, the third-generation leader of the world’s most repressive regime who ordered the murder of his half-brother and uncle, Trump praised Kim’s “great and beautiful vision for his country.” When Otto Warmbier died shortly after his release — in a vegetative state — from prison in North Korea on a bogus charge of subversion, Trump said he “did not believe [Kim] would have allowed” the American college student to be mistreated. Trump expressed confidence that Kim would conclude a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States that would fully “realize the great economic potential of North Korea” because “he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump.” Again and again, Trump declared that he “fell in love” after he read Kim’s “beautiful letters” to him.

It’s not a new infatuation.

“When students poured into Tiananmen Square,” Trump told Playboy in 1990, “the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

In 2018, Trump characterized Xi as “a great gentleman.” Xi is “now president for life, president for life. And he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” A year later, Trump was still musing about Xi’s grip on power: “President Xi, who is a strong man, I call him ‘King.’ Xi said, ‘I am not King, I am president.’ ‘No, you’re president for life, and therefore you’re King.’”

Asked why he declined to press Xi to free the 1 million Uighurs in indoctrination camps in the Xinjiang region, Trump indicated, “Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal.” According to then-national security adviser John Bolton,Trump told Xi to “go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Xi is “for China, I’m for the United States, but other than that we love each other,” Trump declared in January 2020. The relationship between the countries has “probably never been better.” That February, Trump said, “Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country.” More recently, as he had when asked about Putin, Trump shrugged off Bartiromo’s comment that Xi “is a killer.”

Trump has denied telling his White House chief of staff (and former four-star Marine general) John Kelly that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” The comment, however, rings true, as does the report that before canceling a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, the president — reminiscent of candidate Trump’s assertion that John McCain was not a war hero: “I like people who weren’t captured” — asked, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”

Our would-be autocrat is intent on returning to the White House. We should also assume if he succeeds, he intends to put in place the priorities, policies and practices of his role models.

Forget the critics, listen to Trump — and consider his role models

Dictators — not small-d democrats — have long been his role models.

thehill.com

 

[Lastamender]

Find some courage and learn, on your own, what Authocracy is.

Look at the news we are living under one. Like I said, stupid or just a dime a dozen sellout.

 

[Clipper]

Trump trolls you morons so easily.

You mean like when he sucker's you rubes out of money?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Look at the news we are living under one. Like I said, stupid or just a dime a dozen sellout.

You have just shown everyone who does know what Authoritarianism is, that you do NOT know what Authoritarianism is.

You do not have to look at the meaning of the word. Or why Trump has always had a nice word to say about some of the Authoritarian leaders around the world.

One of articles I posted above deals with the things he has said about those Authoritarians. There should be videos of that as well.

You can in denial all you like, and call me names all you like.

I know what Trump has said about Authoritarians around the world that no Republican President has even dreamed of saying, in public or in private.

 

[Lastamender]

You have just shown everyone who does know what Authoritarianism is, that you do NOT know what Authoritarianism is.

You do not have to look at the meaning of the word. Or why Trump has always had a nice word to say about some of the Authoritarian leaders around the world.

One of articles I posted above deals with the things he has said about those Authoritarians. There should be videos of that as well.

You can in denial all you like, and call me names all you like.

I know what Trump has said about Authoritarians around the world that no Republican President has even dreamed of saying, in public or in private.

Sure thing, idiot.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Sure thing, idiot.

Sure thing, one who does not need to ask, does not need to know.

 

[struth]

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. Itâs 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

um historically we have had military parades regularly

The fact we fire fireworks is a testimony the bombs bursting in air. The 4th of July is literally about celebrating a military victory

 

[Lastamender]

Sure thing, one who does not need to ask, does not need to know.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Former President George W. Bush derided his Republican Party on Tuesday for what he said it has become in the era of Donald Trump and misinformation, describing the GOP as "isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist."

Bush, who has been relatively quiet on the political scene since he left office in 2009, let loose in a rare TV appearance, saying the Jan. 6 insurrection "made me sick" and was a "terrible moment in our history" that taints the image of the United States around the world.

"This sends a signal to the world that we're no different," Bush said on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, countering the beloved conservative idea of American exceptionalism.

------
And the 43rd president's observations are a mixed offer for Trump critics. On one hand, Bush – who said he still hopes for GOP victory in 2024 – vindicated their repeated warnings that the twice-impeached former leader was taking the GOP in a dangerous direction.

Yet Bush also became just another Republcian, selling a book, who waited until after Trump was gone to sound an alarm. Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner teared up last week as he talked about what had happened to his party – and how people can learn more about it in his book.
"What the f--- George W Bush? Like Boehner, you come out NOW and speak out against Trumpism? NOW? So many of us former Republicans lost everything publicly opposing Trump these past few years, yet you said & did nothing. And NOW you speak?" tweeted former Rep. Joe Walsh, Illinois Republican who has been a prominent Trump critic.

"Pardon my rant, but come on man," Walsh wrote.

Bush also discussed the value of immigrants to American society – itself an implicit criticism of Trump and the anti-immigrant sentiment of some of the party's more nationalist members. An amateur portraitist, Bush has a new book, "Out of Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants," which tells the stories of 43 men and women who have immigrated to the United States.

(full article online)

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-04-20/george-w-bush-condemns-the-trump-era-republican-party

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ I am curious. Why do the people at the bottom lift their arms, but the people on the side above do not? What is the difference between the two groups? ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]