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by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- As we predicted ages ago, the Senate acquittal of Donald Trump has fortified the president’s worst instincts, emboldening him with a gargantuan sense of invincibility. After all, he’s no longer accountable to the Justice Department nor congressional oversight. There’s literally no law enforcement body or process that can stop him, at least not before the election, and he above anyone else knows this.
Consequently, Trump has gone from merely dictator-adjacent -- dictator-curious -- to being a full-on tyrant, a toddler with a machine gun, lacking the character, the values, or the discretion to forgo this unearned power for the sake of the republic. Instead, he’s brazenly exploiting his tyrannical powers in order to further shield himself and his rogues gallery of henchmen from prison sentences.
Why? Because he can, and that’s all that matters to Trump. The dignity of the office was abandoned the second he stepped into the White House, with further degradations along the way until now when he’s chosen to avail himself of the unitary executive theory, granting him absolute power. He doesn’t care about the presidential traditions and unwritten rules of decorum. Likewise, even the rule of law is irrelevant, as long as he has his agitprop network, Fox News, his brainwashed loyalists, and as long as the congressional Republicans continue to be submissive underlings, too frightened and small to stand up to him and his radicalized minion.
Until recently, we generally viewed the federal government as a vehicle for the people’s business. For Trump, however, the government is the new Trump Organization, intended to exclusively enrich and immunize the president, while policy and legislative measures are there not for the people but to deceive the people into thinking he’s doing something for them. Trump has seized the presidency and turned it against his own people and in service of himself.
“Fascist” isn’t quite the correct word... yet. But “dictator” or “tyrant” both work. “Authoritarian” and “autocrat” are especially appropriate. To be absolutely clear, Trump will not be the next Hitler or Mussolini. It’s actually misleading to think in terms of dictators from foreign nations who were in their primes 80 years ago.
Instead, Trump, America’s first dictator, will go about this differently than history has taught us about other past regimes. Our dictator drapes himself in the iconography of the United States -- the symbols we use to frame our nation: eagles, flags, anthems, puffed up pride, including the words “freedom” and “democracy.” But he doesn’t have any use or respect for the values and the constitutional strictures that gave rise to all the things we consider to be uniquely American.
And given how the Justice Department has become Trump’s personal security force, are we really a free and democratic nation any more, when the federal government is applying the law differently to him and not the rest of us? For now, no. No we aren’t free or democratic. Do we seriously think the Framers intended for the president to act as a totalitarian monarch, abusing his power for personal gain? Not a chance in hell. What I do know is that the president has seized greater powers than any other non-civil-war era president in order to undermine both the rule of law and the democratic processes of a national election.
While running Trump’s campaign and while serving as a senior adviser, Steve Bannon coached Trump on “deconstructing the administrative state.” Not only is Trump doing exactly that, especially with regard to federal agencies he sees as irrelevant or as hindering his power grab, but he’s also establishing his own shadow government -- another colossal red-flag warning us to beware of a tyrant who’s dragging his nation away from republicanism and into the realms of despotism.
Between Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, advisers like Hannity and Dobbs, and a subservient, impotent Republican caucus on the Hill, Trump is building a team that, in his own mind, could easily run the nation in place of that pesky “deep state” with its Constitution and all those annoying agencies. Oh, and by the way, you can bet he’ll keep the Constitution intact as a symbol -- even praising it when he needs to fluff his disciples -- because people like it even though few of the people who compose Trump’s cult know what it means.
We’re no longer in a place where we can laugh off Trump’s actions as clownish, despite his clown makeup and hair. For the next year, Trump will do his very best to retain and expand his power, while whittling away at the administrative state, piece-by-piece, acting department secretary after acting department secretary. This is Trump’s government now, and he’s daring us to take it away from him.
Yet that’s exactly what we have to do. It’s our patriotic duty to wrest power away from this tyrant Trump and to restore constitutional order in America. This will require more than just tweeting or watching Rachel Maddow every night. The time for action is right now, before it’s too late. There’s still an opportunity to overwhelm the vote, completely steamrolling Trump’s efforts with an unmistakable electoral mandate against everything he’s done -- humiliating him at the ballot box and, for all intents and purposes, forcing him into hiding. After all, it’s not just Trump we have to defeat, it’s the corrosive mindset that produced him. To defeat a mindset requires the kind of democratic force that tore down the Berlin Wall, that institutionalized civil rights, the kind of democratic force that stirred the people of Hong Kong to stand up for themselves.
And thus always to tyrants.
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