Trump Isn’t Wrong That Lots of People Like Dictatorship
Opinion by Charles P. Pierce • 20h • 3 min read
Trump Isn’t Wrong That Lots of People Like Dictatorship
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I now call your attention to one particular passage in the Time interview with Fulton County Inmate No. PO1135809 that’s been roiling up the Intertoobz for the past couple days. I was struck by it because, for the first time since he loosed his brand of tasty poison into the political marketplace, at the very end of the interview, the man told the undeniable truth about something.
Whether or not he was kidding about bringing a tyrannical end to our 248-year experiment in democracy, I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles? Trump says no. Quite the opposite, he insists. “I think a lot of people like it.”
Is there anyone who would disagree with that? The country has seen what he was like in office. The country has seen what he was like when he lost an election. The country has seen the effect he’s had on all the institutions of government—including, most recently, the federal judiciary right up to its very top. Now, in this interview, he’s told the country exactly what the next four years will be like.
What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
And thanks to the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court, he likely would commit all these capital constitutional crimes while enjoying some sort of half-assed jerry-rigged immunity based on some sort of half-assed jerry-rigged distinction between “official” and “private” acts.
The whole country has seen all this. The whole country knows all this. The whole country knows, or at least intuits, what is to come. And still, according to most polls, the upcoming election is a dead heat.
“I think a lot of people like it.”
He ain’t lying.
A huge number of our fellow citizens are perfectly willing to submit to the blackmailer while thinking he’s their champion. This is something against which Aristotle warned us centuries ago—that tyranny is not necessarily imposed by force but that it can be established through the consent of the governed as well. In his Politics, he wrote:
...it is necessary to appear to the subjects to be not a tyrannical ruler but a steward and a royal governor, and not an appropriator of wealth but a trustee, and to pursue the moderate things of life and not its extravagances, and also to make the notables one’s comrades and the many one’s followers. For the result of these methods must be that not only the tyrant’s rule will be more honorable and more enviable because he will rule nobler subjects and not men that have been humiliated, and will not be continually hated and feared, but also that his rule will endure longer, and moreover that he himself in his personal character will be nobly disposed towards virtue, or at all events half-virtuous, and not base but only half-base.