July 17, 2023
A story
in the New York Times
today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how
former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a
dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about
how Trump and his loyalists plan to “centralize more power in the Oval
Office” by “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the
federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any
measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” They
plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of the
nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S.
intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They
plan to start “impounding funds,” that is, ignoring programs Congress has
funded if those programs aren’t in line with Trump’s policies. “What
we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,”
said Russell T. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and
who now advises the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a
“president” who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts. Trump’s
desire to grab the mechanics of our government and become a dictator is not
new; both scholars and journalists have called it out since the early years
of his administration. What is new here is the willingness of so-called
establishment Republicans to support this authoritarian power grab. Behind
this initiative is “Project 2025,” a coalition of more than 65 right-wing
organizations putting in place personnel and policies to recommend not just
to Trump, but to any Republican who may win in 2024. Project 2025 is led by
the Heritage Foundation, once considered a conservative think tank, that
helped to lead the Reagan revolution. A piece
by Alexander Bolton in The
Hill today said that Republican senators are “worried” by the
MAGAs, but they have been notably silent in public at a time when every
elected leader should be speaking out against this plot. Their silence
suggests they are on board with it, as Trump apparently hoped to
establish. The
party appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by
authoritarian leaders like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s
prime minister Viktor Orbán, who argue that the post–World War II era, in
which democracy seemed to triumph, is over. They claim that the tenets of
democracy—equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a
market-based economy, immigration, and so on—weaken a nation by destroying a
“traditional” society based in patriarchy and Christianity. Instead
of democracy, they have called for “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy,
which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian,
patriarchal order. What that looks like has a clear blueprint in the actions
of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has gathered extraordinary power into
his own hands in the state and used that power to mirror Orbán’s destruction
of democracy. DeSantis
has pushed through laws that ban abortion after six weeks, before most people
know they’re pregnant; banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and
gender identity (the “Don’t Say Gay” law); prevented recognition of
transgender individuals; made it easier to sentence someone to death; allowed
people to carry guns without training or permits; banned colleges and
businesses from conversations about race; exerted control over state
universities; made it harder for his opponents to vote, and tried to punish
Disney World for speaking out against the Don’t Say Gay law. After rounding
up migrants and sending them to other states, DeSantis recently has called
for using “deadly force” on migrants crossing unlawfully. Because
all the institutions of our democracy are designed to support the tenets of
democracy, right-wingers claim those institutions are weaponized against
them. House Republicans are running hearings designed to prove that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are both
“weaponized” against Republicans. It doesn’t matter that they don’t seem to
have any evidence of bias: the very fact that those institutions support
democracy mean they support a system that right-wing Republicans see as
hostile. “Our
current executive branch,” Trump loyalist John McEntee, who is in charge of
planning to pack the government with Trump loyalists, told the New York Times
reporters, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating
liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in
a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s
necessary is a complete system overhaul.” It has
taken decades for the modern-day Republican Party to get to a place where it
rejects democracy. The roots of that rejection lie all the way back in the
1930s, when Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced a government
that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted
infrastructure. That system ushered in a period from 1933 to 1981 that
economists call the “Great Compression,” when disparities of income and
wealth were significantly reduced, especially after the government also began
to protect civil rights. Members
of both parties embraced this modern government in this period, and Americans
still like what it accomplished. But businessmen who hated regulation joined
with racists who hated federal protection of civil rights and traditionalists
who opposed women’s rights and set out to destroy that government. In West
Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend, at the Turning Points Action Conference,
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared President Biden’s Build
Back Better plan to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs,
which invested in “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty,
transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of
Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.” She noted that under
Biden, the U.S. has made “the largest public investment in social
infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what
FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to
complete.” Well,
yeah. Greene
incorrectly called this program “socialism,” which in fact means government
ownership of production, as opposed to the government’s provision of benefits
people cannot provide individually, a concept first put into practice in the
United States by Abraham Lincoln and later expanded by leadership in both
parties. The administration has stood firmly behind the idea—shared by LBJ
and FDR, and also by Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight
Eisenhower, among others—that investing in programs that enable working
people to prosper is the best way to strengthen the economy. Certainly,
Greene’s speech didn’t seem to be the “gotcha” that she apparently hoped. A
March 2023 poll by independent health policy pollster KFF, for example, found
that 80% of Americans like Social Security, 81% like Medicare, and 76% like
Medicaid, a large majority of members of all political parties. The
White House Twitter account retweeted a clip of Greene’s speech, writing:
“Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking
families.” — Notes: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/07/house-republicans-mccarthy-russell-vought-trump/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/us/politics/ron-desantis-border-drug-traffickers.html https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1680582110636064768 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1680940415812354049 https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4098609-gop-senators-rattled-by-radical-conservative-populism/
© 2023 Heather Cox Richardson |
