Trump's Government: Fascist, Totalitarian, or Something Else?

[Moiraine]

It's only rough if they don't end up getting away with it.

[zoogs]

A trial balloon for a coup?

 

It's been discussed that we are lucky that the Trump team is so haphazard and incompetent in pursuing their aims. Here is another possibility

 

Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.

That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

See bolded.

 

As per my analysis yesterday, Trump is likely to want his own intelligence service disjoint from existing ones and reporting directly to him; given the current staffing and roles of his inner circle, Bannon is the natural choice for them to report through. (Having neither a large existing staff, nor any Congressional or Constitutional restrictions on his role as most other Cabinet-level appointees do) Keith Schiller would continue to run the personal security force, which would take over an increasing fraction of the Secret Service’s job.

 

Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable only to the President.

[zoogs]

Robert Reich is a UC-Berkeley Professor of Public Policy. As SecLabor in the Clinton Administration, he was named one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries by TIME Magazine.

http://www.salon.com/2017/01/04/robert-reich-15-warning-signs-of-impending-trump-tyranny_partner/?source=newsletter

 

As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically:

1. Exaggerate their mandate to govern — claiming, for example, that they won an election by a landslide even after losing the popular vote.

2. Repeatedly claim massive voter fraud in the absence of any evidence, in order to restrict voting in subsequent elections.

3. Call anyone who opposes them “enemies.”

4. Turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize them, calling them “deceitful” and “scum.”

5. Hold few if any press conferences, preferring to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements.

6. Tell the public big lies, causing them to doubt the truth and to believe fictions that support the tyrants’ goals.

7. Blame economic stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities, and foment public bias and even violence against them.

8. Attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit civil liberties.

9. Threaten mass deportations, registries of religious minorities and refugees bans.

10. Seek to eliminate or reduce the influence of competing centers of power, such as labor unions and opposition parties.

11. Appoint family members to high positions of authority.

12. Surround themselves with their own personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the public.

13. Put generals into top civilian posts.

14. Make personal alliances with foreign dictators.

15. Draw no distinction between personal property and public property, profiteering from their public office.

Consider yourself warned.

[Danny Bateman]

Reich is good stuff. I just bought a bunch of Paul Krugman books to try to better understand economics, since I have no formal study of it whatsoever. Reich will be next on my list.

[ColoNoCoHusker]

Reich is good stuff. I just bought a bunch of Paul Krugman books to try to better understand economics, since I have no formal study of it whatsoever. Reich will be next on my list.

 

Good choice, great mind/author. If you like Krugman's works, I would recommend reading David Landes' Wealth & Poverty of Nations at some point. It's Euro-centric and Euro-biased, BUT, if you can keep that in check, it's an interesting attempt to look at economic histories from wide range of aspects/impact (social, geographic, political, climactic, etc).

[Danny Bateman]

Fascinating take on Trump's government from Vox. I feel this is a pretty scathing but accurate assessment of exactly what's playing out.

And I do know that Klein is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is pretty good read.

 

How to stop an autocracy

 

 

The judiciary, however, is not the branch of government with the most power or the most responsibility to curb Trump’s worst instincts. That designation belongs to the US Congress.

 

The president can do little without Congress’s express permission. He cannot raise money. He cannot declare war. He cannot even staff his government. If Congress, tomorrow, wanted to compel Trump to release his tax returns, they could. If Congress, tomorrow, wanted to impeach Trump unless he agreed to turn his assets over to a blind trust, they could. If Congress, tomorrow, wanted to take Trump’s power to choose who can and cannot enter the country, they could. As Frum writes, “Congress can protect the American system from an overbearing president.” He just thinks they won’t.

Frum offers a persuasive account of why congressional Republicans are likely to fall before Trump’s will, and he is probably right. But I want to make the argument that there is nothing inevitable about that: it is not the system envisioned by the Constitution and it is not the system we would have if voters took Congress’s enormous power seriously and were as interested in who ran it as in who ran the presidency.

And I want to shift the locus of responsibility a bit: if Trump builds an autocracy, his congressional enablers will, if anything, be more responsible than him. After all, in amassing power and breaking troublesome norms, Trump will be doing what the Founders expected. But in letting any president do that, Congress will be violating the role they were built to play. We need to stop talking so much about what Trump will do and begin speaking in terms of what Congress lets him do.

Donald Trump is a paper tiger. But the US Congress is a tiger that we pretend is made of paper. It is, at this point, taken for granted that congressional Republicans will protect their co-partisan at any cost. It is, at this point, expected that they will confirm Trump’s unqualified nominees, ignore his obvious conflicts of interest, overlook his dangerous comments, and rationalize his worst behavior.

That expectation — and the cowardice it permits — is the real danger to American democracy.

 

As far as I'm concerned, Klein nailed exactly what the Congress has failed to do that it should have done, and what they're doing wrong.

 

As AR said, failure to condemn is necessarily to condone.

[Moiraine]

This is what I've been saying for weeks now. It is up to congress (i.e. the GOP) to protect the country from Trump.

 

Many of his nominees were downright awful, and yet they couldn't deny even one to make him put some thought into and to show him his powers are limited? What a bunch of weak idiots.

[The Big Nebrowski]

Authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist--absolutely, no doubt about it. A classic autocrat.

[commando]

could this be the most accurate description?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy