Trump’s Love of Strongmen
Terry H. Schwadron
July 25, 2018
Hours after his most recent inauguration this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan moved firmly to remake his government completely subservient to him without a check on his authority.
The Israeli Knesset, behind a campaign led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu passed a bill defining the country as homeland to Jews — asserting Jerusalem as the capital, Hebrew as the official language and granting Jews sole authority to decide the nation’s future. Arabs, about 20% of the population, said it was akin to enacting apartheid.
In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte blacklisted and ordered the deportation of an elderly Australian nun, calling her an “undesirable alien” who broke terms of her missionary visa by engaging in political activism.
These are President Donald Trump’s good guys, if not heroes, a list of strongmen headed by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and they’re all on the move towards making their various nation states impervious to dissent and insistent on clamping down on human rights, civil rights and democracy.
As citizens, we were kept busy all week wondering about the various reasons that Trump seemed to accede to Putin over Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections and its continuing efforts to seek division in American political life. The answer actually may be more obvious. Trump wants what these strong, authoritarian leaders treasure — the sound of their own voice.
It is time for us to be looking critically at the policies, executive orders, appointments, business deals that emanate from the Trump machine with an eye towards the building of a specific authoritarian state. We know Trump would prefer to be king, but there is increasing evidence that Trump’s government is stepping all over the niceties about maintaining a democracy.
Consider:
· Trump is moving to withdraw security clearances for Obama-era intelligence officials — who are no longer in office. Skipping the fact that they are not in office, making the move silly, symbolically it is significant that Trump wants to squash public dissent.
· Trump consistently criticizes the Senate for actually having the cheek to “advise and consent” rather than simply rubber-stamping his ideas, whether for a 3,000 border wall, elimination of health care and food stamps or for travel bans aimed at Muslims. He rejects the idea of a Senate that has rules requiring a super-majority for most important decisions.
· Trump consistently rejects news reporting as “fake” if it reflects something other than White House propaganda. Indeed, President Trump tweeted a defense of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed merger with Tribune Media, days after the Federal Communications Commission raised “serious concerns” about the deal and began legal proceedings to challenge it on grounds the companies had misled regulators. Trump said Tuesday it was “so sad and unfair” that the FCC, an independent agency, did not approve the merger, a $3.9 billion transaction that would create a conservative television giant that originally hoped to reach roughly 70 percent of U.S. households.
· Trump’s Justice Department is wreaking havoc with civil rights efforts, reversing efforts to question police department whose practices have led to too many shootings of unarmed, black citizens, for example, but also that has promoted seizures of property of suspects. The Department of Homeland Security has loosed a widespread anti-immigrant campaign.
Specifics aside, there is a long list of policy changes that Trump is pursuing that allow him to pick winners and losers in the economy, that allow him to selectively exempt various industries from environmental or consumer law enforcement, that have flaunted ethics policies for personal gain by his own family and that of Cabinet secretaries.
There is a daily practice of the president speaking, then insisting that he was misquoted when it turns out that the statement proved controversial. There is the long, long list of lies from the White House on the full spectrum of topics touched by the administration.
There is Trump’s continuing practice of declaring “tremendous success” when nothing has happened. So, North Korea has yet to pursue a denuclearization program, NAFTA talks remain unresolved, there is no agreement towards ending this budding international trade war with China, there is no new schedule of defense spending increases by NATO countries — all claims of triumph by this president.
America First, the guiding Trump principle, is really Trump first, last and only.
Whether there are kompromattapes of Trump behaving badly hidden in Putin’s vault, whether there are secrets worth knowing in Trump’s tax returns, whether there are documents that show Trump beholden to Russian oligarchs, let’s face the fact that Trump wants to be a strongman.
That’s not in his job description.
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