Gift Republic Dictator Trumps

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His relationship to democracy, I would really insist, is the key to answering whether he’s a fascist or not. Even in four years of incoherent and inconsistent tweets, he’s never actually done a Putin and tried to make himself a permanent president, let alone suggest any coherent plan for overthrowing the constitutional system. And I don’t even think that’s in his mind. He is an exploiter, he’s a freeloader. He’s a wheeler and dealer. And that is not the same as an ideologue. Then there is the further question: Had Trump succeeded on January 6, what would America have looked like on January 7? There is every reason to believe he would have launched mass arrests and killings of his political opponents. Although my position has not changed on Trump — less fascist than kleptocrat, more egoist than radical-right ideologue — that does little to mitigate the danger. But how are we supposed to forgive evil? How do you compromise with racism? It’s not possible to reach a half-way point of common agreement on racism. Or on denigrating and punishing immigrants. Or on unimaginable cruelty to children, carried out in our name.

Trump would try to run a fascist dictatorship in Twelve signs Trump would try to run a fascist dictatorship in

Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” If I was doing this as a bottom line in some debate, I’d say that Trump is not a fascist, but what he is quite consistently is an illiberal democrat. He is a democrat to the extent that he’s used democratic processes to be where he is, which he doesn’t radically challenge. He obviously plays fast and loose, like any wheeler dealer, with things like the Supreme Court, who he gets in, etc. He doesn’t care about the rules, but the core system he doesn’t want to change, because he’s somebody who’s profited by that system.

Everywhere we went we found excitement, and hope for an end to terror, death, and injustice, and for the start of a new era, during which Guatemala would get to be a normal country, one with problems, of course, its staggering poverty and inequality, but at peace, with some degree of justice at least, and where citizens would have a voice, and a chance to make things better, because they got to vote for their government. The Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo won the election. He frequently remarked that as president he would possess only “70 percent” of the political power; he meant that the military and its allies would retain the rest. When my friend Jean-Marie Simon interviewed him in the National Palace, he pointed to a nearby potted plant, suggesting that an eavesdropping device was planted there, that the National Palace wasn’t a place that he, the president, was free to converse. Seventy percent was wildly optimistic; whatever it actually was—25 percent?—amounted in reality to almost nothing. The military had only agreed to elections because the dictatorship’s human rights violations had made it a pariah state; the brutal war had essentially been won, and now they wanted, for obvious economic reasons, to be accepted by the community of nations. Trump’s role models include leaders like Erdogan and Putin who are not exactly fascists, but something more: authoritarians, or strongman rulers who also use virility as a tool of domination. The Constitution distributes power between the federal government and the state government, codified in the 10 th Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It took Trump a long time to understand this but states have repeatedly exercised their power against Trump, especially in two areas; COVID-19 and voting. Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud. If re-elected, Trump will feel empowered and emboldened to march the country toward dictatorial rule. If Republicans continue in their complicity, Trump's dictatorial strivings will not be stopped. And, sadly, Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, will clear the path for him in his quest for an authoritarian presidency.

US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian

Any cards that are leftover should be placed to one side. Once each player has their cards, they can choose their trump card. Once you’ve decided on your suit, take one card from your hand (that matches your trump suit) and place it face-down in front of you. Thank goodness we have someone so strong and brave in the White House to make those decisions for us. However, if you don’t have a card of the lead suit, you can instead play a trump card from your hand. But before you do this, you must reveal your face-down card to show the other players your trump suit.

Ben-Ghiat: It could happen in a quieter way. I think that it’s not out of the realm of possibility, because if the Republicans tried to impeach Biden and impeach Harris, there would be protests. Whether that becomes a civil war is very different because it’s predominantly only one side which is armed, first of all. So Walter is right. She wanted to point out how far our democracy has eroded. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could end up with some kind of form of autocracy because that’s what’s being set up by all of the assaults on our electoral system. And Bannon’s been working very hard at this, too, from his own vantage point. It’s intimidation of voters, removing voters, look at all these threats to election officials — so you get them out of the system — this all corresponds to what we call “autocratic capture.” There’s a movement going on. This is what I mean by more — it’s more legalistic and quieter. And that doesn’t tend to bring out people into the streets. Because it’s an evolution and it’s happening slowly, slowly, slowly, and big protests are occasioned by an event. To get a sense of why I argue that the guardrails of democracy have held, let’s look at the five major institutions that protect us from rule by an aspiring dictator: Congress, the courts, the federal system, the press and the civil service. Not a single one of them has lost legal power during Trump’s turbulent presidency. Refusing to use power is not the same as losing the power. That said, just as ethnically based violence or ethnic cleansing shares some characteristics with genocide/the Holocaust, so too does Trump bear similarities to other strongmen, a category in which fascists like Hitler and Mussolini belong, as do Orbán, Erdogan, Putin, and their ilk. That Trump maintains his support by engaging in explicitly divisive appeals designed to pit groups against each other — particularly but not exclusively ethnic groups — also, of course, bears some similarity to what fascists did.