Americans need a strong president to end their squabbles and stop woke lefties from preventing business from doing business. This belief sums up the addenda of Donald Trump, his aides, and his base.
They learn from the tactics by which Viktor Orbán took power and consolidated control of post-Communist Hungary to achieve these goals. Across Europe, some leaders and many voters, swayed by fear and prejudice, look to the far right for salvation.
The trap has sprung. Suddenly, free speech is curtailed in many Western countries as if by a signal. The Fifth column, with its sleeper cells, was the political class.
What History Can Teach Us About Donald Trump
An earlier model for Trumpists is the path that Hitler took to supreme power in Germany. Berlin. Faced with political and economic chaos, Hitler exploited the structures of the post-World War I Weimar constitution to become chancellor in 1933 and then destroy, one after another, the guardrails of democracy. To those who objected to his power grab, he countered, “We must remove the source of our troubles, the Jews.”
Like Orbán and Hitler, Trump and his helpers would end American democracy– not with one stroke but by a thousand small cuts. Taken alone, many of these actions do not seem very menacing. As each reinforces the other, they aim at what Trump strategist Stephen Bannon called the deconstruction of the administrative state. Simply stated, the goal is an omnipotent dictatorship and the end of checks and balances among the three branches of government.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets if independence and seize them,” said Russell Vought, again, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and the Budget. A self-styled “boring budget guy,” Vought co-authored the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Vought now pushes Republicans in the House of Representatives to investigate the alleged “weaponization of the federal government” under President Joe Biden.
“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought told GOP lawmakers, “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country–the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish.” In March, Vought co-authored an opinion piece for Fox News contending that “woke ideology is now embedded within the very DNA of the federal bureaucracy.”
Trump’s base includes many Americans suffering deaths of despair. For them, Trump’s promises outshine the results of his policies that widened gaps in education, income, health, and the federal budget. Right-wing news services use their influence to promote disinformation favorable to MAGA causes. Trump’s base wants to hear this slant. For America’s far right, as for Hitler’s followers, the Big Lie (die grosse Lüge) is a mighty influencer.
Trumpists want their president to reign supreme over other branches of government.
Before his election, Trump warned he would claim the right to impound—not spend– moneys authorized by Congress for goals the president rejects.
Trump wants to control what Congress intended to be politically independent agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission. He is eviscerating the safeguards erected over decades by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The motives for this orientation are complex. Financial greed is at the bottom. The most influential source for Trumpist ideas is the Heritage Foundation, supported by David Koch and his carbon-producing industries. Koch’s foundations belong to the State Policy Network, a chain of tax-exempt, right-wing organizations militating in every state for deregulation of all economic activities but for greater regulation of human reproduction.
Hitler scapegoated Jews for Germany’s ills. Trump and many Republicans blame Blacks and Browns and their awakened sympathizers for much they see as bad for America. Accordingly, they use every trick in whatever venue becomes available to strip non-whites of voting and other privileges. Their masterful use of code words masks ugly realities.
Besides material and racist incentives, many Trump supporters believe, or at least proclaim, that real Christians should back him and his policies no matter what infidelities or indictments darken his aura.
Apart from launching a Second World War and the Holocaust, Nazis pushed Germany to build better highways and a “people’s car,” the Volkswagen. America needs better transportation systems and many other improvements, but it does not require an updated version of Der Führer.
Trump and his policies fall far below the scale of Hitler’s atrocities–unmatched by anyone except Stalin and Mao Zedong. Still, like Hitler, Trump and his aides do plan to dismantle democracy and consolidate supreme power.
In World War II, it was us against the fascists; now fascism has bored into the architecture of Western nations like termites about to take down a building. All this while the termination of human society rushes toward us in the form of planetary heat death.
About the Author: Dr. Walter Clemens
Dr. Walter Clemens is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. He wrote The Republican War on America: Dangers of Trump and Trumpism.
