Any idea how dangerous Trump’s presidency was?
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, there’s been an argument on the left over the sort of threat he poses.
The American left’s most famous figures saw Trump as an authoritarian who could, if reelected, destroy American democracy. But another strain of left opinion viewed Trump’s fascistic gestures as less dangerous than, say, George W. Bush.
A leading proponent of this position is political theorist Corey Robin. In an interview with the left-wing publication Jewish Currents, he argued, “Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured.”
Trump tried to overturn the election, and much of his party lined up behind him. Yet he failed, and it’s unlikely that he will follow calls from supporters to declare martial law.
Just how fascist was Trump?
It seems obvious enough that the spirit of Trumpism is fascistic, at least according to classic definitions of the term. In “The Nature of Fascism,” Roger Griffin described fascism’s “mobilizing vision” as “the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.”
Fascists, wrote Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” see “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny.” They believe in “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.”
Yet Trump was only intermittently able to translate his movement into a government. The national security state was more often his antagonist than his tool.
Trump celebrated what may be the extrajudicial killing of Michael Reinoehl, an antifa activist wanted in a fatal shooting, but such killings weren’t the norm. And in the end, he lost an election and will have to leave.
The damage he’s done, however, may be irreversible. On Twitter, Robin argued, correctly, that George W. Bush changed the shape of government, leaving behind the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. Most of Trump’s legacy, by contrast, is destruction — of even the pretense that the law should apply equally to ruler and ruled, of large parts of the civil service, of America’s standing in the world.
Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of reality. Other presidents sneered at the truth; a senior Bush official famously derided the “reality-based community” to journalist Ron Suskind.
But Trump’s ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist, after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that the war was a disaster.
No such consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves behind a nation deranged.
The postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country doesn’t see it.
In May, Samuel Moyn predicted, in The New York Review of Books, that if Biden won, fears about American fascism would dissipate. Complacent in their restoration, he wrote, those who warned of fascism “will cordon off the interlude, as if it was ‘an accident in the factory,’ as Germans after World War II described their 12-year mistake.”
As American electors gathered — with police offering armed guards and Michigan’s Capitol closed by “credible threats of violence” — Moyn’s words, meant cynically, seem too optimistic. Trump failed to capture America, but he may have irrevocably broken it.