Trump as dictator
Joe Biden has always said lots of dumb things. But he might have topped “They gonna put y’all back in chains” and “Jim Crow on steroids” with his “We nearly lost America— lost it all” on Jan. 6, 2021.
By such logic, Jan. 6 somehow ranks as the most dangerous thing that ever happened to our nation, topping even the Civil War, the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, covid, and 9/11.
That a drunken protest turned into a two-hour riot by rubes and buffoons could be remotely compared to such momentous events testifies to the extent Democrats are growing desperate to divert attention away from Biden’s hugely unpopular presidency.
If your job approval is in the tank, resort to scaremongering and demonization of the other side, and when you can’t talk about the economy/ inflation, the national debt, crime, the border or any issues that the voters actually care about, fall back on the “insurrection” that wasn’t and the menace to our democracy, Donald Trump, that isn’t.
Democrats have spent more than three years now milking Jan. 6 for all it is worth. If all Trump wants to talk about is the “stolen election” that wasn’t stolen, and all Biden wants to talk about is how our democracy will end if not enough people vote for him in November, then perhaps this is the most ironic and self-serving a campaign slogan one can imagine: To save democracy, no one can vote for the other party’s candidate.
The real problem is that most Americans think Biden has been a terrible president, perceive him to be in mental and physical decline, and doubt that he will come close to serving out a full second term.
The hunch is that the “dictatorship comes to America if Trump comes back to the White House” talking point isn’t going to save Biden, for at least three reasons.
First, Trump can pose a threat to American democracy only if he has a massive following in possession of the levers and gears of America’s major political institutions. But he doesn’t. Far from it; just about every institution in America that matters, both public and private, is pervaded by people who despise him.
The federal and state government bureaucracies, the nation’s court system, law enforcement, Congress, our intelligence agencies, the mass media, academe, the corporate world, publishing, Hollywood and the arts— think of anything in America that matters, and you find overwhelming anti-Trump sentiment therein. Indeed, about the only place where Trump might find some support for anything resembling unconstitutional exercise of authority, albeit a powerful place, is the officer corps of the military, but even there one suspects that there are far more Democrats or neverTrump Republicans than die-hard Trump supporters itching to use the instrumentalities of violence to make Trump president for life.
The second reason to be skeptical of the Trump-as-dictator claims is that we’ve already been there and done that. We went through four chaotic and often embarrassing years with Trump occupying the most powerful office in the land, each and every day of which confirmed the belief of many of us that he was thoroughly unfit for that office, but at no point did it appear that democracy wouldn’t survive his tenure or that he was incapable of being removed via either impeachment or the ballot box, as he ultimately was. Rather than exercising decisive control over the federal government, Trump largely had no knowledge of what it was even doing when he was president, and little interest in finding out.
Our system of checks and balances is perfectly designed to thwart the ambitions of the overly ambitious, and in this case wingnuts who somehow manage to stumble their way into political power.
If the flotsam and jetsam who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 constitute Trump’s street fighters ready to carry out the putsch on his command, then it is a source of power that lacks the firepower of the Batesville Police Department and would be summarily crushed by it in a manner of mere minutes.
Like their hero, they are more pathetic than threatening.
Finally, to demolish the world’s oldest and greatest democracy and replace it with a personalistic dictatorship would require an individual in possession of exceptional personal characteristics: extreme intelligence, self-discipline and focus, immense organizational skills and determination and more. No one with any skills of observation would claim that such words describe Trump.
No, Trump is bad because of what he has done to the Republican Party, what he has done to the dignity of the office of the presidency, and what he has done to our national political discourse.
He is simply too stupid, undisciplined, and disorganized to become dictator of the Seychelles, let alone the United States of America.
Trump is an insult to American politics, but it is also an insult to our democratic system to pretend that some ignorant slob who sits about in his bathrobe all day eating Doritos and screaming at the TV could present a genuine threat to it.
Instead of a campaign featuring actual discussion of issues and public policies, we instead get two codgers with a reckless disregard for the truth peddling mythology (“stolen elections” and “insurrections”).