Tag Archives: Authoritarianism

An Historian Admires Biden and Fears the Other Guy

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The New York Times has described Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has a new book out called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The Guardian calls it “a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism, with an assist from [you know who]”. More from The Guardian:

[Richardson says] “the reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the Southern Strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”

Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.

She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.

America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.

Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it… They all disavow it, but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.

“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes, but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”

These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.

A prime example was the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, an attempt to convince the public he was not a legitimate president.

“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”

Enter [T], a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own….

“[T] is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population [note: a white part], one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.

“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.

“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”

Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that [T’s] 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives….

Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary….What would a second [T] term mean for America?

“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if he wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases.”

Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, he issued another stark warning…. Richardson casts a historian’s eye at his record.

“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs….

“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, [although] it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election. The Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle it so long as it means they can regain power….

“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that [T] could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.

“That has been huge but 
 he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.

“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months”.

“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”

Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day….

She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, 
 to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting…. “So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”

They Want a Red (as in Red State) Caesar

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Even though the 2024 election is still 13 months away, we should all be paying attention to the Republican Party’s descent into outright fascism (or to use a more contemporary term, “Trumpism”). Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer explains why: far right “thought leaders” think a dictator should take control in 2025:

The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy…..

To a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

… Let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack….

In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.

“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue”….

America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.

And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.

It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange….The 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, [he] has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities….

But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like [him] — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House [note: according to polls 13 months before the election]. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — [Steve] Bannon, who was [T’s] 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster …, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as [T] did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it”.

In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate … wrote that t[Bannon] frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”

So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway 
 between monarchy and tyranny”….

The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.

After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988â€Čs “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.

But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” In the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.

The Violence Continues

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It’s happening now: “An unprecedented attack from Gaza spurs Israeli airstrikes, gun battles. Israeli civilians, soldiers held captive; hundreds feared dead across Gaza, Israel”.

Coincidentally, the next article I read in The New York Review of Books (probably behind a paywall) was “Heading Toward a Second Nakba”. (According to the United Nations, “the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society”.) 

The article, published last month, provides some of the context for today’s violence. Here are excerpts:

In effect, the second Nakba is already underway.

It is happening slowly, piece by piece, and largely under the radar. Here’s an example. The beautiful village of Ein Samiya, not far from Ramallah, was for years subject to continuous settler harassment. First the Civil Administration issued a demolition order for the village school—by far the most impressive and important building there. An array of European sponsors had supplied the funds to build it. The villagers went to court, and on August 10, 2022, the Jerusalem District Court decreed, unsurprisingly, that the school could indeed be demolished. In January the High Court of Justice put a freeze on executing this ruling; but on August 17, 2023, the army destroyed the school.

Meanwhile, over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops—in short, they routinely terrorized their Palestinian neighbors. The army and police, as usual, did nothing to stop any of this. What finally broke the villagers’ spirit came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep that they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen, and handed it over to the settlers. Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.

I was there on May 24, 2023.

I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people—evacuated their homes… I’ve seen rather a lot of heartbreaking scenes in the Palestinian territories over the years, but the flight from Ein Samiya was one of the hardest to watch. It goes without saying that the villagers’ lands have now been appropriated by the settlers, with the collusion of the army, the police, the courts, and, not least, the government.

The fate of Ein Samiya is shared by many other Palestinian sites. In the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of the High Court of Justice; the excuse is that they are located within an arbitrarily imposed training zone for the army. Al-Khan al-Ahmar, slightly east of Jerusalem, was on the verge of being destroyed—the army bulldozers had already begun their work—when the International Criminal Court in The Hague declared that a war crime was being committed. That stopped the destruction for the moment, though government ministers have been demanding that the army finish the job. The village of Ras al-Tin, not far from Ein Samiya, was emptied of most of its inhabitants after savage acts by the army. (Among other things, soldiers emptied and confiscated the large water tanks that made life sustainable in the stony desert hills.) Denying water to Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley, where temperatures in summer can pass 120 degrees Fahrenheit, is a standard tactic employed by the army…. These are random names from a longer list.

In Nathan Thrall’s words, a “hidden universe of suffering” touches “nearly every Palestinian home.” There is no way to justify any of it, unless one thinks that ensuring eternal Jewish supremacy over all of Palestine, and with it an Israeli version of apartheid, is a worthy objective. The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.

To perpetuate that reality is, to no small extent, the real rationale of the antidemocratic legislation limiting the power of the Supreme Court that the Netanyahu government pushed through the Knesset on July 24, despite weeks of huge demonstrations against it. Right-wing fanatics think, with some reason, that the Supreme Court is the last remaining obstacle to the annexation of the territories (although its record on Palestinian matters is far from good). Hence the attempt to undermine the court, indeed to sabotage the state’s entire legal system and thus to give the government almost unlimited power to do whatever it pleases. In the face of overwhelming opposition to this move from critical sectors of Israeli society … and from abroad, the legislation abolishes the so-called reasonableness clause, which gave the Supreme Court the authority to overrule government decisions on grounds that they are patently unreasonable—for example, when the prime minister appoints to a ministerial position a politician repeatedly convicted for taking bribes (this is not a theoretical example).

The Supreme Court will pronounce on the legality of the new law; major figures in the government, including the Speaker of the Knesset, have announced in advance that they will not honor the court’s decision if it invalidates the law, and Netanyahu has more than hinted that he, too, will defy the court. Israel is in the throes of a constitutional crisis (in the absence of a constitution), and the threat to democracy, coming from the government and the slim right-wing majority in the Knesset, is without precedent in the country’s history.

For [those Palestinians] who have suffered unthinkable losses, there will be no release from pain. As long as the occupation continues on its self-destructive course, there will be many more innocent victims… It is obvious, though many refuse to see it, that the only way Israel can survive in the long run is to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement—that is, to make peace, an honest and generous peace.

I am certain that some form of mutual accord is still possible, though I may not live to see it. Palestine is in disarray, after decades of Israeli occupation and the deliberate erosion of Palestinian civil society and institutions by Israel; but there are still serious Palestinian partners for peace, including some whom many of us have known…. On the grassroots level, in the villages, most Palestinians want what most Israelis want—a livable life, without war. They also rightly want, and some day will certainly achieve, equality and an end to the current regime of discrimination, oppression, and constant threat. As my shepherd friend Jamal likes to say, “We were born to live in peace with one another. We think that hell lies somewhere beneath the earth, and heaven lies above us. But in fact people create their own hell on earth, when paradise, right here, could be ours.”

Unquote.

The author is David Shulman, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. He is a longtime activist in Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian territories.

You Are Not the Only One Who Feels This Way

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Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to assume you have this feeling. I sure do. So does David Roberts, as he explains: 

Contemplating the latest [Orange Menace] revelations, the chaos in the US House, the bullshit hearings, the servicing of Putin … it just makes me feel genuinely crazy that anyone is voting for a Republican for anything. I barely even know how to argue. I just wanna say: LOOK AROUND.

Look at this motley collection of dimwits, apparatchiks, back-biters, liars, grifters, and narcissists. You want to be on their side? You want them in charge? I’ll never understand it. It’s crazy-making trying to pretend there’s some normal political dispute happening here.

To be a normie, news-following Democrat is basically to feel gaslit all the time, all day every day. I know pundits are supposed to affect this world-weary, seen-it-all attitude — actually having feelings is unforgivably naive — but some days it just all gets to me.

Like, we find out that [the Menace] is repulsed at the sight of a wounded soldier and instructs a general to hide the soldier away. That … should be it, right? Discussion over. Horrible person. No place in public life. Obviously. Wait. What? You say we’re just gonna roll on?!

You say House Republicans are mounting an impeachment based on nothing, purely out of revenge? OK, well, that’s that. Clearly wildly irresponsible people with no business being near the levers of power. Surely will be universally denounced. Wait. What? We’re just rolling on?

Hearings full of demonstrable lies, slandering longstanding public servants? Hostage-taking that could destroy the economy, with no coherent demands? Open corruption on the Supreme Court? Senators voting against impeachment out of fear for their safety? Just roll on.

It does something to a person, being forced to pretend that this is normal, just something else to scratch our chins about and debate on the morning shows. Just one more thing to slipstream into a both-sides template. The cognitive dissonance is corrosive.

Unquote.

While I’m here, amid all the right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria, this news might have been widely reported, but wasn’t (I wasn’t able to find the actual Census report it’s based on, but I doubt the libertarian Cato Institute made up the numbers).

  • the number of immigrants in 2022 was nearly 2 million immigrants lower than the Census Bureau’s 2017 projection for 2022;
  • over the last decade, the United States has seen the slowest growth in the immigrant share of the U.S. population since the 1960s;
  • the immigrant share is growing slowly, even while the United States faces the lowest total population growth in its history.

Our Former President Invites an Odious Comparison

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You’ve probably heard that the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis automatically loses the argument. That’s not true, of course, but it does suggest that Hitler or Nazi comparisons shouldn’t be made lightly. (This adage is different from Godwin’s Law, which says “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1”.

Yet, these days, with America’s right wing becoming ever more extreme, it’s natural to wonder how far they’ll go. Journalist Brian Beutler names a few names:

We see all around us people clothed in immense power whom we know, to a practical certainty, would have been enthusiastic allies to George Wallace or Jefferson Davis or even Adolf Hitler, and we see many, many more who would quite evidently have made their peace with segregation, or slavery, or genocide as an acceptable moral compromise for maintaining their wealth or social sway. 

It’s a testament to the durable temptation of wickedness—to the fact that “Never Again!” without constant vigilance is a chant of delusion. But it’s also prima facie evidence that we remain insufficiently vigilant, or that a large subset of liberals is in denial about the totalitarian temptation washing over the right. The people would side with us overwhelmingly if they understood the stakes this way, but all too frequently we won’t even tell them. 

Anybody who’s paid to write or speak for a big corporation like The New York Times or a smaller one like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting needs to come across as fair and balanced. That’s a big problem if the subject they’re writing or speaking about, American politics, is no longer balanced at all. What words are appropriate when there is news like this, in this case reported by the Times:

[The former president] and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

[He] and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

[He] intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”.

[He] and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them….

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget [for the former president].

The Times reporters don’t draw the obvious conclusion. In response to the Times article, Ryan Cooper of the American Prospect does:

Donald Trump is plotting to make himself dictator. His plan it to make the federal government his plaything, and many Republican elites are behind him.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999, he did not become dictator overnight. It took him many years to crush independent media, make the oligarch class dependent on him, and suppress organized political opposition… That process of power consolidation has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine, as the former “hybrid regime” with some tacit limited freedoms has become a full-blown autocracy.

Trump is openly planning something similar, should he win the 2024 election…. Given [his] history, it’s clear that should he become president again, he will try to set up a dictatorship….

When [he] first came to power, he had little idea of how the federal government worked or even what he wanted to do with it, much less how to bend it to his will….

Eventually, [he] figured out how to get what he wanted. The answer was not to conform his acts to the existing system, but to break it. By issuing hundreds of executive orders, threatening those who stood in his way, and above all installing cronies throughout the executive branch and the judiciary, he could break through the procedures and norms that had constrained previous presidents (which turned out to be a lot more feeble than many assumed).

By 2020, Presidential Personnel Office head John McEntee was running a plan to install Trump stooges throughout the federal bureaucracy even over the objections of Trump’s own Cabinet members.

This process culminated in the attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, which as usual was poorly planned and led, yet got alarmingly close to success nonetheless. For the first time in American history, a fascist mob sacked the national legislature and disrupted the process of transferring power—all under the direction of the losing president, who was trying to cling to power through violence….

The Times report is characteristically stuffy about what is going on here. Yet the reporters got enough [of his] cronies on the record to make the stakes abundantly clear. The plan is called Project 2025—a transition project … with the explicit purpose of making the entire government beholden to [the president’s] every whim…. The only way to satisfy his craving for limitless money and power, and to inflict ruthless vengeance against his enemies, is to turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

[He] won’t necessarily succeed, even if he does win the election—it is unwise for a would-be autocrat to cultivate deep unpopularity among the armed forces, just for starters—but that is what he’s determined to do.

The Hitler of 1943? No. The Hitler of 1933? The evidence is clear.