Over the past few years, there has been a constant refrain: We’re lucky that Trump is incompetent. A competent tyrant could have done far more damage.
It’s a given that a competent tyrant would have avoided Trump’s negatives - his tweets would be intelligent, he would know better than to say things out loud that he shouldn’t, he’d probably pay proper taxes and have a clean tax return, etc.
But what would a smart tyrant do that Trump did not?
Xerxes selected Esther as one of several wives, in what is described to Jewish children as “a beauty contest.” I’ve always thought he had all the young women line up naked for his inspection.
But I digress.
A competent tyrant would do away with elections, or be certain he always won, like Putin.
Nicholas II dissolved the Duma when they did not legislate as he desired.
Declare martial law.
Have some uncoperative folks shot, or become mysteriously ill, or poked in the butt with a ricin tipped umbrella.
I think Putin is a good standard to apply. He started out as an elected official but manipulated the system to the point where elections no longer effect him.
A president can’t just declare martial law in America and have it actually work. There would have to first be a long escalating process to lead up to it. The frog would have to be slowly heated. And probably need some major action by a major foreign adversary threat to set the scene.
Trump missed an open net with the coronavirus response. Any politician who wanted to get reelected, regardless of whether or not they wanted to become a god-emperor later needed to take it seriously from the start both in terms of policies to limit the impact, and consistently showing compassion in public. If Trump had done that we would probably still be in office right now.
Beyond that, a competent tyrant would have gone bigger, pushed more boundaries and acted quicker and with more preparation than Trump. I think the first year or two even a Putin-like figure might have done what Trump did - pushing boundaries far more than a normal politician but trying to be careful about certain things like alienating his own party. After a while it became clear that his own party was not going to impede him at all. At that point he needed to get even more aggressive with executive overreach, openly defy court orders and plant people he could trust at a variety of government and socially influential positions.
Someone smart would have realized that when you act like a lawless tyrant during your term in US politics, the only real consequence is impeachment which requires politicians from your own party to turn on you, and when you try to illegally stay in office, the consequences are a combination of the fact that the local and state officials responsible for certifying are actually afraid of the legal consequences, and that the military at that point would take you out of office. Trump filled the court system from top to bottom with Federalist Society conservatives - he needed to fill it with Trumpists who would conspicuously rule everything in his favor, so that at least some other Republican officials needed to be worried more about the court system coming after them for a lack of loyalty than for not following the law in key cases like the census or certifying election results. He also needed to get loyalists in county clerk positions early enough that they could have an impact in 2020, and he needed to try to transform the US military into loyalists to protect him from consequences from them. I also think instead of letting all these random militia groups do their thing independently, he could have done a world of damage by exerting more direction over them, and specifically using them to suppress voters on election day. One of his biggest failures on election day was that he didn’t create any doubt about the election result - if he had been smarter he probably could have made it positively inconclusive and essentially necessitated state legislatures to take things into their own hands.
I don’t know a ton about Putin, but my impression is his rise to power was based on using government power to enrich himself, then paying off people who could help him.
Then he videotaped a Russian prosecutor with hookers at a hotel who was investigating Yeltsin for corruption. Putin then released the tapes, he lost his job and Yeltsin rewarded him by making him president.
then he committed false flag terror acts with the apartment bombings, then declared war on Chechnya, which cemented his popularity.
Trump on the other hand would’ve been teh guy in the hotel being videotaped having sex with prostitutes, not the guy who did the videotaping and then used it to blackmail people.
So the recipe seems to involve (but isn’t limited to)
Enrich yourself with corruption, use the money to pay off loyalists
False flag terror attacks, then march in and pretend to be the savior/hero
blackmail the right people
Get on the good side of the right people
Trump is too enslaved to his base desires and mental illnesses to competently do these things.
Yes, I have definitely thought that Trump–very fortunately*–really missed an opportunity with the pandemic. An authoritarian xenophobic germophobe is in charge, and then a pandemic breaks out? A pandemic that can be sort of plausibly be blamed on China? If there was ever a time to go into full freak-out mode (with plenty of rather authoritarian government mandates), a year ago was that time. Instead, Trump’s first impulse was to minimize everything, claim there was nothing wrong, everything’s fine, nothing to worry about, let me play everyone a nice tune on my fiddle.
*Well, “very fortunately” except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly dead.
Imagine if Trump had had the basic competence to listen to other people (then loudly claim credit for all their ideas). If he’d spent lots of time telling everyone what to do (because it’s a national emergency!): “Stay home! Social distance! Wear masks! Wash your hands! We must protect America from the Plague from China!” (He would naturally have wanted to get in some good demagogic licks at other countries, of course.) And what if he had introduced a real and serious lock-down of the border (with no exceptions–quarantines for everybody who wants to come to America, or even come back to America)–Trump was seemingly born to do that! And did I mention telling everyone to wash their hands, and wear a mask, and social distance? (Repetition and simple ideas aren’t necessarily a bad communications strategy for a national emergency.)
And Trump’s no fiscal conservative, either–he likes giving away money (it wouldn’t have been his money of course), especially when he gets to put his name on the checks, so that part he could have done pretty well, too.
I suspect he really would have won re-election if he had done all those things (and then been able to point at how worse various other countries would have hypothetically been doing during the huge scary global pandemic) and it honestly baffles me that he is so utterly incompetent–to the point of being incapable of pouring piss out of a bucket–that he couldn’t even manage to do things which really should have been right up his alley. And that, in turn, would have given him four more years–legitimately given him, even–to continue gnawing away at the foundations of the Republic.
Well, for starters, he could have “lock[ed] her up”. Even if the charges were completely, uh, trumped up, it would have signaled to his supporters that no bullshit claim is too extreme to act upon. Instead, he spent four years playing golf with himself, tweeting out stream-of-consciousness conspiranoia that mostly served as chum for cable news pundits to “analyze”, ineffectually venting his spleen at various media personalities and banning Jim Acosta from the White House Press Corps, and annoying the hosts of “Fox & Friends” by calling them up like an annoying grandpa in the throes of senility.
He basically did nothing that a “competent tyrant” would do, such as nominating actually effective cabinet secretaries who were capable of running their departments in a way that served his agenda, working McConnell at al to actively bolster GOP and Congressional support for his anti-immigrant agenda, establishing a shadow government to actually direct control of the executive branch out of sight of the media, demonizing Muslims to the point of public acceptance of rounding them up into ‘resettlement facilities’, and effectively engaging with other demagogues to undermine allies. He actually attempted the latter, albeit with the same degree of ineptitude he demonstrated in running multiple businesses into the ground.
Trump is far more Mussolini (or perhaps Rufus T. Firefly) than Hitler or Stalin. He has the hunger to be a despot and the charisma to inspire devotion, but not the discipline or intelligence to follow through on it. However, he has shown the path to motivate people to follow this kind of thinking and there are doubtless people out there taking notes on what works and how to improve upon it. That Trump failed–narrowly–in getting the country to continue to follow him down a path toward fascist devotion does not mean that the possibility of this has past. The Weimar Republic did not fall to fascism in just a few years.
Stranger
There is also the fact that contagious pathogens make people’s personalities more prone to authoritarianism.
An infectious disease pandemic causes people to become more conformist, tribalistic, disgusted by outsiders, etc. Supposedly its an evolutionary trait designed to slow down disease progress but it makes people more prone to authoritarianism too which can have society wide effects.
Plus I know someone living in the Philippines, they said they have military checkpoints everywhere to stop the spread of the virus. It always felt obvious to me they were just using the virus to justify expanding the military state. A competent Trump could’ve done that, if the courts let him. Demanded people get permission to travel across county or state lines. Placed military checkpoints all over.
The courts were the real bulwark against fascism. Luckily even though Trump appointed a lot of judges, the ones he appointed weren’t mindless Trumpsters. Imagine if Trump not only appointed several hundred judges, but he expanded the judiciary and forced retirement of non-Trump judges. He could’ve appointed hundreds of judges as radicalized as the people who tried to overthrow the government.
I believe corrupting the courts was a major tool Chavez used in venezuela to cement his rule, thats also why Poland is trying so hard to corrupt the judiciary.
If Trump has packed the courts with mindless followers, replaced military leaders with mindless followers, appointed mindless followers to lead important bureaucracies, he could’ve done much worse damage.
I fully agree. Trump is lazy and stupid. He wanted power but he didn’t want to make the effort to get it. He expected other people to hand him power. I think in his last weeks in office, he was shocked when he realized it wasn’t going to happen (a second time anyway).
But the premise is what somebody who was competent would have done in Trump’s place. I figure Putin is a good example of somebody entering power by legal means and then staying in power by throwing out the laws.
Trump was very unfortunate to be born a US citizen. The US would be one of the most challenging countries to successfully overthrow from the inside due to the way the government is set up. Where ‘the people’s rights’ are not really granted by a piece of paper (the constitution), but only by competing ruling tyrants (elected and appointed government officials) who’s best self interest is not to allow other tyrants to take more power than that piece of paper allows. In that every ruling tyrant must rally around the rights of the people to accomplish that task of preserving their power.
This is not to say that the US system is impossible, and Trump gave it a fair play. Coopting the republican party, 3 judges, many governors, installed many of his picks in all aspects of government as Trump populated the swamp. But there were some hold outs, specifically the dems and pre-Trump SCOTUS judges that somehow were able to remain alive as Trump was trying to take over absolutely and I would not put anything past him.
A skilled tyrant would learn to delegate properly. When Trump passed his racist “ban Muslim visitors” executive actions, they were written by Miller. These failed. Eventually he had to turn to J. Sessions, a competent racist lawyer, to come up with a Muslim ban that worked. Miller continued to have an oversized role in the Trump administration afterward.
Trump hired a lot of incompetent people, and when he hired competent people, like Sessions, he frequently fired them or they stormed out. This is true even when these competent people were evil-hearted, like Sessions.
Understand how government actually works. Trump saw himself as the head of the Republican Party, meaning that all senators (such as Moscow Mitch), all Republican Supreme Court justices, and all Republican governors, had to listen to him. He didn’t realize the chain of command doesn’t work that way. Furthermore, his absurd requests to the Supreme Court were so ridiculous even a 6:3 majority (with 3 appointed by Trump) wouldn’t overturn the election for him.
Not screwing up COVID would have helped. To be fair, competent tyrant Putin screwed this up too, along with Bolsonaro and a lot of other similar politicians.
Before Trump I believed that our unique system acted as a safeguard against a demagogue co-opting Democracy, but I really don’t anymore. It feels like most of the institutions that were supposed to do something about Trump failed. He was able to either fire or muzzle basically all of the people investigating him, the court system was never able to hamstring him in any real way and the legislature completely failed as a restraining influence. One moment that really changed my perspective was when Trump declared emergency to fund the wall, and congress voted to strip him of his emergency powers - and they weren’t able to because even that is subject to a veto. The things we put in place to ensure checks and balances actually worked against
I think the states at least managed to run and certify an election, and while they tried to tip the scales on the election results they at least didn’t actually succeed, so we have that to hang our hat on. Unfortunately the next Trump now knows to put more emphasis on state election systems, and because of the electoral college (another institution that was supposed to protect us from a tyrannical demagogue) they only need to worry about a few state and local governments that tip the scales.
The only things I really have faith in at this point is that our military is so massive and has so many different branches and wings that a takeover by filling the military with loyalists would still be extremely hard, and that so many business interests are invested in how our economy works under the current system that they’ll use their enormous influence to keep the existing system in place as much as possible.
I think encouraging a multiparty system is the real way to safeguard yourself against demagoguery. I think Trump benefited from how ambiguous the GOP stance on himself has been since 2015. In a system where it was possible for votes to be split between different parties and for coalition politics to be possible, there would be a separate conservative and right-wing nationalist party, and the conservatives would have a lot more freedom to legitimately push back against a figure like Trump without having to play this game of appeasing his base while giving the appearance of restraint to the non-Trumpers in your party.
trump’s greatest success was in courting the racist, xenophobic lowest common denominator of people who in the past never had a candidate before who was hateful enough to speak to them like trump. But that group, while they turned out to be depressingly more numerous than a lot of people thought, still aren’t enough to win elections with. trump managed to cobble together a victory with that group plus just enough traditional Repub voters.
But he traded in the dog whistle for a megaphone and started believing his own fictional narrative. trump could have payed lip service to the things his rabid base wanted to hear, keeping them happy and on board, while continuing to build a coalition of more traditional Repubs. But trump got seduced by the adulation of his base at his numerous rallies and went too far with the hateful rhetoric, and with stupid money and resource black holes like actually trying to build a wall, instead of just talking about it. Appointing incompetent toadies in his admin who made terrible decisions and wouldn’t or couldn’t keep him in check made things worse. He played to the cheap seats while alienating the rest of the audience. This led to losing the House in 2018, losing the presidency in November, and losing the Senate runoff which caused them to lose the Senate in January.
A more effective autocrat will deliver winks and nudges to the hateful base while doing and saying more traditionally politic things out loud, building a coalition, and work behind the scenes to consolidate power while not letting his ego get out of control. I doubt Putin has held many “love me, worship me” style rallies.
One could argue that competent tyrants wouldn’t have the level and style of popularity that Trump had.
I disagree. The reason Trump did better than McCain and Romney was because he did those things, while McCain and Romney didn’t. I still remember the lady who asked McCain about Obama being a Muslim. McCain told her something along the lines of no, Obama isn’t a Muslim, he’s a decent Christian who has different political positions than I do. Trump realized that it wasn’t just that lady, but 10s of millions of other people who thought like her and were eagerly awaiting the chance to support someone like him where they previously would have stayed home when a McCain or Romney was on the ballot. His tactics could have been a lot better, but his strategy was brilliant.
As for what he could have done differently, he should have started right after his inauguration with nominees of the sort he was making towards the end. Forget about Rex Tillerson and “Mad Dog” Mattis. Had he started off by nominating the true believers right off the bat, he might have pulled it off.
To some extent, he did that. Riots were blamed upon Antifa, even the Jan 6th insurrection. And some peaceful protests apparently went violent due to either his brownshirts or right wing agitators.
But trump never really wanted to be a tyrant. He is & was a conman, not a dictator.
That’s true, and a good tyrant would try to engineer that. But it doesn’t really require any 3D chess to be a great tyrant. Avoid shooting yourself in the foot, seek small incremental expansions of your power until you have it all. Don’t provoke too many people until your position is secure enough to do so.
Essentially: a competent tyrant would simply be a Trump-like Republican with enough impulse control to suppress any self-sabotaging instincts. Just a cool sociopath with minimum skills at grabbing power, claiming credit, and deflecting blame. No hypothetical needed, Republicans will find that man and run him in 2024. He’ll have a decent shot at winning. I reckon Ted Cruz is taking careful notes.