Very well said.
But the second unusual thing was that trump somehow persuaded the Republican Party that he was part of, the leader in fact, of the Republican Party.
In a nutshell… a competent tyrant’s priorities are:
- Gain and consolidate power
- Consolidate power by a system of spoils and bribes
- Support that power by fostering popular approval
All he had to do is pursue those priorities in the right order. He had every resource at his disposal to do so. But he pursued them in exactly the reverse order because he’s so desperately vain, insecure, and stupid.
No, I think the leaders of the Republican party knew Trump wasn’t really one of them. But the party has spent forty years manipulating dumb people to advance its agenda. They usually apply that skill to Republican voters but for the last four years they used it on a Republican president.
Trump was just a figurehead in his own administration. McConnell and other regular Republicans were running the country.
Trump looked at that list and said “You expect me to do three things!”
“How can I remember three things? Rick Perry couldn’t, and I hired him!”
The pandemic was an unexpected “gift” that Trump completely squandered and would have given him an almost perfect opportunity to impose a functional, martial law-lite (or martial law-like) structure. Horatius’ “Pandemic Patriot Patrolmen” scenario is a very plausible one.
If Trump also had not been so overtly toxic, bigoted and insulting, he could have been seen as a sort-of “lovable big goof” who the population would want to succeed, sort of like Rodney Dangerfield; if he could have exploited the pandemic in a lovable goof manner that seemed to show that he truly cared about the citizenry, and seemed to earnestly listen to wise counsel, I think that we would be in a lot of trouble now and would only realize it after it was far too late.
“I don’t get no respect!” versus “I have been treated more unfairly than any president in history!”
When Rodney Dangerfield would have been a better president, things are seriously wrong.
Stranger
So true. In fact I was going to edit my post to say Rodney Dangerfield or John Goodman. There also would have been the advantage of a perceived “pivot” after his first election which I think would have stood him in very good stead.
That’s an interesting angle. If he could have, every so often, just done a public facepalm and said, Hey, you know what? I fucked up. These guys are right. Let’s do it their way! he could have won (not to mention saved tens of thousands of lives).
Appointing loyalists to the major commands wouldn’t be too tough, but below the level of Chiefs of Staff/Combatant Commanders, the officers aren’t appointed by the President. So he could install all his own guys at the top levels, but below that, it would take a fairly long-term concerted effort to identify and promote loyalists on the part of the other political appointees.
The States would be the kicker in any sort of despotic/tyrannical situation. Even though lots of them are red states and seem to like Trump, I’m not so sure how they’d react in a situation where they stood to lose a big chunk of their sovereignty to the Federal government, no matter what party was in charge. I suspect that sort of tyranny would only go so far before the states would put brakes on it.
I agree, but I think he would have lost a lot of support from his base. Trump’s self-image, and his base’s image of him, has only two modes: Beloved Leader and Lone Hero. If he’s not effortlessly in control of a situation with everybody around him praising and thanking him, then he has to be the beleaguered stalwart indomitably resisting the evil assaults of his enemies.
Trump squandered his chance to be the Beloved Leader of the pandemic when he placed his bet on just being able to ignore and minimize it until it went away, so as not to jeopardize his precious “booming economy”. When he turned out to be solidly in the wrong about that, he couldn’t admit to being wrong, because being wrong is for losers. So his only option, from a Trumpian perspective, was to double down on his wrongness and present himself as the Lone Hero repudiating all the attempts to “destroy our freedoms” by imposing public-health protocols.
He’s more “Greatest American Hero” except without the suit or selfless attitude:
Stranger
Yeah, all those praising Trump for motivating his base seemed to not notice that he motivated the opposition even more. If he’d toned it down even a little, he might have won some of the states he lost by only a small margin, and won the election.
Contrary, to this, how many state officials actually turned around and supported his “stolen election” nonsense? They were perfectly happy to try to have the state-level election results thrown out just to help him. State-level control of the Presidential election is probably the most important power they have, and they were willing to just toss it aside.
I don’t know… I feel like there’s probably a line that a despot couldn’t cross, no matter what party he started from. I’m just not sure exactly where that is.
How many times did we say that about Trump and the GOP? “Come on, now they have to stop supporting him, right? Right?”
Nope.
We’ve already established a Republican can get away with torture, rape, and trying to overthrow the government without losing the support of the party. So what possibilities are we down to now? Cannibalism?
I bet someone could be thrown out of the party for committing decency. That’s not a move Trump is capable of, so we’ll never know if the Rs would shun him specifically for that.
More to the point, Trump voters are inherently authoritarian-oriented; they believe in using police power or military power to defeat liberalism with brute force.
I think Trump could have continued to be a braggadocio jackass if he had just demonstrated a little more seriousness and consistency with regard to the pandemic. This was the only time he really needed to be presidential, and he just couldn’t sustain it. We’re fortunate that he was too narcissistic to pull it off over the long term.
That said, the problem Republicans have with toning it down is that it dampens the enthusiasm of the conservative political base, and conservatism has long been associated with white nationalism. It hasn’t always been as obvious as it has been the last few years, but there’s always been an association. In fact Bushism and Romneyism was the kinder, nicer form of it, and they couldn’t energize conservatives with promises of moderation and compromise. The base - where most of the party is - demanded anger. Trump gave it to them. He came frighteningly close to winning re-election with that energy, which is why there’s no real mandate to steer away from it.
What Republicans are waiting for is some kind of catastrophe that they can capitalize on in order to discredit Biden and their Dem opposition. They need vaccines to fail. They need COVID to succeed. They need the economy to collapse. They need disaster. They’ll be working hard behind the scenes to foment it.
A little off tangent with regard to the thread but in the same vein as the paragraph above…one thing that’s beginning to worry me a little is the explosive popularity of cryptocurrency. It reminds me of a lot of ‘new economy’ bubbles: dot com IPOs of the 90s, shady mark-to-market accounting of the 2000s, credit default swaps, and now banks moving to crypto. The first two bubbles were more easily corrected – one with a market correction and the other with the criminal justice system, but when big banks start chasing imaginary fortunes…bad shit tends to follow. I don’t pretend to understand the macro-implications of crypto, but I don’t think anyone else does either, particularly the banks - and that’s the problem.
Has already effectively happened. Cindy McCain was censured and effectively ‘removed’ for speaking her mind and of course being the widow of that hideous turncoat, ‘fake’ Republican, and immoral coward, John McCain.
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