What would a competent tyrant do that Trump didn't?

Politics & Elections
61
  1. Set goals that he could achieve, and do them.

Let’s face it, Trump said a lot of things that he had zero intention of doing. Mexico was never going to pay for the wall, the US was never going to figure out how to legally allow immigration from Muslim countries, most people paid more after his ‘tax cut’, and how’s the replacement for Obamacare doing?

The difference between conman and tyrant is execution; Trump couldn’t create a functioning policy to save his life.

  1. Destroy the free press.

It’s an interesting consequence that Fox News is not a winner of four years of Donald Trump. CNN topped them in viewers, and for as much as Trump would bellow fake news, the propagandist right relied heavily upon it. Trump had a willing republican congress and the means to appoint people to things like the FCC; he could have simply forced mainstream news off the air.

  1. Win a military adventure.

Mussolini, Napoleon, and many others would use the troops to highlight patriotism to the nation, and then effect some cause to promote themselves. The obvious target probably would have been North Korea, a target that would probably have ironically earned some good will around the world

Trump was notorious for bailing on the Kurds and had no appetite for such efforts.

  1. Draw a direct connection between people’s personal fortunes to their actions.

Glory in battle, prosperity at home; humans are built to weigh themselves far before they consider the how and the why. A harbinger of the of apocalypse was at hand to make crystal clear that this was not the case in 2020. The only thing worse than encountering Covid-19 was a questionable record in dealing with it.

  1. Break the normal.

Change society, leave your political opponents interested in keeping some of the things you’ve done. Deciding to give funds to something like Indian tribes would be followed by someone else either accepting it or trying to take the money back. Make the next guy have to make hard choices about the policies you’ve changed.

Because it’s real easy to look at children and cages and say NO, and to get much of the nation to agree with you, and look like a monster for doing it.

The reality is that the US Presidency is designed to create strong leadership. You don’t become a tyrant by removing votes, but by removing voices. You win, and you create a culture where you are winning, and people win for supporting you. The ballot box is non-negotiable, but how you conduct elections, how people are informed, even the culture all around them is up to you.

62

See that’s the part I can’t quite wrap my head around- how these stalwarts of the party have gone from beloved statesmen and party movers and shakers, to being effectively pariahs in the span of maybe what… a dozen years? Are these people’s memories that short, or are they that stupid and gullible that they could somehow forget that all these guys have/had long and distinguished credentials as Republican politicians, and are now listening to this nonsense about them being RINOs?

It boggles the mind. It’s like if the Democratic party took a hard left turn and started denouncing Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter.

63

Yes, it is. Or, like the Stalin-era CPSU denouncing Leon Trotsky and then having him assassinated. And, as with Trotsky, this was no accident; if you want to really want to convert people to your dogma, you must start by making them denounce and disavow their heroes, especially those who have failed. That so many Republicans now regard McCain–a lifelong Republican of the pragmatically conservative wing–as some kind of traitor or worse, a “liberal”, and revere Donald Trump for his “strength” and “courage”–demonstrates how effective the GOP propaganda machine has been in distancing itself from McCain’s loss to Barack Obama, and moreover his graceful and honest concession when it was clear he lost the election. Ditto for Mitt Romney. The GOP has now learned that they can contest the results of any election, regardless of how baseless such a challenge is, and even though they may not overturn the results it will strengthen their support among the base who want to believe that some kind of fraud occurred regardless of the lack of evidence.

The GOP isn’t trying to win on facts; they’re earnestly saying that the facts don’t matter. They’re appealing to magical thinking that if you pressure election officials they’ll overturn the election, and if they can establish enough threat of force or support among state governments, they just might be right. Trump’s real failing was whining about unfairness instead of inveighing supporters to attack state and local election officials. Instead, he belatedly compelled them to charge Congress in some kind of fanciful hope that preventing the already collected Electoral College votes from being tallied would allow him to remain in office, even though that whole procedure is just pageantry. You’d think Donald Trump would know something about pageants, but then, this is the guy who ran multiple waterfront casinos into bankruptcy, so he’s not even good at the things he supposedly knows how to do.

Stranger

64

Notice how all these censures (McCain, Murkowski, etc.) are being carried out by the State party committees. Committees that in the last 10 years were mostly taken over by the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus and then by the Trumpists/White Nationalists, so in fact they do not have institutional memories longer than 8 or 10 years and their memories of McCain/Romney/Murkowski etc. are memories of people who did/could/would not impose the Will of the Base by whatever means necessary.

This takeover was helped a lot because traditionally the “serious” national or statewide Establishment leaders would not bother with actually controlling and running the state parties as Officers of the State Party but leave those posts to whoever would get elected from every Fumbuck County, who they’d expect to control through money/influence while themselves remaining around their peers and the big corporate donors.

Took them far longer than it should to realize that the people who were bothering any more to show up to run and vote in all the Fumbuck Counties were the wingnuts. Who now have demands to make.

65

Fortunately his only skill is as a salesman. He did what a sleazy salesman would do when selling a car with a weird noise - deny it exists, say it’s normal etc. If he’d been someone who could actually fix the problem, he’d still be in office, very likely.

66

Wish I had your confidence. Biden is now the train driver, he’s got the train back on the rails and moving forward and that’s great. But the method that has been found by which the train driver can derail the train still exists. Biden driving the train well isn’t enough. He’s got to make modifications to the system so that the next time the Republicans get elected train driver (and they will, sooner or later) they can’t derail the train again.

I don’t think he persuaded them of anything, as such. He simply won the vote of enough of their constituents to bust down the door and install himself in the Big Chair.

67

I have to admit I was wrong on this one. I would have bet a good sum of money back in 2016 that Trump would start a war before 2020. It’s an obvious way for a weak president to build up his prestige. It astonishes me that he didn’t.

68

Anyone who isn’t stupid and/or gullible has left the Republican party.

69

I can only infer from the above statement that you believe that Biden should somehow “make modifications to the system” of governance to prevent an autocrat from committing vile and antidemocratic actions. But making modifications to the system of checks and balances in the federal government is the specific responsibility of Congress; the President has no authority to make any changes beyond those within the bureaucracies of the Executive Branch, and is extremely limited even within that context. The primary authority the President has is in engaging with foreign powers and invoking military action, and technically those are even restricted in duration and permanence without Congressional approval.

In any case, regardless of what strictures are in place, a would-be demagogue in the Oval Office backed by a Congress in which the majority supports his misdeeds and a judiciary that can’t or won’t act as a check against executive overreach is pretty much free to do as he wishes subject to resistance at the state and local level. Biden can be an example of what actually competent, pragmatic, and compassionate leadership should look like, but he cannot force his success to follow that model except via electoral pressure. In other words, the answer isn’t to try (and fail) to create some kind of rigid system of governance that won’t permit a president to misbehave, but not to elect bad people to the office, which is the job of The People to whom the country is theoretically beholden.

What Biden can do is highlight how much corporate interests and dark money influence elections…which, perhaps ironically, is the same thing John McCain campaigned upon. But nobody makes people follow a demagogue, or can stop them from doing so when the ‘freely’ choose that path.

Stranger

70

Whatever Biden does, nobody can guarantee that it will be enough to win an election - I agree with you on that point.

But Biden is not repeating the same mistakes Obama and he made in the months after Obama’s inauguration. They’re not trying to please moderates or the corporate wing of the party; they’re trying to get money into checking accounts, which is exactly what they need to be doing. They’re also working with the private sector to get vaccines out and into people’s arms. He’s not trying to be photogenic or hip; he’s getting it done. That’s the right approach.

Longer-term I worry about a market meltdown. There’s shit going on in the market that ought to give us some pause, though I couldn’t begin to say when those chickens might come home to roost. Might be next week, but could be next decade.

71

I think the most important thing Biden and the Democrats can do, after addressing the immediate pandemic crisis, is work on enshrining voter rights. The Republicans do not have a real majority; they hold power by suppressing voters.

72

Unfortunately, direct authority over voting is the purview of the states. Even federal legislation such as the Voting Rights Act which can eliminate poll taxes and excessive eligibility requirements can’t eliminate ‘reasonable’ voter ID laws (even when those laws are onerous on specific demographics) or fully control gerrymandering that is not of a specific racial or ethnic nature. Gerrymandering in particular is problematic because the whole notion of what plays as ‘fair’ in redistricting is subjective and indeed almost arbitrary, e.g. should all districts be constituted to represent specific “communities of interest”, or should they be diverse enough to be “balanced”, or should they follow geographical and/or historical population clusters, or what? FiveThirtyEight.com had an excellent podcast series on gerrymandering and how difficult it is to comprise voting districts that are actually fair in being both broadly and accurately representative.

The real solution, and the one that the DNC has regrettably ignored, is not losing focus on state and local elections. The RNC has put significant effort in the last twenty years into winning statehouses and governorships because while the federal government has most of the money, the states actually still hold a lot of electoral power, and in theory a majority of Republican-dominated states could simply select a Republican president (and if they could force elected senators out of office, replace them with Republican appointees) regardless of the will of the majority of voters. The fact that so many traditionally Democratic states (and not ‘Dixiecrat’ Southern states but northern states (e.g. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) and states that historically in play (Iowa, Ohio, and West Virginia), have been widely ignored by the DNC in favor of corporate benefactors and high density urban voting populations. Certainly the voting obstruction strategy of the Republicans is a factor, but just as much is that so many people feel unrepresented and ignored by the Democratic party that even though the GOP makes nonsense promises that they fail to fulfill or blames all of the nation’s problems on fabricated bogeymen like immigration or environmentalism, at least they’re speaking to these people in a way Democrats, as a whole, are not.

Joe Manchin gets traction in West Virginia by being a Democrat that talks an awful lot like a Republican because he’s telling people at least part of what they want to hear even though his record as a senator is mediocre at best, and while the lesson isn’t that Democrats should should just ape GOP candidates with a slightly liberal spin, it is that they need to listen and respond to their voters’ concerns.

Stranger

73

Agreed, and I see that as something that is going to be done at the state and local level. Take a page - no take the whole playbook from Stacy Abrams. I think the work that she has done and is doing is some of the most constructive pro-democracy work that’s been done in the United States ever, and certainly the most important post-1965.

Biden and the Congress have to do their part by doing what they’re doing now – stick a wet thumb in the air to see if bipartisan winds might be blowing their way but otherwise, fuck the GOP, and just shove their agenda down their throats. Just put money into people’s pockets.

74

Does eating babies count as cannibalism? Gee, I drew that over three years ago! I still stand by it.

75

Stacey Abrams grasped some essentials that the entire DNC apparatus failed to understand: one, of course, is that local politics and grassroots organizing matters, and in fact is crucial in areas of traditionally low voter turnout. Grassroots organizing requires both a lot of effort and skill but the result is getting to people who aren’t part of your standard voting bloc, nor represent traditional ‘swing voters’. The other is that reaching out to marginalizing communities in a direct way matters.

Abrams understood that black women voters in particular were a highly marginalized group that often didn’t bother voting both because of all of the other competing burdens they often have and because none of the candidates really spoke or listened to them. By reaching out to them through members of their own communities and listening to their specific needs and concerns rather than just telling them what they’ll get for their vote, Abrams turned a marginal election into a victory. And that is a lesson that doesn’t just apply to black women; it applies to every voting demographic that feels alienated and ignored, including the ‘reluctant’ Trump voters in the Midwest who glommed onto facile claims of assistance because Trump was the only person offering them. The DNC should be copying the entire playbook from Abrams and bringing her in to consult because she understands a basic lesson that they have apparently forgotten.

Stranger

76

The constitution does not say that states have sole authority over their elections, or even that the only exception would be civil rights-based amendments to prevent racial discrimination.

Article 1 Section 4 states:

Gerrymandering I think would be harder for the federal government to regulate without hooking in to the civil rights amendments.

77

It’s a problem that has to be attacked both ways. Yes Biden hopefully governs well and in a way that causes him (and the Dems) to stay in charge of the train. But I am doubtful that is enough.

@Stranger_On_A_Train I understand the constitutional and practical difficulties Biden faces but you underplay his power. The Dems control both the executive and congress, and that provides opportunities for reform as to elections and judicial appointments.

78

Personally, I think packing the courts is all it would take for a competent tyrant to destroy democracy.

The US has been a dictatorship for black people for most of its history. Slavery, then Jim Crow. Blacks who lived under Jim Crow lived under a dictatorship. A brutal police state, no voting rights, no freedom of speech, no rights to assembly (there were limitations under Jim crow to black people congregating together w/o a white person there, except in church services), no rights to personal property or privacy, no rights to be free of cruel treatment, etc. And Judges didn’t really overturn these laws (except for Brown v Board of education, which kick started the civil rights movement).

Luckily the judges appointed by Trump and confirmed by the GOP seem to be fairly professional. They’ve thrown out Trump’s election lawsuits. However imagine if someone like Trump forced retirement on hundreds of federal judges, then appointed people like the capitol insurgents to be judges instead.

The judiciary is all that really holds us back from a true dictatorship.

79

I came to post pretty much exactly that, but also to add the FBI and the CIA to the list of agencies he needed but totally alienated. The only thing that allowed me to sleep for the last 4 years was the fact that Trump had basically alienated everyone he needed to actually abuse his power. I think the reason for this is that Trump knew that all of the dictators that he admired all had these institutions behind them, but he had no idea how much effort it took to get them.

Rather than slowly over a number of years placing loyalists in positions of power while quietly marginalizing those opposed him, he just assumed that once he took office they would just do what he said automatically. When that failed to happen he in his usual Trump fashion threw a hissy fit and attacked them publicly. Thus he turned organizations that were naturally well disposed to Republicans and authoritarianism into enemies. A competent dictator wouldn’t have made such a mistake.

80

A corrupted judiciary would certainly help. The law and justice party has strengthened the right wing in Poland and I think Erdogan has stacked courts in Turkey. In theory, courts try to pass themselves off as neutral arbiters of constitutions and the law; in reality, they can become sock puppets. One of the things the Framers did right was to create a very strong, very independent judiciary.

I’m still quite concerned at the erosion of judicial independence from politics at the state level. If the Republicans succeed at building an authoritarian state, the state governments will have a lot to do with that.