When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, many people saw the event as an inflection point in world history. Academic Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that it signaled the “end of history,” by which he meant the end of the 50-year-old world order based on the US-USSR superpower struggle. The West quickly embraced the burgeoning democracy in Russia and looked forward to improved relations across the globe as the previous proxy wars were expected to disappear along with their Soviet sponsor.
The Soviet Union was relegated to the “ash heap of history,” as President Reagan had predicted a few years earlier. Any Western opposition to the new Russia was seen as a throwback to the various Red Scares that occurred in the decades between the formation of the Soviet Union in 1917 and its demise in 1991. Anti-Russia talk was labeled a new McCarthyism, calling to mind the hysteria that characterized one stream of American opinion about the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
In the 2016 election, the successful candidate, #PO1135809, famously called for Russian interference in the presidential contest when he said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” But he’s a charlatan and a blowhard, right? Who would take him seriously?
The Russians, that’s who. According to the Mueller Report (read it if you haven’t; the report confirmed Russian election interference and did not exonerate #PO1135809, despite the repeated claims by him and his acolytes that it did. Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices on or around the day that TFG, aka #PO1135809, called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server. The US intelligence community – along with a 2019 report by the then GOP-controlled United States Senate – confirmed that the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based in St. Petersburg, Russia, was a troll farm focused on creating thousands of social media accounts that planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton. Check it out – the Wikipedia article on “Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections” is well-sourced and very detailed.
The 2024 presidential election is in full swing. Astonishingly, #PO1135809 is very likely to be the GOP nominee. If he wins the presidency in 2024, Russia (currently a dying political system) will be reinvigorated as a major player – primarily because the simpleton (and autocrat-wannabe) who will occupy the White House wants Putin to love him. The people whom #PO1135809 admires most in the world – Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro – are anti-democracy thugs who look, act, and talk like strongmen. #PO1135809 is transfixed by powerful men, and has said many times that he thinks these are “very smart men” who “love their country.” When he was in office he shifted American foreign policy away from the country’s traditional democratic allies and in the direction of these dangerous leaders. In his current bloviating about what he would do as POTUS if given the opportunity, #PO1135809 makes clear that he would do this again — but more effectively because he will ensure that there are no guardrails to prevent it — if American voters make the mistake of returning him to office.
#PO1135809 employs all the tools of authoritarians.
He creates scapegoats on which he says Americans can blame all of their woes. Sometimes these scapegoats are simply people who dare to disagree with him publically (Rinos, Trump-hating judges, anyone he decides is “woke”) but at other times his scapegoats are entire demographic groups – immigrants, Arabs, Black Lives Matter). This is attractive to his reduced voter base, made up to a significant degree of economically marginal and low-education white men who can’t compete in a society where nonwhite nonmen can catch a break.
He marginalizes expertise across the board: the media, professionals (scientists, academics, journalists, doctors, government employees) and recommends that his voters listen to him alone.
He normalizes political violence. During the 2016 campaign, he encouraged his rallygoers to attack protesters in the crowd, suggested that the police need to rough up people when they take them into custody, and he not only failed to respond adequately to the political violence of January 6 — he encouraged the rioters during that day and has been sympathetic toward them ever since.
He denigrates democracy by his continuing adherence to what everyone else calls“The Big Lie.” Three years later, he reiterates that the 2020 election was “stollen and rigged” (the man can’t spell) and predicts that the only way he can lose in 2024 is if the election is once again “stollen.” The Big Lie is systematically being dismantled in a variety of legal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions across the country. Meanwhile, this is what #PO1135809 told rally-goers in New Hampshire last week:
"So we have to be careful, you gotta get out there and you got to watch those voters," Trump said. "You don't have to vote, don't worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes, you gotta watch.
This is insidious; it suggests that he knows he won’t have the votes and has decided that it will work for him to denigrate the democratic process entirely.
We should remember the source of the idea of “The Big Lie:” Nazi propaganda, in which Goebbels (among others) supported the idea that
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
In checking this out, I found that Goebbels did not say this precisely (although it is often attributed to him) but that it summarized the Third Reich ideology of lying to achieve political goals.
When I started thinking (last week) about writing on this topic, I saw that one of my regular podcasts, Talking Heads (hosted by law professor and legal commentator Harry Litman), had just released its most recent episode “From Russia with Kompromat.” I decided to take a listen. In this episode, I was quickly reminded of all of the ties between TFG and Putin’s Russia. Harry Litman and his guests (Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, who worked on the Mueller probe, and Adam Davidson, a journalist who has covered international economics for decades) spend 50 minutes reminding listeners of all of the reasons why American national interest and nation security demand that #PO1135809 never be returned to the White House.
Here it is – you should listen to it too.
It’s still not clear whether American democracy actually survived the first #PO1135809 presidential term. The detritus is everywhere – in the courts, in Congress, in the schools, in our election processes, in our everyday discourse, and in the streets of American cities. We would almost certainly not survive a second term – at least, not in recognizable form.
Terrific piece. Thank you. Love that chart, as despicable as it is. Thank you. Important as ever.
As usual, excellent essay. I'm reading the book "Winter Is Coming", and it is truly chilling. Thanks for all you do to keep the conversation going, Karen. It's frightening, but we cannot let down. I have every hope that we will see him in bright orange and for many, many years.