Jeff's Lunchbreak

This is my semi-regular feature to post links to articles about Donald Trump along with excerpts from those articles. Trump has the potential to cause so much damage to our country and the world that it's every citizen's responsibility to keep pressure on him and our other elected officials to try to minimize the damage. To read previous entries in this series and other Trump related posts, check out my Trump archives.

It's been a little while since I've done one of these posts because, quite frankly, it's so damned disheartening. Every time I review politics and see all the damage being done to the United States, I get depressed and worried for the future. And today, as in literally just an hour or two ago, we see a corrupt President trying very hard to discredit the very agency that could investigate him. And it's working. Republican trust in the FBI is down 22 points since 2015 (source).

Here's a good article discussing Trump's feud with the FBI, followed by a scary excerpt.

"Unprecedented": 9 historians on why Trump's war with the FBI is so stunning

Yes, the independence of the FBI is under siege. Bringing an independent judiciary and investigative branch under the domination of the executive is one of the first moves of regimes that do not respect the rule of law. Pinochet's Chile. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Putin's Russia.

The rationale is simple. Besides the military, the judiciary and law enforcement branches are the most powerful in a state. Control and politicization of that wing allows the ruler to criminalize his opponents, to label them enemies of the state, when in fact those so-called enemies are really defenders of a more viable, democratic nation. That is why they are a threat.

One of the scariest things is actually a few months old by now, summed up succinctly in the headline itself:

Washington Post - In a new poll, half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it

Half of Republicans would actually support postponing an election if Donald Trump called for it. That is absolutely outrageous. That is exactly the type of thing the despots and dictators do, and here in the United States of America, we have half of the members of the party in power supporting such a gross violation of democratic principles.

Here's another article to do nothing to reassure you, also followed with a few excerpts:

Vox - How democracies die, explained: The problems in American democracy run far deeper than Trump.

Demagogues and authoritarians do not destroy democracies. It's established political parties, and the choices they make when faced with demagogues and authoritarians, that decide whether democracies survive.

"2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I've been here," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week. "The best year on all fronts. And a lot of people were shocked because we didn't know what we were getting with Donald Trump."

The best year on all fronts. Think about that for a moment. If you want to know why congressional Republicans are opening an assault on the FBI in order to protect Trump, it can be found in that comment. This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies.

And yet McConnell surveyed the tax cuts he passed and the regulations he repealed and called this not a mixed year for his political movement, not a good year for his political movement, but the best year he'd ever seen.

How Democracies Die contains quite a bit about Trump, but it is largely what we already know: Trump has authoritarian instincts -- indeed, he checks every box on a test of authoritarian leaders -- but thus far, he has lacked the discipline and the institutional capacity to upend American democracy.

What if, instead of a louche, undisciplined, boorish, and insulting demagogue, Trump were a smooth, calculating, strategic, and disciplined demagogue? What if it were not Trump who had won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but John Kelly -- a four-star general who shares many of Trump's cultural grievances and his xenophobic intuitions but could wrap himself in the flag, in the rhetoric of patriotism, in the dangers that lurk beyond our borders?

Indeed, if I had to rank the most unsettling moments of the past year, high on my list would be press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders's rejoinder to a journalist who asked about a baldfaced lie Kelly had told. "If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that's something highly inappropriate," she said. That is how democracies die.

I just finished reading a young adult historical novel, The Devil in Vienna. It was about a Jewish girl's experience in Vienna around the time Hitler was coming to power, based largely on the author's own experiences. And no, things are nowhere near that bad, yet, and hopefully won't ever be, but the parallels are deeply disturbing - extreme patriotism, nearly religious reverence for the flag, scapegoating a minority group, the authoritarian leader discrediting and interfering with legitimate government agencies, the cult of personality around that leader. When you see the direction our country is headed, and look at what has happened in history when other countries have gone down that path, it will make you very, very scared for the possible future of the U.S. Let's just hope the Democrats do well in the next election.