Trump: Two views

There’ll be more serious blogging later this week, but first I wanted to draw attention to two recent commentaries out of the multitude of Trump stories. They’re useful because they represent conflicting views, yet each contains some important truth.

The first piece, from David Smith in the Guardian, comes with the catchy title (it’s a pull quote from politics professor Larry Jacobs) “In a real sense, US democracy has died.” Smith compares Donald Trump’s playbook to that of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, not just in terms of similarity but in direct emulation:

Orbán’s fans in the US include Vice-President JD Vance, the media personality Tucker Carlson and Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation thinktank, who once said: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” The Heritage Foundation produced Project 2025, a far-right blueprint for Trump’s second term.

He then suggests that in some ways the Trump program has gone further: “But even Orbán might be taken aback – and somewhat envious – of the alacrity that Trump has shown since returning to power, attacking the foundations of democracy not with a chisel but a sledgehammer.” And he quotes Bill Kristol, former neoconservative leader and now Trump critic:

Why can’t he order the justice department to investigate you and me and 50 other people? One assumes the lawyers at justice or the FBI agents wouldn’t do it, but if a couple of thousand have been cleared out and the rest are intimidated. I’m not hysterical but I do think the threat is much more real now than people anticipated it being a month ago.

Other pessimistic voices are also heard. Democrat senator Chris Murphy says “It’s [a] dizzying campaign of political repression that looks more like Russia than the United States,” while anti-Trump Republican Charlie Sykes refers to “a fundamental loss of faith in the rule of law and in our system of checks and balances.” And in the final line, Jacobs warns that “at this moment the idea of an accountable representative system, as the framers of the constitution wrote it, is no longer present.”

Contrast that with Ezra Klein, whose piece (reprinted at Inside Story) is headed “Don’t believe him” – the “him” here being not Smith or his informants, but Trump. According to Klein, the frantic activity of the president’s opening weeks in power shows weakness, not strength. The important thing, he argues, is not to be distracted by it:

The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. …

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalise him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Klein agrees that Trump is aiming at authoritarian power: “His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.” But he rates his chance of success poorly. If his position was stronger, Klein suggests, he wouldn’t need to move so quickly; the whole point is to try to wrongfoot the opposition. But it’s a risky strategy:

It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Klein argues that neither congress nor the courts will be willing to hand Trump unlimited power, and that he is unlikely to attempt to override them by force:

So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin.

So, who is right? Is authoritarian rule an all-but-accomplished fact, or a project doomed to failure? No doubt the truth is somewhere in between, but it seems to me that Klein’s stress on the obstacles to Trump’s success is the more important message at the moment. Just as the United States is not 1930s Germany (as I argued last year in response to John Quiggin), nor is it quite Orbán’s Hungary.

Nonetheless, the Hungarian parallel is an important one to stress, if only because the widespread admiration of Orbán by Trumpist politicians and intellectuals (including many in Australia) so comprehensively undermines their pretence at democratic values. If your political ideal involves muzzling the media, rigging the electoral system and running the economy as a kleptocracy, you can’t hide behind the fig leaf of “populism”: you’re an authoritarian, pure and simple.

But the United States is not Hungary, and Trump has few of Orbán’s advantages. Instead of a new democracy with fragile institutions, he faces numerous competing power centres and a constitution specifically designed to guard against someone just like a Trump. His majority in congress is wafer-thin (whereas Orbán started out with a two-thirds majority) and his control over his party, while impressive, is much less than complete.

We should not take the wrong message from Klein’s optimism: defeating Trump is not going to be easy. The fight is going to be long and difficult, and enormous damage both to America and the world may be done along the way. But the death of democracy is not yet upon us.