The biggest lie Trump–Biden 2024 voters tell themselves. – Slate
Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.
Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.
He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.
The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless.
In general, the mainstream media have shrugged at these overt plans and troubling actions, and most voters either have not focused on them or have dismissed them as exaggerations or impossibilities. After all, our constitutional system has endured for almost 250 years, and the web of checks and balances is strong. There is evidence to support that optimism. We have just seen a historic moment in the rule of law: A unanimous jury of his peers found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying financial documents to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. This was huge news for about three days, or maybe a thousandth of a news cycle as measured in Hunter Biden units. For a good two days, however, proponents of democracy and the justice system took to the airwaves with a message that was equal parts yogurt, mayonnaise, and vanilla: The criminal justice system works! The system held!
But conviction notwithstanding, there is reason to be alarmed—deeply alarmed. This one felony conviction was hardly a vindication of the American justice system. The system “held” only insofar as it was capable of somewhat muzzling the ongoing threats leveled by the defendant against the presiding judge and his family, the jurors and the witnesses, and the team of prosecutors who brought the case. The system held only insofar as efforts to bully and terrorize and bribe witnesses who have helped Donald Trump commit crimes with impunity for decades didn’t quite manage to silence all of those witnesses.
And, depressingly, the system only “held” insofar as it doesn’t collapse upon appeal, say if a someday–Supreme Court, summoned by Speaker Mike Johnson, decides, for no reason law would ever permit or condone, to step in and somehow scupper the whole conviction while giving Trump free rein to act with impunity. This is not fanciful; the current Supreme Court has justices who are partisan actors and likely a majority to give a great deal of leeway to Trump—and he would possibly be able to fill even more seats with loyalists like Judge Aileen Cannon, the jurist presiding comically in his favor in his classified documents theft case, willing to bend the justice system to fit his aims. Below the Supreme Court level, Trump would stack the judicial deck with more extremists like Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and loyalists like Cannon.
To be sure: The conviction was a huge win. Respect to Alvin Bragg and his team and Justice Juan Merchan and the jurors and the witnesses who almost made convicting a former president seem normal. But the normal? That’s also the problem.
Americans have a normalcy bias. It leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that a system is “holding”—even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss. Lawyers have an almost terrifying normalcy bias. It leads them to assume that so long as they are winning good cases it means the justice system is a pathway to winning the larger political debate. And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34 felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal, covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences, and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden.
We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.
“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.
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