Who is Donald Trump, Really?

Who is Donald Trump, really? Damon Linker, writing in "The Week" makes the case that Trump is awful, but that styling opposition to him as a "resistance" and calling his Administration a "regime" is taking things too far. Commentators like Linker woefully underestimate the danger Trump represents to American democracy. Yes, some people go too far. Yes, we are not (yet) an autocracy and people can (still) voice opposition. But Trump is doing everything he can to weaken these restraints. He lies constantly, blurring the very idea of objective fact. He actively tries to discredit those who report fact, referring to the real press that reports on him accurately with the Stalinist phrase "enemy of the people" and dismissing their factual reporting with the epithet "fake news." Like autocrats everywhere he seeks to deny people an independent source of information from his unending torrent of lies. If he gets his way we will no longer be a democracy, but a tyranny. Jefferson understood the vital role of free and independent media when he wrote, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter." He understood that without an informed populace democracy cannot be sustained against the unchallenged propaganda of a despot.

Trump calls for physical violence against the press, dissenters, criminal suspects and those exercising their First Amendment rights. He publicly calls for America to disregard humanitarian provisions of the Geneva Convention which we ourselves introduced to the world. He publicly calls for his political rivals who have been convicted of no crimes (nor even charged) to be thrown in jail. He silences or fires anyone who reports on his corruption or calls out his lies, followed by streams of vicious slander against them. He violates the Constitution by subjecting asylum seekers to cruel and unusual punishment (caging, dividing families, considering people guilty before judgment) and by spending moneys (for his wall, for instance) that have been legally appropriated by Congress for other purposes. He has subverted the security of the United States for his personal, corrupt purposes by attempting to extort a vulnerable foreign ally at war by denying it congressionally appropriated moneys (another breach of the Constitution which requires the president to see that the laws are faithfully executed and of his oath of office to support that Constitution) to force it to concoct lies to help him in his re-election effort. He has threatened to unleash the military power of the US armed forces against the civilian population. He has repeatedly lied to and knowingly spread disinformation to the American people about a deadly pandemic, resulting in the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of people to serve his imagined political self-interest. He has obstructed justice in a serial manner to hide a full investigation of his wrongdoings.

There has never been a president like Trump. Linker is wrong to say the military leaders, by opposing him, are dangerously injecting politics into the civilian-military chain of command. They take an oath to the Constitution, not to one man, and when that man orders them to violate the Constitution they are oath-bound to resist, disobey, and call him out, as they have begun to do. He is the one injecting politics into the military, trying to make it a tool of his racial and political enforcement, and if they go along and follow such orders he will succeed. Linker is wrong, for the road we are on leads to dictatorship. There were several years during Hitler's rise when he hadn't destroyed the free press, he was only talking about it. He hadn't sent Jews to concentration camps, he was only talking about persecuting them. Hitler hadn't launched his war of conquest, he was only talking about how the French, Poles and Russians had to be annihilated to make way for the growing multitudes of Aryan Germans. Many believed he was only spreading such venomous hate and making such outlandish pronouncements to rile up the people and get into power, and then he would become responsible and act like a gentleman. It turned out he meant every word of them and tried to carry out his program just as he had promised. Sixty-five million people paid the price for naïveté like that, entire continents were devastated, and hundreds of millions were thrown into tyranny for decades thereafter as a direct result.

When a man in charge of a powerful country says predominantly brown and black people constitute the "shithole countries," that Nazis and Klansmen are "very fine people," that anyone reporting the facts is a national "enemy," that he believes the dictator of Russia over his own loyal American public servants, that maybe his supporters will insist he serve more than two terms, that police ought to be able to mistreat suspects, that he has the right to order unidentifiable secret police to attack American citizens on the street to clear a way for his photo op, that people of a certain religion cannot immigrate to this country, that the military should be used to unleash a bloodletting on American streets, and that the power of the state should be used to make it more difficult for certain people to vote, we ought to take him at his word. "Resistance" is exactly the way we need to define our approach to such a person, and "regime" is exactly the way we ought to understand what he is trying to institute here.