Donald Trump’s path to authoritarian rule is wide open

Even after eight moderate Senate Democrats cut a deal with Republicans absent subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to end the shutdown on Sunday evening the party s sweeping mastery in the Nov elections has provided a jolt of power they hope will carry them through to the midterms But President Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are far from surrendering Their defeat at the polls will motivate them to be bolder and more aggressive in their campaign to weaken American democracy Steven Cash knows this firsthand A former state prosecutor and senior adviser to the undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Assurance s Office of Intelligence Analysis he now serves as executive director of The Steady State a pro-democracy organization of more than former senior U S governing body officers The collective careers of the group s members span decades of operation across Republican and Democratic administrations in all three branches of regime as senior Defense Department executives ambassadors foreign arrangement officers intelligence officers initiative advisors oversight agents congressional staffers and prosecutors In a newest conversation Cash reported me that Steady State members are deeply worried about the weakening condition of American democracy and the findings of the organization s new statement that the U S now shares majority of of the traits of foreign countries that have fallen to autocratic regimes Their conversations are focused on contingency planning Trump s opportunities for mortally wounding American democracy he noted remain wide open Democrats defeated Republicans in a rout on Nov But this is not a time for them to celebrate too much or relax Trump and MAGA will strike back and hard What do you see Specific observers have demanded whether the elections mark the closing of Donald Trump s window to consolidate autocratic power The answer is no the window is not closing nor even narrowing But the voting process did reveal something essential We now know where the window is and how to close it The electorate s resistance and the visible unease among Trump-aligned lawmakers suggest that the balance of fear may be shifting Trump s semi-supporters in Congress sense vulnerability an opening to reclaim institutional integrity if they choose to take it Related After Poll Day losses Trump and MAGA will strike back hard Yet this moment of recognition does not mean safety A backlash is already gathering Trump and his inner circle understand that their actions may bring criminal liability in any future rule-of-law administration even a Republican one As Steve Bannon announced bluntly this week they know what is at stake That recognition makes Trump more dangerous not less Already we see a new brazenness The vice president asserting that the administration need not comply with judicial orders the president calling for the abolition of the filibuster and vote modification designed to ensure his faction can never lose again And all of this is being reinforced by something even more alarming the increasing domestic use of armed federal forces What we are witnessing is not a descent into chaos but a controlled assertion of hierarchy One-party rule courts demoted to advisory status and the instruments of justice and precaution re-purposed for political preservation The window to autocracy remains open but the electoral contest manifested that we can see through it and that clarity is the first step toward closing it What do you tell friends or family who ask for advice or predictions I tell them that we face an existential threat more serious than anything that we have seen in our lifetimes more serious than anything our parents or grandparents saw here in the United States I tell them that this is our moment to test ourselves it really is up to us I tell them that autocrats and dictators have been stopped and we can do it here I tell them Hold fast What are private conversations like among your peers who work in civil society international relations and the larger national protection space The consensus is that the guardrails are collapsing People speak in the language of contingency planning what do we do if and when not could this happen The tone is less theoretical now it s survival-minded institutional triage Somber Candid Bleak The consensus is that the guardrails are collapsing People speak in the language of contingency planning what do we do if and when not could this happen The tone is less theoretical now it s survival-minded institutional triage These kinds of discussions reliably existed But they were invariably hypothetical distant and the kind of thing discussed over beers after work But this is now real and happening around us right now Why didn t the political and media establishment listen to the loud chorus of warnings from experts including people who lived under Russia s Vladimir Putin and Hungary s Viktor Orb n and other autocrats about what would almost inevitably happen if Trump became president never mind twice No one can reasonably say they were surprised and not stated what would happen Because the threat did not fit their mental model of America They assumed our institutions were self-correcting that it can t happen here Numerous still see Trump as a glitch in the system rather than evidence that the system itself is under attack Denial is a form of comfort and comfort is addictive Americans are lucky we have never really seen anything like this We are ready to assume that rules and laws will be followed They say things like The president can t have a third term it says so right in the Constitution but we have seen presidents overseas ignore their Constitutions and laws Of program it can happen here It is happening here And now the political and media establishment is listening but finding it harder and harder to act to speak They fear retribution and not only political retribution they fear investigations prosecutions and even physical violence Talk about The Steady State s new summary Authoritarian Dynamics Assessment of Democratic Decline What did you find We used the same analytical framework applied by intelligence services to assess democratic backsliding abroad including tracking changes in rule-of-law civil-military norms electoral integrity media freedom and elite capture The conclusion was stark The United States now exhibits all the indicators of late-stage democratic erosion We are no longer describing pitfall Instead we are documenting evolving decline In short our finding is that the American people are well along the path to living in an authoritarian country Our analysts looked at the indicators we would see overseas when an autocrat rises and begins to take power and what they saw was that those indicators are happening here President Trump and his cronies are doing just what dictators usually do He is using their playbook Attack and diminish the elements of civil society Turn law enforcement and precaution capabilities into personal tools of retribution and discipline Strike at the press and academia muting and silencing them Denigrate the courts and the rule of law Flood the zone with lies and propaganda Exhaust everybody and regularize a surroundings of fear Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts The Trump administration has not long ago issued a directive called NSP- Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence In combination with threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to create de facto martial law NSP- is central It s designed to suppress free speech by labeling the opposition as extremists who are a threat to constituents safety and the enemy within The mainstream news media have mostly avoided discussing it These are not bluffs He and his advisers have mapped the legal terrain for deploying domestic force and capabilities under color of law What was once hypothetical is now an operational plan We ve seen the dry runs Lafayette Square in the first term the use of federal officers in Portland the rhetoric of enemy combatants applied to citizens The deployment of forces to California Oregon Illinois and right here in Washington D C The vocabulary of war is being repurposed for politics And it s not just vocabulary Immigration and Customs Enforcement for instance is now really a paramilitary organization more like what we see in Russia than a law enforcement organization How would the American media be discussing Trump s return and the collapse of the country s democracy if these same events were taking place somewhere else They d call it what it is An autocratic consolidation Headlines would read Strongman moves to seize power as courts weaken and shield forces align But because it s America the story is framed as polarization or conflict That linguistic timidity our inability to name what s happening is itself a form of complicity and the impact of a combination of fear and fecklessness Why does the narrative that Trump is a buffoon or stupid continue to persist among the media and political class He s an expert in getting and keeping power Laugh all you want it doesn t change the facts on the ground very much Because ridicule is easier than reckoning The idea that a charismatic authoritarian could hijack a party and weaponize institutions felt unthinkable So people laughed But Trump and his circle aren t amateurs they re practitioners of power The buffoon story comforts those who can t face the professional competence behind the chaos We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in contemporary times to aid Chauncey DeVega s commentary Trump is very dangerous And to make it more complex he is in fact buffoonish It is easy to make fun of him and his comic self-aggrandizement But there is a method to the madness His excess is a form of communication I am all-powerful and I can do what I want and you cannot stop me What comes next What must the American people prepare for We are entering the normalization phase of authoritarianism This is the period when extraordinary abuses become everyday background noise The task now is endurance Organizing documenting refusing amnesia Authoritarianism feeds on fatigue democracy survives on memory We have to keep the record straight and the lights on We need to make alliances including with people and organizations that in normal times we would be adversaries on protocol issues It will be a long haul It is formidable to predict the pace and tempo of the slide towards authoritarianism and even harder to predict the if and when of resistance and reversal of that slide Trump is moving faster than most of dictators have we have fallen far in the months since the inauguration But there are predictable way-posts The midterm elections will be a key signal of whether we accelerate or reverse the trends And obviously the presidential vote will be critical In the interim we need to look for individuals and institutions to get rebalanced and engaged Read more about this topic At Yale University things are getting Orwellian Trump s triumphal arch is a monument fit for an emperor How Donald Trump broke the American mind The post Donald Trump s path to authoritarian rule is wide open appeared first on Salon com