Today marks six months of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. In this half year since his Jan. 20 inauguration, we’ve seen a country changed, mostly in the wrong direction.
Witness American troops deployed on city streets, masked and unidentified federal agents snatching people in broad daylight, long-standing international alliances shaken, a Supreme Court all in on endorsing a practically monarchic vision of the presidency, a Congress brought entirely to heel, a torpedoing of government capacity that will be difficult if not impossible to rebuild and the consistent and aggressive targeting of every plank of civil society.
There are too many representative moments of this dangerous time in U.S. political history to count, but to take just one example, last week the toadyish GOP majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nomination hatchet man Emil Bove, a former Trump personal attorney and now associate deputy attorney general, to a be a federal appeals court judge.
There could hardly be a more telling capstone to the first six months of the wannabe authoritarian than trying to put a man who has been credibly accused by a whistleblower of telling DOJ personnel to prepare to ignore federal court orders on the bench himself, purely on the reasoning that he’s a loyalist and he will be loyal in his position. Every other branch of government is not a separate and co-equal one, but an extension of Trump‘s mandate and power, such as his threats against the independence of the Federal Reserve.
There’s no area of American public or private life that Trump has not touched, generally for the worse. He has worked in these seemingly eternal months to consolidate power and crush the ability to organize against him, targeting the loci of alternative political and civic power including the universities, the media, law firms and other planks of government power at all levels. Even “Sesame Street” is not safe, with his just approved cuts to PBS.
He’s capping this first half year by celebrating the pushing through a destructive budget bill — with the sickening capitulation of a fully compliant group of congressional Republicans — that will massively expand ICE, which is quickly becoming a sort of national secret police force, and aim to finish breaking the back of the post-Depression social order that tried to establish some semblance of safety net for the disadvantaged. Hospitals will close, Americans will go hungry and die of preventable illnesses, but at least there will be far more detention space for our neighbors.
In doing all this, Trump is not really doing anything particularly novel. Like every other aspect of the man’s career in public life, this is not an original idea, but a rehash of a playbook that has been utilized by emerging despots around the world for the better part of a century.
It seems bizarre and surreal to the American public largely because we have never experienced it, or even believed that such a thing was simply impossible here in the world’s most long-standing and successful democratic state. We are coming now to find that there was no law of nature that prevented the rise of an authoritarian wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, and a political establishment that had grown complacent and accustomed to a presumption of regularity have been too slow and too timid in their response, failing absolutely to understand what’s at stake.
For a global superpower such as the United States, the implications of this failure resonate well beyond our borders. The phenomenon of Trump has now re-oriented thinking in Europe and Asia, shifted the momentum of the Russia-Ukraine war, shaken for the first time in decades the foundations of open global trade and put into question the dollar as the global reserve currency.
The retreat from a bipartisan tradition of robust foreign aid alone will cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and could lead to millions more in the next few years by some estimates. It will put all of us at increased risk of another pandemic, not to mention global political instability, food insecurity and so on.
Trump could attempt to reverse every bit of this destruction tomorrow and a lot of damage would still be unavoidable. Of course, he won’t. He’s had many years to change and never has, which means that every remaining institution should understand that constraining him is existential.
