The Guardian: Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It's not enough just to laugh at him
(Of course, nobody here is laughing about his ambition to be a dictator. We take his presidency as seriously as a heart attack. But we do laugh at him when he acts a fool and talks about Revolutionary War airports and covfefe and when he trails a piece of toilet paper onto Air Force Once and when his hair flips up and exposes his bald scalp. He's a buffoon, but he could lead the most powerful country in the world into a place so dark it simply will never recover. Rome's fall was once completely unimaginable, after all. Anyway: )
This [the border crisis] too is what dictators do: demonising a group – in this case, migrants – as an alien threat, an army of invaders, so intensely and for so long that eventually any fate, no matter how brutal or inhumane, seems deserved, even when it is inflicted on that group’s youngest and most vulnerable members. Breaking up families, caging children in hot, fetid, disease-ridden camps – this is what dictators do.
But we hesitate to see it for what it is. Again, the laughter gets in the way. So we snigger at Ivanka Trump ludicrously barging her way into a powwow of world leaders, making a meme of #uninvitedIvanka, rather than confronting head-on the reality that Trump is doing what dictators always do: he’s building a hereditary dynasty, so that his power won’t end with his death. Those images at the G20 looked absurd to us, but they will take their place in the showreel, so that, come the 2024 or 2028 elections, they can be used as proof of Ivanka’s supposed experience on the global stage.
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Why don’t we see all this as the behaviour of a would-be dictator? Part of it is a language problem. The archetypal despot lodged in the collective imagination does not speak English. Dub a Trump speech into, say, Italian, show it in black and white, and perhaps then we’d spot the similarity. Part of it is that Trump has not been able to do his worst. No elections have been overturned, no dissidents jailed, no journalists arrested. The restraints of the US system have, so far, kept Trump in check.
Yet that can lull us into a false sense of security, what political scientist David Runciman calls “the confidence trap”: the belief that, because democracy has withstood past threats, it will withstand present and future ones too. That’s complacent, not least because those restraints are fraying fast. Note how Trump is appointing sympathetic judges in record numbers: you can’t rely on the courts to check an authoritarian president if the courts are increasingly in that president’s image.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/05/donald-trump-dictator-not-enough-laugh
(I kind of love the idea of dubbing one of his speeches into Italian, running English subtitles along the bottom of the screen, and showing it in black and white. I hope the DNC's advertising agencies are super creative this time around; they have an excess of material to work with.)
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