How to Build An Autocracy

[Honeycombe8]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

The article presents a playbook that Trump could use to set up an autocracy. All the pieces are here. He just needs to complete the plan.


"It’s 2021, and president donald trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances. Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

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Most Americans intuit that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss. Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really knows.

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The business community learned its lesson early. “You work for me, you don’t criticize me,” the president was reported to have told one major federal contractor, after knocking billions off his company’s stock-market valuation with an angry tweet. Wise business leaders take care to credit Trump’s personal leadership for any good news, and to avoid saying anything that might displease the president or his family.

The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warner’s CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trump’s definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of The Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage."

This is chilling, because Trump is already doing some of these things. This is what happened in Poland and Hungary, I read. Poland has become increasingly far-right in a few short years. Clamping down on freedoms, tolerance, globalism.

In the past, Trump's contractor had also hired a lot of non-union undocumented Polish workers for a big project (Trump upon seeing them said "They're hard workers&quot . The workers were not provided with hard hats, and stopped work several times because they hadn't been paid.

It's expected that Poland will give Trump a warm welcome, since both Poland and the U.S. are on the same path to far-right government, in a likewise short period of time.

[sharedvalues]

1. This is the danger. Frum is on point

Frum- former GOP speechwriter, fired by GOP think tank AEI for going off message about Obamacare- wrote this in Feb. Mar issue of the Atlantic.