Win or lose today, don't think that the Donald Trump we have is the one we're fated to have until the day he goes down in flames. He is distinctly a work in progress, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: in regress. In that context, let me mention an evolution of a grim sort in my own thinking over the last two years.
For some time now there have been both thinkers and activists who have been convinced that Donald Trump is an American Mussolini, an outright fascist. (According to his ex-wife, in the early 1990s he kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside and, during the 2016 election campaign, he retweeted a Mussolini quote, defending himself for doing so.) I've always disagreed, however. To my mind, he's clearly been a man who wants to be idolized and adulated (as happens at any of his rallies) -- wants, that is, to have fans, not (in the fascistic sense) followers; applause and the eternal spotlight, not a social movement. That, it seems to me, has been an accurate description of the president who entered the Oval Office and occupied it in such a suggestive way these last nearly two years. But I've recently started to wonder. After all, once upon a time, Donald Trump wasn't a Republican either. Let's face it, he's a quick learner when it comes to whatever may benefit The Donald.
And keep in mind that he entered an unsettled world already well prepared for such a presidency by his predecessors in Washington. If the fascist or, if you prefer, autocratic tendency that lurks in him and in the situation that surrounds him does come out more fully, he will obviously be aided by the ever more imperial presidency that was created in the decades before he left Trump Tower for the White House.
When he entered the Oval Office, he found there a presidency in which -- particularly on the subject of war (the president was, for instance, already America's global assassin-in-chief) -- his powers increasingly stood outside both Congress and the Constitution. The weapons he's now bringing to bear, including executive orders and the U.S. military, were already well prepared for him. The refugees he makes such effective use of, whether from Syria or Central America, came to him, at least in part, thanks to this country's war and other policies that had already roiled significant parts of the planet. Before entering the Oval Office, the only aspect of such preparations he had any role in was the increasingly staggering inequality that gave a "populist" billionaire president, always ready to put more money in the hands of his .01% pals, a pained but receptive audience in the heartland.
In other words, this world and the fever dream that goes with it were Donald Trump's oyster before he ever lifted a finger in the White House. As a result, no election results, no matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans "win," are likely to bring that temperature down. In fact, if the Democrats do take the House (or even Congress), Donald Trump is unlikely to become more pliable. If the Mueller report results in impeachment proceedings in the House, he won't be humbled. In the face of any such development, my guess is that his impulse will be to become more autocratic, more imperial, and even possibly more fascistic. And the same may hold if the Republicans hang onto both houses of Congress.
Waiting for the Red Hats
Even before the vote was in, the evidence was there. In the lead-up to the election, 5,000-plus U.S. troops (or maybe 15,000?) are headed for the U.S.-Mexico border to deal with what the president has called both an "invasion" and a "national emergency." ("Fake news!") There, those troops will essentially twiddle their thumbs (since they are legally allowed to do little) simply because the president wanted it so. There may, in fact, be two soldiers for every desperate refugee, including children and babies, headed toward the U.S. border in that now notorious "caravan" from Honduras. In other words, on a whim, Donald Trump is already capable of building a wall (of troops) at that border. The question worth asking is this: In an embattled near-future moment in which a truly Trumpian military figure (think of "him" as the next John Bolton) is in place as secretary of defense and another "national emergency" is declared, where might those troops go next because the president wanted it so?
In the days before the election, the president also threatened to sign an executive order to nullify birthright citizenship -- in the process, threatening to functionally nullify the Constitution (see the 14th Amendment), while bringing back to life the ugliest strains of American racial history just because he wanted it so. At the moment, he might not even sign that order or, if he does, it might go down big time in Congress and the courts. But who knows what the future of an executive-order presidency holds, especially with another Supreme Court justice pick or two in place, no matter who controls Congress?
As for those rallies of his: tell me you can't conceive of a future America in which his adulatory crowds have stopped simply cheering and shouting for him ("Build the wall!" "Lock her up!") and are now marching for him as well. Is it really so hard to imagine a future in which there would be a place for a Trump Corps or for "the Red Hats"; for, that is, the kind of social movement that would no longer be confined to the arenas and stadiums of red-state America or even the polling booths of Election Day, one that might indeed be in the streets of this country at the beck and call of a fierce and autocratic billionaire?
In an increasingly unsettled world, an Autocrats, Incorporated moment globally, with an ever more powerful chief executive, and a right wing still on the march, everything that Donald Trump inherited could certainly be intensified further. And he might be just the man to do it. In a world in which Congress is no longer fully in his camp, in which legal charges against him, his family, and his cronies only grow, to adapt a title from a Russian novel of the early twentieth century, unquiet could flow The Don -- and in that lies peril for us all.
Now, excuse me, I'm heading out to vote.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt
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