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Robert Kagan: Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. [1]

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Date: 2023-11-30

Robert Kagan (remember him?) has an op-ed today in the Washington Post entitled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” His argument is overstated, in my view, but he nonetheless makes a chilling case that once Trump wins the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, Republicans will fall in line and money will flow toward his campaign. Even as President Biden has failed to unify Democrats and put out a compelling message, Trump’s power and momentum will grow and become nearly unstoppable.

Kagan addresses those who believe that somehow the courts will stop Trump. He argues that Trump is successfully defying the courts’ restraints on him and once he wins the nomination, no court will have the courage to check him. Trump will demonstrate his power by showing that the legal system has no control over him.

Once Trump seizes office, he will do as he pleases with little restraint from the institutions of government. He will defy the constitution, use the Armed Forces and his Justice Department to quell dissent, persecute his enemies, and shut down media that have been hostile to him. Even the 22nd Amendment won’t stop him from being dictator for life.

Here are his concluding paragraphs:

A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family? We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.

Here is a link to a cached version of his op-ed.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/30/2208920/-Robert-Kagan-Trump-dictatorship-is-increasingly-inevitable?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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