he put pressure on the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to wage a criminal investigation against The New York Times for running an anonymous op-ed that called into question Trump’s ability to govern, if not his sanity. In the op-ed, an alleged senior official in the administration stated that Trump was amoral and erratic in his decision-making, using “misguided principles,” and was simply unfit to be president.12 Trump condemned the article “as an act of treason.” Trump’s unapologetic embrace of lawlessness and his blind spot for constitutional principles border on the pathological. He has argued that protesters should be thrown in jail, immigrants seeking asylum should be denied due process, and people who burn the flag should lose their citizenship. Emulating the rhetoric of gang bosses, he has stated that individuals who cooperate with federal prosecutors in criminal investigations are disloyal and that such cooperation or “flipping … almost ought to be outlawed.”13
Trump shamelessly relativizes the meaning and implementation of “law and order” depending on whether the perpetrator of the alleged crime is a friend or an enemy. “Illegals” or anyone in his target audience of “criminals” he insists should be roughed up by the police, but friends such as Rob Porter, a former White House senior aide charged with abuse by both of his ex-wives, should have criminal charges dismissed. He criticized Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department for bringing charges against two popular Republican Congressmen, Chris Collins (NY) and Duncan Hunter (CA), suggesting the charges against them be dropped because they are loyal to him and that their “two easy wins [in the November 2018 elections are] now in doubt because there is not enough time.”14 Collins was charged with a series of crimes including insider trading and multiple counts of securities fraud while “Hunter has been charged with wire fraud, false campaign reporting, and using hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions for his own personal ‘slush fund’ to cover vacations and personal medical expenses.”15
As Chris Hayes observes, law and order for Trump has little to do with justice or the rule of law:
If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption. And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law.16
The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a GDP per capita of $62,152, and yet its current policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty will make matters worse.17 As Professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has reported, Trump’s tax approach “stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest one percent and the poorest 50 percent of Americans.”18 Trump’s health care reforms, particularly the elimination of the individual mandate, which requires nearly all Americans to get coverage or be strapped with a penalty, threatens to leave close to nine million people without health insurance in 2019.19
Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence, rather than refusing to cooperate with evil, exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian pathologies and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. Many politicians at all levels of power remain silent and therefore complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy. Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless policies of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s.20 Both groups were more than ready to buy into the script of ultra-
nationalism, cultivate toxic masculinity, demonize racial and ethnic others, support unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanction state violence at home and abroad. The noble history of a World War II resistance that bore witness to human suffering and mounted the courage to face “the unspeakable” while being “committed… to the unimaginable” casts a dark shadow today over a Republican Party and other politicians who look away in the face of an emerging fascism at all levels of government.21
Former conservative commentator Charles Sykes is right in arguing that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and, as such, are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and all too willing to overlook corruption, stupidity and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have been disposed to surrender to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy, and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which has “meant accepting the unacceptable [reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”22 Alarmingly, they have ignored the criticisms of Trump by high-profile members of their own party. For instance, former Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, accused Trump of “debasing the nation,” “treating his office like a reality show,” and warned “Trump may be setting the US on the path to World War III.”
This is not to propose that the Republicans who support Trump, or the media commentators who defend his callous policies and assaults on the truth, or the intellectuals who turn the other way and either apologize for Trump or remain silent, are simply updated Nazis.23 Nevertheless, it is meant to suggest a real and present danger. People of power have turned their backs on the cautionary histories of the fascist and Nazi regimes and, in doing so, willingly embrace a number of authoritarian messages and tropes: the cult of the leader, the discourse of the savior, white nationalism, a narrative of decline, unchecked casino capitalism, systemic racism, silence in the face of a growing police state, the encouragement of state endorsed violence, the hollowing out of democracy by corporate power, a grotesque celebration of greed, a massive growth in the inequality of wealth, power, and resources, a brutal politics of disposability, an expanding culture of cruelty, and a disdain for public virtues, all wrapped up in an authoritarian populism. These tropes are both the cause and effect of a growing culture of social and historical amnesia that normalizes fascism and mobilizes language into an instrument of violence. As the renowned British historian Richard J. Evans observes:
Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism . . . so that “fanatical,” “brutal,” “ruthless,” “uncompromising,” “hard,” all became words of praise instead of disapproval … In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive, and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.24
Even disposability is no longer the discourse of marginalized extremists. It now exists at the highest levels of government. Examples of such reckless rhetoric include: Trump’s immigration policy teeming with threats of a wall to keep out Mexican “criminals” and “drug dealers”; his Muslim ban and efforts to curb newcomers from “shithole” countries; his zero-tolerance policy towards undocumented workers, which separated children from their parents and then incarcerated the children — some as young as five years old; and his revoking of the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras and San Salvador, among other countries, which furthered such racist and exclusionary agendas.
Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked by incendiary words, cleansed of any critical ideas, and devoid of any substantive meaning. Even domestic populations, such as youth subject to mass shootings in their schools, fare poorly in Trump’s worldview. In the wake of the school shooting massacre in Parkland, Florida, Trump and Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, have called for the arming of teachers as opposed to restricting gun access or providing support services for students in the face of such carnage.
Ignorance
