Donald Trump stopped by The Wall Street Journal editorial page for a friendly interview and laying on of hands. The Journal’s imprimatur, while inevitable, offers an important marker in Trump’s reconciliation with the money wing of the Republican Party, which briefly renounced him after his coup attempt before eventually crawling back.
In the closing stages of the campaign, as he has sensed himself getting closer to power, Trump’s urge to abuse it has gotten more palpable. Hardly a day goes by now without the Republican candidate waxing authoritarian. Trump has embraced the January 6 insurrection even more tightly, referring to the rioters as “we,” insisting there was “nothing done wrong,” except by the police who tried to stop it. Trump has broadened the scope of internal enemies (“the enemy within”) he threatens to punish, including the media, the election-counting apparatus, and his opponents, notably Kamala Harris, who he has called to be investigated for the crime of running against him and “forced off the campaign.”
The predictable result was an editorial assuring the Journal’s readers that Trump poses no threat to the republic, or at least that the danger is nothing that ought to cost him their votes and donations.
If you can ignore its bleak implications, the Journal’s interview with Trump supplies some prime black comedy. The editors have mostly ignored Trump’s firehose of threats to burn down the republic, but the interview gives them an opportunity to coach him into saying something reassuring. Here is the question the Journal, via columnist Peggy Noonan, poses to Trump:
“If you were to reach the presidency again, would you of course rule out using the military to move against your enemies? That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you—is that correct?”
This is like a student, having failed a true-false question multiple times, is being given another chance, with the teacher gesturing dramatically toward the chalkboard where the word “FALSE!” is written in giant letters. Trump, hilariously, is only barely able to take the hint:
“Yeah,” Mr. Trump says, “but I never said I would… . First of all, Biden, who doesn’t know he is alive—Biden said that he expects there to be a lot of trouble if I win the election. That’s a very bad statement for him to make. He said that. That’s where this came from.” Mr. Trump digresses into his poll numbers and has to be brought back on topic.
Ms. Noonan: “But you would never do that?”
Mr. Trump: “Of course I wouldn’t. But now, if you’re talking about you’re going to have riots on the street, you would certainly bring the National Guard in. As an example, in Minneapolis while I was there”—meaning while he was in office—“they had riots, literal riots. That whole city was burning down. And Minnesota, the governor was supposed to—our favorite governor—the governor was supposed to do it. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. And I said, ‘You got to get the National Guard.’ …”
In its editorial, the Journal cites this answer as satisfactory: “When we asked about it Thursday in an interview, Mr. Trump made clear after some rambling that he was talking about destructive riots.” It doesn’t matter that Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish the internal enemy, and that he has flunked other attempts by Republican media to prod him to renounce the term. Trump can threaten violence and abusive power against his domestic enemies as many times as he wants, but as long as he is able to contradict that position one time, with appropriate hand-holding, the Journal is satisfied.
The editorial runs through what have become standard conservative excuses for Trump’s manifest authoritarianism. It insists that even if Trump wants to undermine the Constitution, his administration won’t let him:
Most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr. Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances. Democrats, the press and the federal bureaucracy were relentlessly opposed to all his works, as they would be again.
It is only partly true that Trump’s abuses of power were thwarted. He did succeed in pardoning numerous criminal allies, launching spurious Justice Department investigations of his deep-state targets, and nakedly punishing owners of independent media by denying mergers or government contracts. (Imagine what the Journal would be writing if the Biden administration had singled out Rupert Murdoch for à la carte regulatory punishment!)
To the extent Trump did not go much farther, as he wished, yes, he was frequently thwarted. But Trump is extremely well aware of this dynamic and eager to prevent it from recurring. His allies are drawing up lists of disloyal Republicans to prevent from appointments during a second term. He is planning to cleanse the bureaucracy to the officials who played a role in thwarting his schemes — the Journal itself has run numerous columns defending his plans to do so.
Indeed, most of the Republican officials who laid down their careers to stop Trump from burning the Constitution to the ground are now persona non grata within the party, and are publicly calling him dangerous and unfit for power. The Journal is now assuring its readers that Trump will be again be restrained by the likes of Mattis and Kelly, while Mattis and Kelly are themselves telling reporters that Trump is too dangerous to be given power.
The Journal engages in predictable whataboutism to insist the Democrats are just as undemocratic as Trump:
Democrats exploited the Russia collusion narrative in 2016 until it was exposed as a lie financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Democrats tried to keep Mr. Trump off the presidential ballot this year. Democrats have used the law in no fewer than five cases to disqualify him—and New York’s Attorney General campaigned explicitly on a promise to find something, anything, to charge him with. This subverts a basic principle of American justice.
Democrats—including Ms. Harris—are also candid in saying they want to compromise the independence of the Supreme Court with new political rules and supervision. If they get even narrow control of the Senate, along with the House and White House, they say they will break the 60-vote filibuster rule to do it. That in our view is a greater threat to the Constitution than anything Mr. Trump might be able to do in a second term.
What a feeble list! Some of these alleged offenses are attributed to “Democrats” when they describe the actions of individual actors — “the Democrats” did not convict Trump of crimes in Manhattan, nor did they question his eligibility in Colorado. Some of these actions are perfectly legitimate and democratic — the Senate filibuster is not in the Constitution and has been changed repeatedly by both parties over time. Others (“the Russia collusion narrative”) aren’t even in the category of imagined threats to the Constitution — there’s no law or norm against investigating your opponent’s ties to a foreign country. This is just a collection of partisan grievances dressed up as a principled defense of democracy.
The most revealing argument in the Journal’s editorial is when it argues that Trump can’t be a fascist because he supports small government: “Fascism historically was ‘national socialism’ — government control over much of the economy. By that definition, Democrats today are the national socialists.”
Here the Journal is referring to a right-wing belief that the main problem with the Nazis was that they were too socialistic. Of course, the standard definition of fascism under Adolf Hitler is not that the government imposed excessive levels of taxes, social spending, and regulation of business, but that it banned political dissent. Rightists aren’t in favor of sending political opponents to concentration camps and beating up dissidents on the street, but their definition of liberty is focused more on stopping the government from taxing the rich too heavily.
If you don’t speak the lingo of the conservative movement, the claim that the Democrats are more fascistic than Trump because they favor a larger and more redistributive welfare state sounds deranged. But it is important to understand that the Journal is deranged in precisely this way. This is a newspaper that has greeted every incremental extension of government with bug-eyed hysteria. Every Democratic proposal to nudge up the top tax rate is bloody class warfare, every new social program heralds the clanging drop of a new iron curtain. A conservative might clumsily step on some toes and go a bit too far with insurrections and the like. But as long as he favors cutting taxes for the rich, he can never pose a threat to liberty equal to that of the Democrats.
The central argument of “How Democracies Die” is that the survival of a democracy in the face of an authoritarian challenges is dictated mainly by the behavior of the authoritarian’s coalition partners, who are forced to choose between loyalty to the republic and maximizing their own power. The Journal’s interview and functional endorsement is a historical record of the thought process of the Republican elite as they willingly went along.
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