“One of our two parties is … following the rules of authoritarianism”
A column from Tuesday presaged retired Judge J. Michael Luttig’s Thursday testimony that “Donald Trump and his allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who authored “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” spoke with Business Insider:
“The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure,” Ben-Ghiat wrote in a November 2020 piece for The Washington Post. “Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until his own people turn against him.”
When, two months later, former President Donald Trump urged his supporters to head over to the US Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election, Ben-Ghiat was not altogether surprised. Indeed, she had told people to expect it, arguing: “the rage that will grow in Trump as reality sinks in may make for a rocky transition to Biden’s presidency. Americans would do well to be prepared.”
Had Trump actually arrived outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as he promised the mob he sent there, things may have been far worse. It is a mistake to see this operation as “amateur.”
One thing that is haunting me, a lot, is if you put the pieces together, which is what these hearings are allowing us to do, is when the temporary Senate president, Chuck Grassley, on January 5th, tweeted that he would be doing the Electoral College count, not Pence, because Pence won’t be with us that day.
That’s one of these things that got attention and then it kind of went out of the news cycle. Chuck Grassley is third in command. If we think in terms of this being a coup attempt, these are very important details. He was third in command and one of the people above him was Nancy Pelosi. And we just saw, once again, we were reminded that the violent mob that breached the capital was looking for Nancy Pelosi. So if we think of January 6th in the frame of a coup attempt, and coup attempts are violent, this could have had a very different outcome that really resembled something out of a political thriller or a coup attempt that we read about in other countries.
With that in mind, one question the Jan. 6 committee needs to ask is what did Sen. Chuck Grassley know in advance about the coup plot? Why did he send that tweet?
Like Luttig, Ben-Giat sees warning signs she’d rather not see:
I am absolutely haunted by the fact that people were trying to kill Pence and that Trump said that he deserved to hang. This kind of party, authoritarian discipline, where you follow the leader or you deserve to die, that’s not democracy. That has nothing to do with democracy. So the challenge in the coming time will be that one of our two parties is really exited from democracy and right now it’s following the rules of authoritarianism. I don’t know where this is gonna take us, but it’s not a very good place for a country to be.
If Trump gets prosecuted (successfully), says Ben-Ghiat (and as Luttig emphasized on Thursday), the danger is not over:
When people are prosecuted for corruption or whatever the charge is, and it sticks, that personality cult — it starts to deflate, it starts to shrivel. It’s happened in several countries around the world, only when they are prosecuted. So that’s an argument for doing that.
Now, if that does happen to Trump — DeSantis has already absorbed all the lessons of Trump. He’s clearly readying himself for a national run, whether it’s in 2024 or later. And he’s a very dangerous individual. I’ve written several essays on him already. He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump. It’s hard to have the baggage of Trump. Trump has a criminal past, in so many areas, that nobody else is really like Trump I would say. All of those things could happen.
Watch for these tee shirts to pop up among DeSantis supporters if he runs and Trump does not.
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