How’s the weather in Budapest?
“Schedule F” went from being an IRS form “Profit or Loss From Farming” to a source of alarm thanks to Jonathan Swan’s Axios series on what a second Trump presidency might look like. Swan himself said he’s never received more mail, some from Trump fans giddy at the prospect of a Trumpist poisoning of the federal bureauocracy. Imagine mini-Trumps in charge of delivering, if not eradicating after pillaging, Medicare, Social Security, and other core federal functions.
Donald Trump is not coy about his plans beyond that, writes David Frum:
Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a “weak, foolish, and stupid governor,” and to fire “radical and racist prosecutors”—racist here meaning “anti-white.” The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal weapons, and impose death sentences on drug dealers after expedited trials.
Revenge is Trump’s second-term agenda. The criminal has learned from his mistakes and means to “use the law as a weapon: a weapon to shield his own wrongdoing, a weapon to wield against his political opponents.” Frum adds, “Next time, he will have the wholehearted support of a White House staff selected to enable him. Next time, he will have the backing in Congress of a party remade in his own image. Next time, he’ll be acting to ensure that his opponents never again get a ‘next time’ of their own.”
By now, however, Trump could be irrelevent to the reactionary right’s project to create a one-party state. What Americans across the politcal spectrum need to know right this minute is that if Republicans gain control of Congress this fall, they have already telegraphed where they want to take the country: Budapest.
The American right has fallen hard for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. His recent screed against race-mixing drove his longtime adviser Zsuzsa Hegedus to resign over “a pure Nazi speech worthy of Goebbels.” But it was not a deal-breaker for the American right.
“CPAC’s organizer confirmed to me on Wednesday that Orban is still scheduled to address the group next week, writes Dana Milbank. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday, “Let’s listen to the man speak.”
Milbank continues:
At its core, Orban’s rule has been about sustaining, and being sustained by, white nationalism. His July 23 speech was an extended articulation of the “great replacement” conspiracy idea — embraced by Carlson and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), among others — that non-White people are plotting to wipe out White people. He claimed: “Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us.” Orban railed against a “mixed-race world” in which “European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” He warned that “Islamic civilization” is “constantly moving toward Europe” and is now “occupying and flooding the West.”
“This is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna,” he said, citing the 1683 battle between a European alliance and the Ottoman Empire. “This is why, in still older times, the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.” This was a reference to the Battle of Tours — in the year 732, when a Frankish Christian ruler defeated an army of Moors invading from Spain.
It was good of Orban to spell that out, because now we know what Hungary’s white nationalists — and their American fan boys at CPAC — have in mind when they rage against immigration and the “great replacement.” They want to take us back to the Dark Ages.
Hell’s bells.
Defense analyst Brynn Tannehill’s assessment in The New Republic is even grimmer reading. “The truth is that American democracy is essentially broken beyond fixing and is unable to withstand a right-wing populist movement determined to destroy it,” she believes. It will take a string of miracles to stop the GOP from completing its project to turn the U.S. into Hungary:
To prevent the GOP from capturing the U.S. the way Orbán and the Fidesz Party did Hungary is going to require several miracles in a row: having a history-and-poll-defying 2022 election, then being willing to overturn the filibuster, then getting lucky with an opening on the Supreme Court and a GOP that never regains its footing or suddenly decides to abandon its quest while at the cusp of victory.
Tannehill’s view tends to be bleaker than others’, perhaps for effect, perhaps, as her bio reads, as a woman who “lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and three children.” Recent Suupreme Court opinions give her family have plenty of reason for concern.
The Jan. 6 committee’s hearings may tarnish the Trump administration. Trump himself may be losing support among the cult. But the project could be unfased. Left out of these bleak discussions about extremists’ intentions are how prosecution of Trump and his cronies might upset them.
It is difficult after the 2016 election to put much faith in Americans’ good sense. What we are left with is a hope that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice retains enough integrity and balls to prove to the world that justice is still possible in the U.S. He/they had better get about demonstrating it publicly, and soon.
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