Which way to the counteroffensive?
Donald Trump is a showman and a con man. He is not a strategist. Nor are most of his closest advisers. But he is at his core insecure, so breaking out his sharpie to sign a raft of Day 1 orders was a display of strength that appealed to him. Soon after the convicted felon swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution no one expected him to uphold, Trump launched an attack against the rule of law on Monday. His goal? To consolidate power in his hands and crush opponents in the “old republic” before they can mount any resistance.
At best, the supine press will call Trump’s actions shock-and-awe, after the Bush II-era invasion of Iraq. But blitzkrieg is likely his strategists’ inspiration even if yesterday’s actions were no surprise.
Wikipedia defines shock-and-awe, or “rapid dominance” (something Trump practices in person), as “the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.” The distinction may not be academic, but since Trump’s actions on Monday did not involve armor, artillery and warplanes, blitzkrieg is not quite the right metaphor. But everyone gets the point. Bottom line: Trump declared war on anyone not kneeling before him.
The White House issued an official list of Trump’s recissions of Biden executive orders, plus a multi-page list of his own Christmas morning gifts to himself, to his oligarch allies, and finally to his political ones. The Associated Press reports that with the executive orders Trump signed, he “began his immigration crackdown, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords and sought to keep TikTok open in the U.S.” He also “pardoned hundreds of people for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
If you thought “stand back and stand by” was a winking signal to Trump’s would-be Sturmabteilung in 2020, with those pardons on Monday he all but began peddling armbands and Sam Browne belts online. Locking and loading will come later.
I won’t try to summarize the lot. The press has all that. But if one headline encapsulates the royalists’ impulse for rolling onto their backs and peeing into the air when the king barks, it is this from Politico’s landing page. The firm’s founding editor and global editor-in-chief declares Trump, not necessarily for good, “a force of history“:
I’m not exaggerating about royalists.
Richard Hofstadter famously decribed the “paranoid style in American politics.” But do not underestimate the royalist strain. Plenty of our flag-waving countrymen secretly yearn to be subjects. They never believed in popular sovereignty. They never bought into the founders’ “created equal” nonsense. They remain committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. They just won’t admit it to themselves.
Okay, some will:
At noon Monday, the news rippled through a snaking mass of people in downtown D.C. One man, tall and bundled against the frigid air, raised his arms and pumped his fists. He jumped and released a joyous scream.
“It happened! Fooour looong years. The king has returned!”
Do not be distracted by the shiny baubles and sharp barbs among Trump’s first actions meant to catch your attention. As much as to effectuate his agenda, they are there to signal his intentions to friend and foe alike that the king has returned. Whether supporters like the man above like what they get depends on what Trump does next, on how much he can actually accomplish between trips to the golf course and his cult rallies. And on how much Americans who want to remain Americans can do to preserve the world’s oldest democracy from the predations of Trump and his team of neo-feudalists.
Given the present compostition of the Democratic Party leadership in Congress, I’m less than optimistic.
Democrats’ Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lost no time in proving he can’t chew the leather anymore:
Wake up and smell the cordite, Chuck. This is what it feels like to be Ukraine.