Roll over and play peasant?
I’ve recounted this Cold War joke before:
American: We have freedom of speech in my country. I’m free to criticize my president as much as I want.
Russian: But is true in Soviet Union! I too am free to criticize your president as much as I want.
Let’s get serious. Because this is getting serious. It started with law firms that defended Donald Trump’s enemies caving to his threats. There are his attacks on universities. His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal. CBS announced last week it would cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” next year. Colbert, long a Trump critic, had just skewered his Paramount bosses’ decision to pay a $16m settlement over Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” Paramount is trying to convince Trump’s Federal Communications Commission to approve the $8 billion sale of CBS to Skydance. Colbert told his audience it amounted to a “big fat bribe.”
And that’s just the prominent and powerful. Trump threatens to arrest enemies, harasses U.S. citizens, attacks judges, and extorts other countries with tariffs he has no legitimate power to levy.
Then there is the arresting of anyone who looks to ICE’s Craigslist new-hires like an undocumented immigrant. And deporting them to a gulag with no due process. But not before Trump’s agents warehouse them in its Everglades concentration camp. Or strips them of their humanity and makes shackled men eat like animals from plates set on chairs in front of them.
See photos above for where this is heading. The U.S. has done it before in this century. Don’t think it won’t again.
Of appeasers and crocodiles
David Pressman, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, issues a stark warning based on what he witnessed there under Viktor Orban (free link):
Take the judiciary. I met leaders of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body in October 2022 to discuss their work. For months afterward, their faces (and mine) were plastered in the papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary. The response from other powerful judges? Silence.
Or take the private sector. Since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010, the state has awarded billions in public contracts to his son-in-law and childhood friend, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. What have Hungarian business leaders said? Nothing.
Last year, when Mr. Orban’s close associates reportedly told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, did other multinational companies speak up? They did not.
Hungarians with little power or privilege to lose would occasionally protest. But those with power remained reliably, pliably silent.
Americans explained it away as Hungary’s democratic traditions being too shallowly rooted to resist a strongman. What Pressman sees here at home under Trump is the same appeasement and delusional thinking that if Americans give a little they “can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.”
Hungarian judges, investors, executives, entire business sectors, made deals. Writes Pressman, “Going along is what did them in.” Like Orban, Trump believes everyone has a price. Prominent American businesses and institutions are proving him right.
To the stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: Don’t dupe yourselves. The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters.
It’d be nice if we saw more of it.
Most of the rest of us are keeping our heads down like good little peasants.
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