Maybe we need a movie?
We suffer from a failure of imagination, Tom Nichols argues, about what a second Trump administration would actually look and feel like. It’s not that the clues aren’t there. They are. Trump told us again in his Time interview this week:
In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.
[…]
Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.
Or perhaps non-political junkies don’t read The Atlantic? Dan Pfeiffer remarked again on Thursday that “the vast majority of Americans … do not actively engage with politics and the news.” Or what they do hear is not news, but infotainment.
Eugene Robinson shouts into the hurricane of Fox News disinformation and reality TV:
Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.
[…]
Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13 percent last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.
Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.
I recall times traveling outside the country and seeing police and soldiers with automatic weapons patrolling airports and beaches, and two dudes with a pistol and a shotgun standing guard outside a Mexican bank, and thinking, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Nichols suggests maybe a movie could help Americans grasp that reality:
… Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place. (That’s despite how thoroughly fears of nuclear war had otherwise permeated the culture.) The movie includes a stomach-churning scene of people watching a football game at a stadium, looking up to see the contrails of American missiles in the sky, and realizing that the world as they’ve known it would last for another 30 minutes at most. This was not Dr. Strangelove; it was a moment people could see happening to themselves.
BTW, The Day After is set in Kansas, Toto.
Filmmakers might want to throw in scenes of entire coastal communities disappearing under swiftly rising seas. Don’t expect MAGA Republicans to do anything to stop that.
It’s clear Trump won’t do anything to restore women’s reproductive rights, either. (That’s Joe Biden.) Trump is still taking credit for women’s rights being revoked. How about imagining Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas in charge of another pandemic should one occur? Surely the mass graves from the last one haven’t entirely disappeared down the memory hole.
Maybe the cost of living could rouse non-political junkies? It’s technical, but Catherine Rampell warns of inflation spikes under a second Trump administration:
Donald Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, wants to kneecap the Federal Reserve. This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone who claims to care about inflation.
The former president and his advisers keep finding new ways to outdo themselves on bad economic ideas. Should Trump be granted a second term, he plans to slash the labor supply by ratcheting down immigration (including legal, work-authorized immigration). He wants to devalue the dollar. He’d levy worldwide tariffs of 10 percent or higher, plus perhaps a 100 percent tariff on some Chinese goods, apparently failing to notice that the costs of his previous tariffs fell almost entirely on American consumers.
Now, according to a Wall Street Journal scoop, Trump also wants to strip the Fed of its political independence. Proposed changes include enabling the president to fire the Fed chair at will, or even play a role in setting interest rates himself.
Uh-huh. The guy who bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos and was just fined $355 million for defrauding lenders to get favorable interest rates for himself wants to set interest rates for the country. Brilliant idea for making America great again.
Imagine this. Nobody knows more about setting interest rates than Donald Trump, many people are saying.
With tears in their eyes.
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