We had a New York Real Estate guy, with NO political experience be the United States President for Four years….
Three and half years has blurred how Fucked Up it was….
But?
We got thru it in one piece because there WAS people who told the guy he should not do this and that….
A second time up at bat for Trump won’t have those constraints….
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.
Trump told Time that he thinks people actually like it when he sounds like a dictator, and he’s not entirely wrong: As I’ve noted, much of his base loves talk of “vermin” and the idea of exacting revenge on other Americans. But there are two other important reasons that many people are not taking Trump seriously enough—and that Biden, a long-serving American politician, is struggling in the polls with an often incoherent would-be autocrat.
One problem has been around as long as the republic: Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and when they do, they frequently blame the current president for whatever is going wrong in their lives. For most people, economic cause and effect is mostly notional; if gas prices are high today, or if someone is still not working despite low unemployment rates, it’s because ofthe guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Combine this with the peculiar amnesia that helps people forget how many Americans needlessly died of COVIDwhile Trump talked about injecting bleach, and you have a population that fondly remembers how good they had it during a terrifying pandemic.
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….
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We just don’t have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America. I have not seen the film Civil War, but I’m not worried about another civil war—at least not the kind we had before. Rather, I’m worried about the gray fog of authoritarianism settling, in patches and pieces, across the United States. In 2021, my colleague George Packer tried to present a realistic scenario of democratic collapse; the next year, I wrote about what such a process might look like. But looking back, I see the limits of my imagination…
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Crucial to deadening our imaginations about Trump is the idea pushed by some of his supporters that his unhinged statements are just a lot of tough talk, and that the second term would be like the first, only without the pandemic and with cheaper eggs. In reality, of course, Trump’s first term was (to use a rather vivid Russian expression I learned in my days in the Soviet Union) about as organized as a whorehouse on fire during an earthquake. Even before COVID, responsible men and women, some of whom agreed deeply with Trump on many issues, nonetheless had to run around stamping out one crisis after another. None of those people will be present to restrain Trump this time, and he will bring to Washington a crew that is even more morally reprehensible—and far more organized—than those who joined him in his first term….
image…Slate .Com