In July 2017, Stephen Walt wrote Top 10 Signs of Creeping Authoritarianism Revisited to examine the extent to which criminal Fuhrer Trump* and the Republican Reich were conforming to authoritarianism, the neo-Nazi model. Here is what he found.
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, I wrote a column listing possible “warning signs” of democratic breakdown under his leadership. A few other people did, too. I wasn’t predicting Trump would become a dictator — although some of his statements and actions during the campaign were worrisome; the column was simply a checklist of warning signs that would tell us how well U.S. political institutions were holding up in unusual circumstances (and with a most unusual president).
We’re now a bit more than six months into Trump’s presidency, and it is high time to review the list and see how America is doing. Has Trump undermined America’s constitutional order? Is he consolidating executive power the way democratically elected leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have? Or are U.S. institutions holding up reasonably well, either because they have proved to be surprisingly resilient or because Trump has been less adept at politics than he claimed to be?The record is mixed. Although some of the warning signs are flashing red, others are glowing yellow (at worst), and one or two don’t seem that worrisome at all. My worst fears of further democratic breakdown have not been confirmed — thus far — though in some cases it is not for want of trying.
Grab your No. 2 pencil and go down my original list. Feel free to keep score at home.
1. Systematic efforts to intimidate the media: Check
There’s little doubt that Trump and his associates have repeatedly tried to intimidate mainstream media organizations, whether through tweets deriding the supposedly “failing” New York Times, the repeated references to the “Amazon Washington Post,” or White House chief strategist and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon’s referring to media organizations as “the opposition party.” Trump and Fox News also falsely accused the Times of thwarting efforts to kill or capture top Islamic State leaders, and the White House has arbitrarily excluded reporters of some organizations from press pools, press conferences, and other events. The obvious message: Play ball with us a bit more or expect to be marginalized. And that’s just a small sample of Trump’s war on the press.
But, on the other hand, these efforts don’t seem to be working very well. A few media organizations have made ritual acts of appeasement (e.g., CNN keeps hiring Trump apologists as on-air talent), but Trump’s presidency has given most media organizations a renewed sense of purpose and a growing audience. And the administration’s continued shenanigans, conflicts of interest, ever-changing rationalizations, and sheer buffoonery have created a target-rich environment: The same outrageous behavior that helped boost Trump’s 2016 campaign has given the media a mother lode of material to mine and an eager audience for everything they can dig up. So the good news is that while Trump clearly likes to browbeat media outlets that aren’t reliably in his corner and would undoubtedly like to discredit them, his efforts to date have mostly failed.
2. Building an official pro-Trump media network: Partial check.
Back in November, I speculated that Trump might “use the presidency to bolster media that offer him consistent support” or even try to create a government-funded media agency to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda. There’s little doubt Trump has tried to favor outlets that embrace him, which is why the White House gave press credentials to the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and has given the reliably wacky and pro-Trump Breitbart privileged access. And as one might expect, the Trump administration has backed the expansion plans of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. Apart from the White House press office itself (which has been a train wreck from Day One), there’s no sign that the president intends to build a publicly funded pro-Trump media organization. But with Fox News and Sinclair and the various alt-right websites in his corner, he may not need one.
3. Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, or the domestic security agencies: Partial check.
An obvious counterweight to executive overreach are career civil servants who remain sensitive to precedents, have lots of expertise, and tend to follow the rule of law. And as Samuel Huntington pointed out many years ago, an important barrier to excessive militarization is having a professional military whose direct political role is limited. My concern in 2016 was the possibility that Trump would try to politicize the civil service in various ways or turn the military and the intelligence and domestic security agencies into tools of the White House instead of independent defenders of the Constitution.
Once again, I’d score this one as mixed. Trump has tried to put his stamp on key government agencies by demanding that senior officials resign or by firing people who declined to do his bidding, such as (now former) Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey. He has declined to make top appointments in a number of agencies, at one point telling Fox News, “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary.” And if Comey and others are to be believed (and, on this issue, I think they are), Trump seems to think civil servants and his own appointees should be more loyal to him than to the Constitution, even though it is the latter they swore an oath to defend. Trump has also questioned the integrity of the nonpartisan and highly respected Congressional Budget Office, and he crossed another line last weekend by telling uniformed military personnel to call Congress and lobby for his defense spending and health care proposals.
But there’s a silver lining here, too: You can’t run the federal government without lots of help, and most people don’t like being dissed and intimidated by a group of wealthy insiders who clearly view them with contempt and seem to regard the country as their personal plaything. Combine that with Trump’s world-class ability to sow divisions within his own team, and you have a recipe for the veritable Niagara of leaks that have made life easier for journalists and kept the White House scrambling from scandal to scandal. (Of course, the White House could have avoided all this by telling the truth from the start and by learning how to fill out security clearance forms properly the first time.) As with his effort to intimidate the media, in short, thus far Trump’s desire to get the government bureaucracy to dance to his tune hasn’t gone so well…
Inserted from <FP>
I have shared the first three signs out of ten. Please click through for the other seven.
Of the ten, Walt rated five as check, three as partial, and two as little or none. Three years and a month later, I rate all ten as check or check plus.
Yesterday Brian Stetler reported the same theme.
Stelter: We are witnessing creeping authoritarianism
Both Walt and Stetler are spot on, with one exception. The authoritarianism of the Republican Reich, with or without Trump*, does not creep. It stampedes!
RESIST!!
