WHO’S AFRAID OF DONALD TRUMP? SHORT ANSWER: ANYONE SANE

“The Donald” Trump is now, to the chagrin of much of that party, the virtual Republican (GOP) candidate for president of the United States of America. Many people on both sides of the political aisle in the US and, to an even greater extent, around the world, are scratching their heads and asking themselves how on earth someone like Trump could end up even being an independent presidential candidate, let alone the GOP pick.

Perhaps the most often used term to describe “The Donald” to date is “loose cannon”. Being the virtual GOP nominee has done nothing to change that. And loose cannon is a graphic and accurate term. In the days of sailing ships, cannon were carefully placed and meticulously fastened in position to ensure maximum firepower and safety. But in rough seas or in battle, one of these heavy iron or bronze guns could break loose from its moorings and wreak havoc, acting as a free-wheeling and unpredictable battering ram capable of crushing crewmen and bashing holes in the hull and bulkheads before it could be gotten under control. In short, a loose cannon might well be responsible for sinking a ship and killing its crew.

And this is precisely what Donald Trump is doing, not only within the US Republican Party, but also to the American reputation on a worldwide scale. A few examples:

Over the course of the past few months, White House insiders have noted that wherever President Barack Obama goes in the world and no matter what the purpose of his trip might be, he ends up having to explain the “Trump phenomenon” to foreign leaders who are scared to death that someone such as Trump—a billionaire power broker with fundamentalist and isolationist ideals, zero experience in or knowledge of foreign affairs and who plays by ear his would-be policies on such vital issues as war, immigration, trade, international relations and the role of the United States on the world stage—might actually have a shot at the presidency of the most formidable nation and nuclear power on earth. So true has this been that Obama has apparently had to craft a patent response to try and put foreign leaders’ minds at ease. But up to now, that answer has been based on the previously widely held theory that a Trump presidency could only happen when pigs flew, that “The Donald” would never get the delegates he needed to win the GOP nomination and that the Republican leadership would head him off at the pass when they all met at the national convention in Cleveland next July.

But in light of Trump’s stunning wins in the primaries—which even rendered a vastly moot point the announcement that rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich would pool their own support in order to beat the real estate mogul—the president will have to take another tack, since Trump has proven his detractors as wrong as Obama did his when they said that the United States wasn’t ready for an African American president, and especially not a liberal one.

Another example is the emerging reaction of true conservatives in the GOP sphere of influence. For instance, highly respected conservative Washington Post columnist George Will wrote this past week that the only way the GOP could redeem itself was for non-Trump supporters to break with the party line in the November presidential elections and vote for the probable Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and then to ensure that hers ends up only being a single-term presidency. Indeed, Clinton is much more in line with the GOP mainstream—judging from her voting record in Congress—than Trump is, despite her affiliation with the rival party. But despite Trump’s seeking to write George Will off as “a loser”, it would be hard to overemphasize the momentous importance of a statement such as this having come from such a highly respected and authoritative conservative opinion-former as the Washington Post columnist is.

And George Will doesn’t seem to be the only dyed-in-the-wool conservative who is thinking along these lines. No sooner had it become obvious that Trump would be the stand-alone candidate (Ohio’s Governor Kasich can hardly be taken as a serious threat) than Republican Senator John McCain, who ran against Barack Obama for president in 2008, immediately intimated publicly that he would be breaking ranks with the GOP to support Hillary Clinton in November (anyone but Trump, obviously). How could he back, he wondered aloud, someone who quoted the National Enquirer as if its stories were on the level—a reference to Trump’s picking up on an item in the scandal sheet that suggested involvement of Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination. Son and brother of two former presidents and himself the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the GOP race after getting trounced by Trump also refused to kiss and make up, saying, Trump "has not demonstrated (the right) temperament or strength of character. He has not displayed respect for the Constitution. And he is not a consistent conservative. These are all reasons why I cannot support his candidacy."

Among numerous others who favored the “Will Solution”: Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt tweeted:  “Republicans need to ask whether they love their country more than their party.” Conservative blogger Ben Howe typed “#ImWithHer”. Howe would later add, “I am a fiscal conservative and I am a social conservative. That will not change. But I will not vote for an egomaniacal authoritarian.” Philip Klein, managing editor of the conservative Washington Examiner, publicly announced that he had just “de-registered” as a Republican Party member. His announcement came just after the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, a Clinton-hater, waffled, surrendered and said he was okay with Trump and that it was time for the GOP to pull together and start thinking about beating Hillary. Clearly, then, there is mounting unrest in the party, which has been hijacked by an outsider, and a dangerous, divisive, authoritarian one at that.

However, the problem isn’t nearly so much what Trump has done to domestic politics as it is what he is doing to the US reputation worldwide—and, indeed, what he is doing to Western democracy, which was already weathering the storms of the George W. Bush era in which authoritarianism managed to get its jack-booted foot in the door in a serious and pernicious way, in the wake of the nine-eleven attacks of 2001—a dangerously erosive trend for democracy that President Obama has been partially unable, but also partially unwilling to change significantly during his seven years in office. While Trump’s authoritarian style, which has reminded more than a few observers of the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s in Europe, may seem like an astonishing “American phenomenon”, seen in a broader context, it plays to a rising trend on the European continent— déjà vu for anyone old enough to have first-hand knowledge of, or second-hand learning from their parents’ lips, in the years before and after World War II, about the radical authoritarian populism that fostered that devastating global conflict.

Carlo Bastasin, a Senior Fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution, writes: “Migration, inequality, middle class decline, the euro crisis, mistrust of the establishment—there is no shortage of explanations for the angry message voters in European countries are delivering with their ballots. However, most of the time, we dismiss the message as a temporary burst of irascibility that will eventually self-modulate. For at least 20 years, we have deemed public irritation as a negligible price for democracy.”

But Bastasin goes on to warn that this is a misconception, that, in fact, “support for radical parties has only grown. Traditional parties favoring European integration—Christian democrat and social democrat—are threatened all across the Continent. New radical parties, particularly on the far right, are popping up everywhere... Every four years, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) loses one million voters for purely demographic reasons. The same applies to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Victims of the area’s high youth unemployment, young voters in Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, and elsewhere often vote differently and unpredictably.”

This should sound familiar to all of those—liberals and conservatives alike—who Trump’s extraordinary success across the United States has taken by surprise. In reality, it should come as no surprise at all. There has simply been an utter failure to read the signs. In the post-nine-eleven Bush era, people, by and large, willingly and naïvely handed their human and civil rights over to the care of the Executive, in the name of the War on Terror. Authoritarianism always feeds on fear, and authoritarians manipulate fears and feelings of insecurity to gain the support of a critical mass. Fear is what has, in the last decade and a half, led Americans to relinquish more and more of their rights—both civil and human—and to tolerate the introduction of institutionalized torture and “extraordinary rendition”, blanket legal exceptions to the Bill of Rights, domestic spying without legitimate authority or recourse, arrests without charges or trial, presidential “kill lists”, massive “collateral damage” in overseas operations, the waging of military actions that violate international law, and so on.

But the devastating financial and economic crisis that capped the Bush years and ushered in Obama’s presidency, and the exponential rise of international terrorism that has followed, has fostered new and still deeper fears and left radicalized rightwing segments of the US population (like their European brethren) with a deep distrust of mainstream politicians, and hence, of the system as such. They are, then, as ripe for fundamentalist authoritarian populism as similarly profiled segments of the European population are. And Donald Trump fills that bill.

The similarities between what’s happening in Europe and the Trump phenomenon in the US are truly striking. Quoth Bastasin: “This trend is taking hold of Europe in much the same manner as what happened in the first half of the previous century. This may sound alarmist if not for the fact that European societies are on a slippery slope that provides momentum for authoritarian politics—a slope formed by the combined effects of the economic and migrant crises, which makes the prospect of closing national borders compelling for voters. We have already assented to barbed wire fences going up in Eastern Europe to keep refugees out. Now, Austria is erecting ‘walls’ on the Slovenian and Italian borders.”

Even as this is taking place in Europe, Trump is promising his radicalized anti-everything supporters that he will bar Muslims’ entry to the United States and build a wall so strong on the southern border that no “raping, murdering, drug-smuggling” Mexican will get through it, and doubling down on that vow by saying that he will, furthermore, “make Mexico pay for that wall.”

Like populist authoritarians before him, Trump plays to the most fundamentalist segments of society, serially insulting women and minorities ranging from immigrants to Hispanics, Muslims and Jews. He invents “facts” and lies whenever convenient, covering for his encyclopedic ignorance by making up his discourse as he goes along. Moreover, he is underscoring support for populist dictators throughout the Third World, where he is pointed to as a sign of the times, a trend by which minority and individual rights are made to give way to the will of the majority and where the majority signs over its rights and the entire power of the nation to an autocratic elite.  And he is a boon to systems like those in place in Russia and Turkey where authoritarians like Putin and Erdogan increasingly scoff at Washington’s do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do democratic moralizing and have become ever-less apologetic for their autocratic designs.

It was Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels who famously said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”  

The Donald is an accomplished student of this authoritarian lesson and one can only expect that he would, as president, also master the repression of truth by authority of the State. As a Washington Post editorial recently warned, Trump has demonstrated “contempt for the separation of powers by threatening the Speaker of the House (Trump said the Speaker would ‘pay a big price’ for opposing him).  Where his policy agenda is not thin, it is scary...In short, (it) should inspire fear that someone so lacking in judgment and restraint could acquire the powers of the presidency.”

To date, Trump’s share of the GOP pie, no matter how successful he may appear, has only been a little less than half. Between Republicans and Democrats who do not support him it would seem to follow that between 50 and 75 percent of Americans are anti-Trump. For the sake of world democracy and security, it can only be hoped that a huge proportion of non-Trump supporters will turn out to vote in November and help stem the tide of populist authoritarianism both in the US and abroad.