— by Randy Patrick, WinCity Voices —
In his dark comedy It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis describes the rise of a risible demagogue who is elected president of the United States and becomes a dictator.
The novel was published in 1935, when Lewis’s wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, was reporting on the emergence of fascism in Europe.
The protagonist in the story is Doremus Jessup, a small-town newspaper editor who sees what’s happening and tries to warn his readers that their folksy hero is a fraud.
“He was an actor of genius,” Lewis wrote, describing Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. The politician would captivate his audience by glaring, shouting, cooing, and telling them things that “were entirely incorrect.”
Among Windrip’s first acts as president were to decrease the influence of Congress, curtail the rights of women and minorities, and muzzle the watchdogs of the free press.
Two years into his reign of error, when his promises of prosperity have failed to materialize, and Canada, Mexico and South America have shown no interest in becoming “part of his inevitable empire,” Windrip’s power wanes. He is ousted by his scheming former right-hand man, who is overthrown by a ruthless general.
Lewis’s novel was a warning to a complacent republic that would soon be enraptured by the isolationist America First movement led by aviator Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford, men who held anti-Semitic and pro-fascist views.
Had Pearl Harbor not happened when it did, uniting the nation in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war effort, the history of America in the 1940s and the post-war order might have been quite different.
But what if Lewis’s nightmare was just premature? Ninety years after his book was published, his clarion call sounds clearer and more relevant than ever.
Is Trump a fascist?
Before Donald J. Trump was elected president for a second term in 2024, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Presidents Trump and Biden, told reporter Bob Woodward: “Now I realize he is a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
When he retired in 2023, Milley had said a military officer doesn’t take an oath of loyalty to “a tyrant or a dictator” or someone who wants to be one.
Trump’s chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, echoed Milley’s concern on Oct. 22, when he told The New York Times that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
The former president, Kelly said, believed he had the ability “to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
Kelly also confirmed that Trump was fascinated with Adolph Hitler and had said the fuehrer “did some good things” for Germany.
Vice President Kamala Harris agreed with Kelly that Trump was a fascist and said days before the 2024 election that this was “a 911 call to the American people.”
It was a call that went unheeded by most voters.
It may have hurt Harris and other Democrats to use the word created for Benito Mussolini’s Italian movement that exalted the nation and its government above individual rights, concentrated authority in an autocratic leader, regimented economics and culture and forcibly suppressed all opposition. It has since been used to define rightist regimes in 1930s Spain, a few Latin American countries in the 1970s and 21st century Russia.
Are President Trump and his team fascists? I think it’s probably an exaggeration to call them that. However, they represent a far-right populist and nativist movement, and Trump’s second term is a textbook example of authoritarian governance — even if it may not yet be so extreme as to warrant the f‑word.
How democracies die
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die, have studied the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America and offered comparisons to what they’ve seen occurring in this country.
“Democracies do not die the way they used to die,” which was at the hands of men with guns, Levitsky said in a recent virtual event. It happens more subtly. He suggested there are three stages.
- “First an ‘an elected autocrat’ will start ‘capturing the referees,’ that is, changing personnel in law enforcement, courts, intelligence agencies, tax agencies and more.
- Then, with loyalists wielding government powers, autocrats sideline opposition figures.
- Finally, autocrats ‘change the playing field’ of electoral politics, through new rules about gerrymandering, campaign finance, and media access, among other things,” he said.
Two months into his second term, it’s clear that President Trump has followed this playbook. He is purging the civil service and replacing career public employees with partisan loyalists; directing investigations against his rivals, including prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable; intimidating the media by barring the Associated Press from news conferences, threatening to shut down CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and choosing his own press pool; and trying to wrest control of the purse from Congress by refusing to spend money already allocated.
Unlike past presidents who used executive orders to implement congressional acts or to respond to crises, Trump has governed like a monarch, issuing royal decrees, including some that violate statutory and constitutional law.
He has, for example, tried to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the Constitution; nearly destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provided most of our overseas humanitarian aid; and fired inspectors general, the independent watchdogs over government, without the required congressional notice.
Judges have issued orders halting some of the president’s reckless actions, and for now, he has said he will comply. But he has also threatened to “look at” these judges for possible corruption. And his vice president, J.D. Vance, has said the courts can’t impede the “legitimate” authority of the president.
Paraphrasing the first modern dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, Trump said on social media: “He who saves his Country does not violate the Law.”
Without judicial review, established by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, American democracy as we have known it for more than 200 years won’t exist.
Federal courts can issue fines and even jail officials (except the president) for contempt, but the only way they can enforce their orders is to use U.S. marshals, and the president can order the Department of Justice to call them off.
Cabinet of cranks
In an interview in the January-February issue of The New Republic, Levitsky said that one thing to watch for in an authoritarian leader is his attempt to remove guardrails on his actions by appointing as heads of agencies sycophants who have no “credentials or independent authority” and are “grossly unfit for their jobs.” That, he said, is “a clear tell that Trump seeks loyalists who will weaponize these agencies.”
We’ve seen it already.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now head of Health and Human Services, is a lawyer with no medical background who is best known as a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist. Kennedy has said the government should focus on chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes and forget about pandemics for a while.
“We’re going to give infectious diseases a break for about eight years,” he said before being named secretary of HHS.
He has been strangely silent about the bird flu crisis and said a big measles outbreak that started among unvaccinated children in Texas was not unusual.
Pete Hegseth, the new secretary of defense, was a Fox News commentator and a major in the Army National Guard. Prior to Trump’s talks with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on ending the war against Ukraine, Hegseth committed what Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R‑Miss., called a “rookie mistake” by telling NATO it was unrealistic to think Ukraine could return to its 2014 boundaries before Russia annexed Crimea.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wasn’t included in the initial talks.
Last month, the Senate approved as FBI director Kash Patel, who has said he will follow the law, but who also has published an enemies list of former government officials and warned that he’s “coming after” the media.
Patel has given every indication that he will do what he said in confirmation hearings he wouldn’t: weaponize the agency against the president’s enemies.
His deputy director, Dan Bongino, has called the FBI “irredeemably corrupt” and wanted to fire FBI agents in the Trump classified documents case.
Old world order
The new president is signaling an end to America’s role as leader of the free world.
For three years, the United States has supported Ukraine in its fight against Russia, but now the new administration is negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war on terms favorable to the U.S. Trump wants half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for past support, and he may insist that Ukraine give up occupied territory.
Last month, Trump called Zelensky a dictator and accused Ukraine of starting the war. The U.S. even voted with Russia and North Korea in the United Nations against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression against its neighbor.
Then on Feb. 28, in a televised meeting in the Oval Office, Trump deliberately humiliated Zelensky and expelled him from the White House because the Ukrainian president pushed back on Trump’s proposed cease fire.
Let’s be clear; it is Putin who is a brutal dictator and Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that caused the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
If Ukraine falls, Russia will turn its attention to reclaiming other nations that were once part of the former USSR or under its domination, beginning with the Baltic republics that are now part of NATO. But Trump has signaled that the U.S. will no longer defend NATO countries if they don’t increase their defense funding, although they have been.
For eighty years, the U.S. has been able to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons by providing Europe protection from Russia with its own nuclear arsenal. But if NATO can’t count on us, then Poland, Germany and other European nations will have to develop their own nukes, making the world a far more dangerous place.
It seems Trump no longer considers Russia a pariah nation. He and key members of his team also have expressed support for political parties in Europe that other Western democracies consider extremist, including Victor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Alice Weidel’s Alternative for Germany, a pro-Putin group that has ties to neo-Nazi activists. Vice President J.D. Vance and Trump’s chief deputy, Elon Musk, voiced support for AfD in Germany’s February elections, but the party came in second behind the center-right Christian Democrats, which has refused to include them in a governing coalition.
American carnage
In its effort to remove “waste, fraud and abuse” from federal spending, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a real cabinet-level department, has taken a wrecking ball to the federal bureaucracy.
They have decimated USAID, which was about 1 percent of the federal budget. They have given no examples of fraud, which is a crime, and most of the instances of waste are State Department programs, not USAID.
Trump has governed like a monarch, issuing royal decrees, including some that violate statutory and constitutional law.
Meanwhile, emergency food supplies aren’t getting to starving people in Sudan, and former President George W. Bush’s AIDS relief program for Africa, which saved 20 million lives, is in danger of ending.
Without U.S. foreign aid, China will be able to expand its influence by providing the poorest nations with assistance, but always at a heavy price.
Trump has said he wants to abolish the Department of Education, which provides funding for children with disabilities, financial assistance for low-income college students and other programs that mostly help disadvantaged kids.
The administration has indiscriminately fired tens of thousands of federal workers, including some of the most capable career employees. We can expect our national parks, mail delivery, income tax returns, health and safety protection, pandemic preparedness, air traffic control, and other services to be less efficient as a result.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to purge the civil service of independent professionals and replace them with people who are personally loyal to him. This would amount to a return to the spoils system, which the nonpartisan modern bureaucracy was meant to reform.
The president’s insistence on loyalty even extends to the military. He recently removed the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and other top leaders. That’s worrisome.
We can’t expect the military to save us.
A failed coup d’etat
Save us from what?
The unthinkable.
The same day he swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, Trump pardoned 1,500 rioters who, on Jan. 6, 2021, invaded and vandalized the U.S. Capitol, and assaulted 140 police officers to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election as the 46th president.
Among those excused for their role in the deadly insurrection were members of anti-government paramilitary gangs that refer to themselves as “militias.”
Members testified in court and congressional hearings that they had come to Washington at the urging of the president, who promised on social media that it would “be wild!”
For months, Trump and his minions accused Democrats of election fraud, although 60 courts, the attorney general and others who had investigated the claim said there was no evidence of it.
Then, on Jan. 6, Trump rallied his supporters, telling them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” When he was warned that some in the audience were armed, he said that was all right; they weren’t there to hurt him.
While thugs broke windows and cracked skulls, hunted down fleeing lawmakers, erected a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” (because the vice president had fulfilled his constitutional duty to allow the certification) Trump did nothing for hours but watch the carnage on television. When he finally urged the rioters to go home, he said he loved them.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump called Jan. 6, 2021 a “day of love” and referred to the domestic terrorists as the “J6 Hostages.”
The president’s actions suggest that he will condone political violence on his behalf and protect the perpetrators. In fact, two of the freed paramilitary leaders, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, were emboldened to make threats against those who had put them in prison.
The administration has since asked for the identities of the FBI agents who investigated the attack on the Capitol.
The militia threat
Could these gangs, like the Minute Men in Lewis’s novel, comprise a private army of Trump supporters in the event of some future conflict?
Consider that it has happened before.
In the 2020 presidential debate between Trump and Biden, moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News asked the president if he would tell the Proud Boys to “stand down.”
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said.
And that’s what they did. They waited for the right time and for his orders.
After Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, the House impeached Trump for his role in the mêlée and for trying to steal the election, but the Republican-led Senate refused to convict.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky excoriated Trump, saying every bit of what happened on Jan. 6 was the president’s fault. But, he said, it was unconstitutional to impeach a president after he had left office because the only penalty Congress can impose is removal, and the voters had already removed him.
Constitutional scholars disagreed. And if Trump’s impeachment had succeeded, it would have made him ineligible to be president again.
McConnell suggested the federal courts were the proper place to hold Trump accountable. But the Jan. 6 case and the purloined documents case were delayed by endless legal challenges until the 2024 general election, so prosecutors had no choice but to drop the charges and resign.
America’s dark age
Now Trump is back.
This time, he won the election decisively — the first time a Republican presidential candidate has done so in 36 years.
I would like to think that most who voted for him last year did so because of frustration with post-pandemic inflation, or race-and-gender identity politics excesses, or “woke” ideas about defunding the police and other exaggerations — not because they’re tired of democracy.
Early indications are that his destructive actions, like plundering programs for the poor; planning to increase the national debt by $4.5 trillion to give tax cuts, mostly to the affluent; abandoning our allies to the predations of Russia and China; and bullying Canada and Mexico aren’t popular.
It may be that the courts will rein him in, since the Republican Congress has shown no inclination to do so, and this time there are no Mark Milleys or John Kellys in his cabinet or staff to check his worst impulses.
But maybe Trump will succeed in capturing the referees, sidelining his opponents, ignoring the rules, and changing the playing field so that American democracy will never be the same.
I knew Trump’s second term would be worse than his first, but I never imagined this.
Like Doremus Jessup, who blamed himself for allowing it to happen, I reasoned that America’s institutional guardrails would hold and that people would turn against the demagogue once they opened their eyes.
“The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he conceded to his readers,” Lewis wrote. “It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said Doremus — even now.”
I believe it can happen. But I’m encouraged by something I read by Maria J. Stephan, a political scientist who worked for the U.S. Department of State and NATO and is an expert on authoritarianism and nonviolent civil resistance: “Autocrats are always weaker than they appear, and we are often stronger than we might think.”
If we are to save our country, we must resist.
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Written by Randy Patrick, who was a newspaperman for nearly 40 years in small towns throughout Central Kentucky. Cross-posted from WinCity Voices.
