The Owls' Nest

Click here for an article by Ezra Klein at Vox, entitled "Donald Trump is dangerous when he’s losing."

It's an interesting article that says that Trump's illiberal, authoritarian tendencies come to the fore when he's losing; he lashes out at perceived enemies -- the media, Mexicans, Muslims, a Hollywood actress or a department store -- out of rage and frustration when he doesn't get his way. The subtitle of the article is "Trump’s failures at governing feed his illiberalism."

His staff is riven with infighting, inexperienced with the mechanics of government, and unable to corral their boss’s worst impulses. Trump’s slipshod executive orders are being easily batted back by courts, and his agenda hasn’t even made it to Congress yet. How is he going to go from here to strongman?

Klein spoke to Ron Klain, who had been chief of staff to both vice presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, and he headed Hillary's debate prep team. He was thought to be the most likely candidate as chief of staff for Hillary, had she been elected.

Klain had a theory that combined Trump’s authoritarian impulses and troubled White House management in a way I found hard to dismiss. In Klain’s view, it’s Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the government that catalyzes his illiberal tendencies — the more he is frustrated by the system, the more he will turn on the system.

“If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state,” Klain said. “It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”

Don't forget Trump's infamous antimedia tweet:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

Klein tells of his conversation with Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard. Mounck has studied democracies that backslide into authoritarianism or autocracy, like Turkey and Hungary in recent years. "His concern is palpable. And his argument is persuasive."

The distinction you need to make with Trump, Mounk argues, is that he’s not an ideological authoritarian but a contextual one. He is not entering office with a program to weaken the judiciary and bulldoze legislative roadblocks, as Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. His dangerous tendencies, rather, are reactive to the situations in which he finds himself.

“In a world where institutions let him do what he wants, he doesn’t have a problem with institutions,” Mounk says. Think of Trump’s friendly relationship with the media back when he felt the media was friendlier to him — a comparison the president himself made at his press conference. “Remember, I used to give you a news conference every time I made a speech, which was like every day,” Trump said, almost wistfully.

“But,” Mounk continues, “in a world where they don’t let him do what he wants, he thinks these institutions are unpatriotic and need to be destroyed.” That would have sounded hyperbolic to me if, later that day, Trump hadn’t tweeted that the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN were “the enemy of the American people.”

Klein says:

Of course, losing makes you weaker, not stronger. Trump’s anger at the press or at the courts or at Congress poses little threat if his approval ratings linger in the 40s or 30s. But imagine Trump spends years being stymied by the system and marinating in fury toward the institutions he feels have foiled him. He spends years telling his supporters that the courts are making them less safe, that the press is their enemy, that the congress is corrupt. And then, all at once, Trump gains the power and popularity to do something about it.

"All at once": If Trump has his Reichstag fire, or his 9/11. W's popularity soared after 9/11, and he was able to push through extreme measures in the Patriot Act. If Trump were to spend months building up his fury and resentment at being constrained, and condemning the press, the courts, Congress, and any perceived restrictions on his power to act, what would Trump's Patriot Act look like? It wouldn't be pretty:

Matt Olsen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the New Yorker. “C.I.A. black sites, enhanced interrogations, Gitmo, and warrantless surveillance will all be on the table. In addition, regardless of nationality, there will be changes to immigration and refugee policies.”

Klein says:

Trump is already telling supporters the media is part of “the corrupt system” he was sent to destroy. He has already mused about legislation making it easier to sue journalism organizations for libel. He has suggested using the antitrust powers of the Justice Department to retaliate against Amazon for the Washington Post’s coverage of his campaign. Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere, Jared Kushner, is already pressuring CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, to soften the cable network’s coverage of the president.

Klein goes on to discuss the undercurrent of violence at Trump's rallies and expressed in some of his tweets.

“My great fear,” says Larry Diamond, a Stanford University political scientist who studies democracies, “is that if we have a major terrorist attack on the United States, that the psychology of fear that sets in in these circumstances naturally gives a leader like Trump enormous scope to abridge civil liberties, amend constitutional guarantees, and move in a more authoritarian direction.”

Some analysts even suggest Trump wants this kind of attack and is laying the rhetorical groundwork for it. Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under Bush, has argued that Trump wants his travel ban overturned, because he is “setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration.” In a chilling New Yorker article, Ryan Lizza quotes Todd Breasseale, a former Department of Homeland Security official, saying, “I am fully confident that an attack is exactly what he wants and needs.”

Imagine Trump spends the next year furious at the media and the courts and the leaks within his own bureaucracy — warning that they are making us less safe and that they are the people’s enemies — and then there is a terrorist attack that pushes the country to rally around its leader.

It's disturbing to think about a recent article in The Washington Post by Erik Wemple, entitled "How to build a Donald Trump media bubble," that revealed a new strategy Trump's minions are adopting to keep him from lashing out with angry tweets: They make sure he is fed a steady diet of favorable news stories. He watches an enormous amount of cable TV news, so there's not much they can do to filter out negativity. But he doesn't use a computer, so they print out reams of stories from favorable media outlets -- Breitbart, Fox News, Infowars -- and that keeps him happy. So to some extent he lives in a comfortable bubble, surrounded by sycophants who try to keep him happy.

It is easy to imagine Trump, in a year, cornered in his own White House, furious at the manifold enemies he blames for his failures, and cocooned within an ever-smaller and more radical group of staffers and media outlets that tell him what he wants to hear and feed his grievances and resentments.