“Under no circumstances, you are promising
America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against
anybody?” Hannity asked Trump in the interview taped in Davenport, Iowa
on Tuesday.
Foi assim, o mais despudoradamente possível, que Trump anunciou à América que será, se for eleito para um segundo mandato, ditador apenas no primeiro dia.
Nesse dia, diz ele, encerrará a fronteira com o México e começará a expandir a procura de petróleo.
Tudo às claras, tudo directo, tudo descaradamente frontal.
A assistência, obviamente trumpistas fanáticos, fica exponencialmente excitada com as ameaças, as invectivas, os insultos, tudo o que Trump atira para quem o idolatra, diga o que o seu herói disser mesmo que atire as maiores barbaridades contra a Constituição e as instituições do Estado.
A economia norte-americana atravessa um bom momento, o que, normalmente seria condição necessária e suficiente para garantir ao incumbente na presidência a renovação do mandato.
Agora não.
Trump tem a brutalidade no discurso que concentra todas as frustações, todas as crenças, designios opostos, ambições de sinais contrários, porque os ventos dos populismos voltaram a soprar de diversos quadrantes varrendo os valores democráticos que nos tínhamos habituado tomar como referentes de segurança da convivência entre povos de consciência adulta e livre.
O texto, que transcrevo a seguir, publicado anteontem no Washington Post, da autoria do editor principal do jornal, é sintomático do desnorte que a persistente revoada de agitações que as intervenções públicas de Trump e dos seus seguidores provocam numa democracia que se supunha imune às crises comuns nos jovens ou adolescentes.
Biden recandidata-se para não oferecer a Trump o trunfo que ele mais desejaria, o de falta de comparência. Deste modo, do lado democrata os dados são conhcidos.
Resta aos norte-americanos descortinar como barrar Trump e impedir que uma nuvem de populismo desenfreado lhe dê a possibilidade de semear a confusão para trair os valores que consolidaram a mais antiga e robusta democracia do mundo.
A via mais óbvia parece ser a conjunção num só opositor republicano a Trump de todos os candidatos republicanos contrários à recandidatura de Trump. Mais óbvia, mas de sucesso pouco provável considerando a incomensurável dimensão do lugar a concurso.
Para a União Europeia os resultados presidenciais nos EUA, no dia 5 de Novembro serão, como nunca antes, decisivos do seu futuro.
É nos EUA que se forja a conspiração de Trump contra a Europa. Com toda a transparência, ainda que pouca gente veja.
The Trump dictatorship: How to stop it
By Robert Kagan -
Editor at large . December 7, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
In an essay I wrote last week,
I painted a grim picture of the prospects for dictatorship in the
United States. Some readers were unhappy that I did not offer a
solution. What follows is an attempt at one, and if it seems like a long
shot, it is. Our options today are harder and fewer because we have
passed up so many better and easier alternatives in the past. Nor was it
for lack of knowing what needed to be done. It would not have taken a
miracle for Republicans to unite around a single non-Trump candidate in
2016 or for 10 more Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
The problem has never been knowing what to do. It has been doing
it. In the past, stopping Trump has required people taking risks and
making sacrifices that they did not want to make, whether out of
selfishness, fear or ambition. Today, the challenges are even greater,
but there is little evidence that the people we need to rise to the
occasion are any more likely to do so than they have been for the past
eight years.
Here
are several things people could do to save the country but almost
certainly won’t do, because they selfishly refuse to put their own
ambitions at risk to save our democracy.
Robert Kagan: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
The
first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the
Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious
that candidate should be Nikki Haley
and not because she’s pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most
capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with
the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and
the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible. Yes, Ron DeSantis
is likely too selfish and ambitious to drop out of the race, but if
everyone else does and the remaining money and support all flow to
Haley, he will quickly become irrelevant.
It
won’t be enough, however, to rally the forces behind Haley. Even if she
were to get every vote that’s now spread among the other non-Trump
candidates (and she won’t), it would not come close to being enough to
challenge Trump. Until now, she has been gathering support at the
expense of other non-Trump candidates. To make a serious run for the
nomination, she will also have to cut into the more than 50 percent of
the party that now seems solidly behind Trump.
What
is her theory for doing that? Does she think she will attract these
voters with her policies or her winning political personality? Trump
supporters fall into roughly three categories. The great majority are
completely committed to what former New Jersey governor Christine Todd
Whitman has called the “cult” of Trump. They are out of reach for Haley. Another smaller group has no problem with Trump, so long as he can beat President Biden
and the Democrats next year. This faction is undoubtedly reassured by
polls that say that Trump can win, so the possibility that Haley can
also beat Biden is irrelevant to them. They prefer Trump, and there is
no reason for them to rethink their position so long as Trump remains
clearly electable. Finally, there is a small percentage of Republicans
who say they will support Trump unless he is convicted; recent polls
suggest these people make up roughly six percent of GOP voters in some of the key swing states.
Haley,
therefore, has no chance of getting more than a small fraction of
current Trump supporters to add to her collection of Trump-skeptical
Republicans. She might make a respectable showing as the No. 2
candidate, thus setting her up to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee,
if he will have her, in which case her entire campaign will have been
largely for show. Indeed, it will have served chiefly as a conveyor belt
for Trump skeptics to get onboard the Trump train in the end. If that
is what she’s up to, then the joke will be on the Koch network, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and others who have lately looked to her as a last hope for stopping Trump.
If
she is serious about trying to stop Trump, however, there is only one
way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts
about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those
Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really
does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That
is what will be required to win over the small percentage of
Republicans who are still willing to drop Trump if he is convicted. And
if Haley can begin to reel in those voters, she can begin to raise
doubts in the minds of those who are supporting Trump because they think
he can defeat Biden and the Democrats in November. In short, the way to
beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him
seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable.
Trump’s
dictatorial tendencies and open disdain for the Constitution can become
his greatest vulnerabilities — they might be his only
vulnerabilities — if sufficiently highlighted for the American voter,
and he and his advisers likely know it. Trump’s bizarre assertion that
he would be a dictator only on “Day One” of his presidency
to “close the border” was, believe it or not, an attempt to deflect the
charge. (But what if it takes two days?) Democrats have gotten mileage
in downballot races by painting their Republican opponents as
lawbreaking, MAGA radicals. Trump is aware that he needs to hold on to
some normal, non-cultist Republicans — that is why he has taken a more moderate position on abortion
than much of the rest of the party. Trump is nothing if not a shrewd
politician (the people who persist in claiming he’s an idiot should have
a talk with themselves), and he knows he cannot win the general
election on cult votes alone.
So,
are Haley and other Republicans trying to exploit these
vulnerabilities? No. Quite the contrary, they are helping Trump by
continually affirming his acceptability as president. Every time Haley
and other Republicans say they will support Trump if he is the nominee, they are telling Republican voters, including their own supporters, that Trump is acceptable. When New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu
says, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about,” he
might as well just get it over with — and endorse Trump. To say that
Biden is so dangerous to the country that even Trump would be better is
to endorse the world as Trump and his MAGA cultists portray it. Not only
does this undercut the rationale for Haley’s candidacy, but it also
makes it extremely difficult to peel away current Trump supporters. If
Trump is acceptable, then he is electable. And if he is electable, then
why should any current Trump supporter shift to Haley? Haley’s posture
is not only incoherent; it is fatal to her prospects.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/07/robert-kagan-trump-dictatorship-how-to-stop/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
On
November 19 1919, the US Senate repudiated the Versailles Treaty. With
that decision, the US withdrew its might from maintaining what had been
agreed in the aftermath of the first world war, leaving this task to the
British and French, who lacked both the will and the means to do so.
The second world war followed. After that conflict, the US played a far
more productive role. Today, the world is still in many ways the one the
US made. But for how much longer will that be the case? And what might
follow it? The outcome of the next presidential election might answer
these questions, not just decisively, but, alas, very badly. Recent
polls suggest that almost 55 per cent of US voters disapprove of Joe
Biden’s performance. They also suggest that Trump is slightly ahead of
Biden in head-to-head polling before the election now a year away.
Finally, they suggest that Trump is ahead of Biden in five of the six
most important “battleground” states. In all, a Trump victory is clearly
and disturbingly plausible. What would that mean? The most important
answer is that the US, not just the world’s most powerful democracy, but
its saviour in the 20th century, is no longer committed to democratic
norms. The most fundamental of such norms is that power has to be won in
free and fair elections. Whether US presidential elections are “fair”
is debatable. But they do have rules. Efforts by the incumbent to
overthrow those rules amount to insurrection. That Trump attempted to do
so is not debatable. Neither is the absence of evidence of fraud to
support his attempted coup. He is properly under indictment. Yet he
might still win a presidential election. One reason why he might do so
is that close to 70 per cent of people who identify as Republicans say
they believe his lies. This is shocking, though, alas, not that
surprising. What would another Trump presidency mean for the US, beyond
an endorsement of a man who attempted to overthrow the constitution?
Obviously, the answer would depend partly on the balance in Congress.
Yet it would be wrong to draw additional comfort from how he behaved
last time. Then he relied on quite traditional figures from the military
and business. Next time will be different. “Maga” is now a cult with a
sizeable number of believers. A crucial domestic plan of Trump’s is to
replace the career civil service with loyal servants of the president.
The excuse is the alleged existence of a “deep state”, by which critics
mean knowledgeable career civil servants whose loyalty is to the law and
the state, not to the person in power. One reason this is objectionable
is that modern government cannot run without such people. The bigger
reason is that if the intelligence, homeland security and internal
revenue services, the military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Department of Justice are subservient to the whims of the head of
state, one has autocracy. Yes, it’s that simple. With a vengeful head of
state, abuses of power could be pervasive. This would not be the US we
have known. It might be more like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or even Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. Line chart of Per cent of US voters saying that
Joe Biden won due to voter fraud (total and by party affiliation)
showing Voters are deeply divided over who won the 2020 presidential
election What might this mean for the world? Most obviously, embrace by
the US of a man and a party that have openly repudiated the central norm
of liberal democracy would dishearten those who believe in it and
encourage despots and their lackeys everywhere. It is hard to exaggerate
the effect of such a betrayal by the US. The mixture of this despair
with Trump’s avowedly transactional approach would weaken, if not
destroy, the trust on which current US alliances are based. Americans
are right to decry the freeriding of most allies. There is no doubt,
above all, that Europeans (among which the UK is included) must do more.
But the alliance needs a leader. For the foreseeable future, the US has
to be that leader. With Russia threatening Europe, and China a peer
competitor, alliances are going to be more important than ever — not
just for its allies, but for the US, too. Trump neither understands nor
cares about this. Line chart of Share of global GDP* (%) showing The
purchasing power of China’s GDP is bigger than that of the US or EU but
remains far smaller than those of both together Then there are the
implications for the world economy. Trump is proposing to introduce a 10
per cent across-the-board tariff on all imports. This would be a
contemporary (albeit milder) version of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff
of 1930. It would surely lead to retaliation. It would also do huge
damage to the World Trade Organization, by repudiating US commitments to
lower tariff barriers over many decades. As important is likely to be
the impact on efforts to tackle climate change. The US itself would
presumably reverse many measures in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. As
significant might be a likely US withdrawal from efforts to promote
investment in clean energy in emerging and developing countries. Line
chart of Share of global trade in goods* (exports plus imports, %)
showing China now trades more than the US or EU but less than both
together Prospective relations with China must also be in question. Here
the changes might not be that dramatic, because hostility to China’s
rise is bipartisan. But the opposition to China would be less about
ideology under Trump, who cares not a whit about such differences
between autocracies and democracies. He rather prefers the former. It
would become just a contest over power, with Trump trying to keep the US
number one. How differently that would turn out is unclear. Trump might
seek to turn Russia against China, as Nixon did China against the
Soviet Union. Abandonment of Ukraine might be his bait. One Must-Read
This article was featured in the One Must-Read newsletter, where we
recommend one remarkable story each weekday. Sign up for the newsletter
here A second Trump presidency might not ruin the US forever. But both
it and the rest of the world would lose their innocence. We would have
to adapt to the reality that the US had re-elected a man who had openly
tried to subvert its democracy. It is possible that the indictments
against Trump will save the day. But that fragile hope highlights
today’s threat to democracy. martin.wolf@ft.com
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