Tag: Dictator

What Does Putin Have on Trump? Probably Nothing, Trump’s Just Being Trump

Michael Matheron1 Comment

On tonight’s Jenn Psaki’s show, I just heard Nancy Pelosi speak about Trump’s recent Putin-related comments:

  • Seemingly inviting Russia to invade NATO countries, i.e., those who “don’t pay their dues,” and saying he’d let Russia do “anything they wanted to them,” and
  • His lack of quick response to Russian activist Alexei Navalny’s death due to “unspecified reasons” which Pelosi reckons was an assassination. Then his belated comments, three days after his collapse in a Russian prison, was his usual self-serving attempt to equate Navalny’s death with his own legal problems:

    “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. The former US president and presumptive Republican White House nominee added: “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

Pelosi, as is true of most everyone, stipulates that “Putin has something on Trump.” After reciting that mantra since 2016, I think there’s another explanation: Trump is simply being Trump. It’s no secret about his “bromances” with nearly all world authoritarian leaders. For example, why don’t we wonder “what does Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have on Trump?” Or, “what does Kim Jong Un have on Trump?” All this is not completely irrelevant, but, I believe, only partially true, if at all.

Trump doesn’t need any authoritarian to have something on him. He’s simply an unapologetic authoritarian personality, dyed in the wool at his monstrous father’s directions and via Roy Cohn, a verifiable monster. It’s baked in; Trump is dictator simpatico. He has, as well, survived and thrived despite serious legal, media, and political attacks for decades, emboldening him beyond all concern about his omnipotence. He’s likely always admired those who exercised unquestioned dominance over individuals, industries, and countries. So, of course, he admires Putin. He has no control over himself, in everything that makes a person human, he’s so close to his authoritarian dream and life force, presently leading the GOP, not like a dictator but as a dictator. Next in his sights is our country in full, so mammoth is his evil.

Being humans, we try en masse, I think, to bring some gestalt to the chaos Trump has caused and will continue to accelerate as the election cycle grinds on. We still, after nearly eight years of Trump’s historically rapacious performance as the first truly psychopathic American president, are shocked. At times I startle at the thought that, yes, Donald Trump, was president, and, shockingly, appears at least in light of his apparent omnipotence, to have a path to another four years of destruction. But this is no standard nightmare from which I, or we, can hope to awaken, relieved that it was just a dream. Wondering and wasting time wailing at the wailing wall will not cause Trump and his crowd to magically disappear. We must snap out of it, and very soon begin to fight without apology, if not without fear.

Is This Election “Crucial”? You Bet It Is

Michael Matheron3 Comments

Crucial Elections Are a Moveable Feast

Once again we enter the one-year countdown until our next presidential election, and, as always, this is a crucial one. Trite as that observation may be, trite is not always wrong. At 74, I’m old enough to recall the 1959 election and every one since. Each of those was labeled crucial by many. Yet, “crucial” is a moveable feast: what were the perceived stakes then, in each presidential election? In hindsight, FDR’s election in 1932 was crucial for the nation. Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, became crucial for the Union of the States. George Washington, elected to serve in 1789 was a crucial election, perhaps most importantly because he refused to accept the mantle of king, and calmly retired to Mount Vernon.

Mostly and realistically, the crucialness of an election is a post facto consensus. For one example among many, especially during the conservative resurgence since 1980, people still argue, for instance, that Herbert Hoover’s laissez faire policies would have brought us out of the depression more swiftly and satisfactorily. Liberals see Ronald Reagan’s two terms as a wrecking ball to all we believe in; conservatives sanctify him, calling his elections crucial to the birthing of the Tea Party and the MAGA movement. We need not talk about Nixon, he was always obvious.

The point is that we ought to belay the crucialness game. It’s hindsight alone that generally makes the case whether the previous election was crucial. On the whole, most presidential elections have had but a modicum of cruciality. In hindsight, few presidencies threatened to utterly unhinge our governmental and constitutional foundations, although admittedly, FDR gave many a Republican a scare during that worldwide period of enthusiasm for socialism, ever more an honest threat then to many in the gilded class than now. Nixon frightened the Democratic party into an uncharacteristically fighting stance. The Bush-Cheney alliance accelerated the decimation of even the concept of truth.

Belay Waiting for Hindsight

And then there was Trump. Among the despicable and degenerate presidencies, his was the worst we’ve faced as a nation, and we barely survived him. Pardon me if I don’t waste time demonstrating that he swung a wrecking ball to all we hold dear. And far from just retiring to Mar-A-Lago, like Washington did to Mount Vernon, he is now more than ever before front and center, bringing fear and trembling to the majority of Americans, from old-fashioned conservatives to card-carrying socialists. Despite his very real legal jeopardy in courtrooms throughout the land, he confidently speaks openly about his policies for his next attack on his own country: martial law using armed services troops on our soil; presidentially ordered selective prosecutions; destruction of the civil service system; frightening cabinet picks; wildly disturbing pardons; historical revision. What else? Do we need mention the whole that would likely be worse than its parts?

As a looming dictatorship of the Kleptocrats, i.e., government by thieves, Trump’s enabler’s plan to steal not only wealth in all its material forms, but moral, intellectual, and cultural wealth. Moreover, they plan – are already planning – to use our legal, electoral, and constitutional systems to do so, and in so doing, to destroy those systems and install authoritarian rule, in a way they will maintain was “lawful.” And by and large, the opposition, particularly the moribund and reticent Democratic party, treats this election surprisingly lightly, as if an historically unprecedented malevolent threat were simply another presidential election. This despite Trump’s first term presidential record of abuse at every turn.

We don’t need to wonder if this election is crucial. No waiting for hindsight is required. Drop the debate about it. Use time, especially air time, more productively. We’ve already witnessed Trump and company at work; they openly showed their cards to the entire nation. He earned two impeachments, 90 some odd criminal charges for actions he feels entitled to, and near universal disdain here and abroad for using the nuclear option against our electoral college, and his own Vice President. If this was the warm-up act, imagine the main event. Despite my admission that hindsight plays an important role in labeling presidential elections crucial, we don’t need hindsight to label this election crucial.

We’ve been to the circus and we saw the elephants.