King Trump

Trump doesn't strike me as a deep thinker, so I'm hard pressed to believe he's orchestrating this takeover completely of his own imagination. Popular opinion has it that Putin is pulling the strings. However it is coming about, the performance has been masterful. He's offering a real time example of how to take control of a democratic nation. 

To be up front, I'm not concerned that Trump will actually become a true "Dictator" a la Adolf Hitler.

I don't, for example, expect Trump to burn down the Capitol or round up Muslims. I'm not saying that he wouldn't like to, it's just that it is not necessary. Putin has amply demonstrated that a nation can maintain the façade of democracy while being controlled by a small group of elites, perhaps led by a crafty "strong man" or merely headlined by a morally flexible con man such as Trump. So far, Trump could have taken his script directly from The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. As the authors note...

 "...a challenger need only do three things.  First, he must remove the incumbent. Second, he needs to seize the apparatus of government. Third, he needs to form a coalition of supporters sufficient to sustain him as the new incumbent."

Trump removed the "projected" incumbent, the likelier candidate Hillary Clinton, through skillful campaigning. It serves as a classic example of how to campaign toward a specific aggrieved voting bloc. Trump tricked people who have never seen a Mexican into thinking they were swarming our sourthern border to come rape their wives and daughters. He engaged their religious righteousness by suddenly becoming staunchly anti-abortion. He played like he was the defender of the downtrodden as he implied wealthy industrialists were unpatriotic to offshore jobs. Trump fueled their latent misogyny by showing that he doesn't have to take it from a woman--"it" being honest and straightforward questioning from female reporters like Megyn Kelly. At one point in a debate he called Hillary a "nasty woman." Yet liberals found themselves scratching their heads when it turned out that a majority of white women voted for Trump. This is the "bubble" belonging to liberals who thought it was fait accompli for Clinton to garner the female vote. But Trump understood there is tremendous self-loathing subconsciously ingrained in Trump-supporting women long subjected to patriarchal "Christian" religiosity. Ok, to be fair, maybe Trump didn't understand this, but his campaign managers understood it well, and then Trump spoke the words well and won. 

Of course, Russia hacking DNC servers and releasing emails may have helped Trump. And certainly newspaper headlines reading "FBI Investigating Clinton" hurt Clinton. But unless Russia hacked actual ballots or James Comey admits his investigations were politically driven, it will never be possible to know how much Russia and certain traitors in the U.S. government helped elect Trump. But, he won, so that's that. On to challenger step number two: seizing "the apparatus of government."

One key "apparatus of government" is the military and other security agencies, especially the more secretive and therefore initially more dangerous services such as the CIA. (They have the ways and means to make your death look accidental, at least I assume so....). One of Trump's first moves was to ask West Point graduate but otherwise outsider to the security apparatus Stephen A. Feinburg to do a "review" of the intelligence agencies. It remains to be seen how much independence the agencies can maintain, but Trump has definitely set his sights on quelling the large, powerful and loosely monitored national security apparatus.

There remains the "media" and the Judicial Branch of our government to "check" Trump's ambitions. And it appears the courts survived their first test, having intervened and sidetracked Trump's efforts to block refugees and immigration from certain war-torn regions. But the open Supreme Court seat which he's sure to fill (it's hard to imagine the Democrats sustaining a 4-year filibuster) and the 118 judicial vacancies (as of 2/20/2017), give Trump and Co. tremendous power to pack more authoritarian-friendly thinkers into the judicial system. Again, Trump does not need to burn down the Supreme Court to get his way. If you can get the laws and results you seek while maintaining the appearance of a functioning and fair judiciary, all the better. There are numerous legal moves Trump can attempt to improve conservative representation in the courts, from top to bottom. There's no need to get radical.

What about the "Fourth Estate?" Every kid in America is taught about the all-important "media" and its role to keep an eye on our greedy politicians--from both parties. But now Trump has taught us that the media can't be trusted.

In the past, the media consisted of journalists and buildings, both of which could be physically seized and silenced or intimidated. This still goes on, but the war doctors have conjured new means of "psychological" warfare requiring only frequent, tantalizing, lies:

This is the scary part of the Trump victory. By discrediting, obstructing and feeding lies to the media, Trump has effectively seized the Fourth Estate.  

At the same time, Trump appears to be working every angle to ensure he can reward his key backers and establish a "coalition of supporters" who can help him sustain power. Again, it's not necessary he maintains the Presidency if he can achieve great wealth post-Presidency. Helping out the already rich and powerful is a time-proven strategy. 

One example, Trump's second executive order gave the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) the ability to fast track major infrastructure projects deemed "high priority." The chairman supposed to consider "...the project's importance to the general welfare, value to the Nation, environmental benefits, and such other factors as the Chairman deems relevant." It's not hard to imagine how this order might play out in a Trump administration. Infrastructure projects involve big bucks and are ripe for facilitating corruption. The CEQ seems like a dream conduit through which to reward the key members in his "coalition of supporters." After first trying to whisk away healthcare for millions with the stroke of a pen, Trump's very next move was to give a White House appointee vast powers. More ominously, we don't even know what is happening at the CEQ because Trump and Company took the website down: "Check back soon for more information."  
So here we find ourselves with a President who came to power despite losing the popular vote and who appears to be doing everything he can to become a dictator, who serves with majority party support in congress, a tenuous court system and a private sector "media" in shambles or in cohoots. While this is not a traditional coup d'état, the resulting public policy that flows forth will resemble that which we see from most dictatorships: strict rules around freedom of speech and personal choice, tough rhetoric against an existential threat ["radical Islamic terrorism"], and protecting/rewarding wealthy backers ["eliminating regulations" and "lowering taxes"].