The Nightmare Before Christmas

Like it or not, we have to talk about Trump. For better or worse, he will dominate the 2024 presidential contest. There’s too much at stake for America and the world.

Programming Note: My apologies for the lateness of this post. I usually try to publish on Tuesdays, but did not make my deadline today. Sorry!

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Wednesday, December 20, 2023, 12:00 p.m.

         I desperately want to not talk about Donald Trump, or at least to not have to. He’s outside the wheelhouse of Life Its Ownself, which is my experiences living in Texas almost my whole life and my knowledge of Texas politics, policy and government. It is in these areas that I feel I have something to offer you, Dear Reader.  

         I have another reason for not wanting to talk about Trump: he bores me. He is a stupid, if cunning, man. He is uneducated, uncultured and, worse, uncurious – one of my cardinal sins. He is a demagogue, playing on all our worst instincts: hatred, fear, envy, greed, laziness, racism, nativism – you name it. He desperately needs the self-affirmation that having the world pay attention to him provides.

         He’s both a boor and a bore. I’m pretty sure if he was a colleague at work, a neighbor down the street or a game show host, most of us would avoid him like the plague.

         Yet, here we are: we must pay attention. As of now, he is the leading candidate to be the next President of the United States. I believe he represents a mortal threat to democracy in America and in the world.

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         I was triggered to write this while reading a news story about the hapless Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, nominally the leader of the Palestinian nation. The article reported that he was “in the 18^th year of his four-year term.”

         During those 18 years, his Palestinian Authority lost all credibility and influence and was replaced by the Iran-backed Hamas, which initiated the carnage now facing its homeland. Maybe it’s time for Abbas’s first term to end!

         Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the Four-Times Indicted, 91-Felony Counts Facing 45^thPresident of these United States, promised last weekend that, “We're going to win four more years in the White House, then after that we'll negotiate. Based on the way I was treated; we're probably entitled to another four after that."

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         One almost has to admire the chutzpah of a person who will “negotiate” whether he should have a third term as President.

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         By the way, this is not the first time Trump has suggested that, because his feelings were hurt, he ought to be given a third term, notwithstanding George Washington’s example and the 22^ndAmendment to the Constitution, which reads:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

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Imagine, If You Will …

         Here’s a thought experiment: It’s four years from now, late 2027, and Donald Trump is President, having lost the 2024 popular vote for the third time (a record!) but securing a narrow Electoral College victory. President Trump announces that, because the economy is something something bad and the international situation is yadda yadda yadda dangerous, he is “suspending” the 2028 elections. When the early primary states try to move forward anyway, he invokes the Insurrection Act. National Guard troops from friendly states (Texas among them) are sent into Iowa, New Hampshire and other early states to physically prevent caucuses and elections from happening. Proud Boys and Three Percenters emerge from the sewers to back his play.

         Lawsuits are filed, in all of which courts rule that Trump cannot suspend the primaries. In early January, the Supreme Court rules that Trump does not have the legal authority to cancel the 2028 presidential election or interfere with primaries.

         In his rallies, still attended by roiling thousands of the MAGA faithful, Trump riffs on the famous, if possibly apocryphal, quote from Russian dictator Josef Stalin: “How many divisions does the Supreme Court have?” Delirious crowds scream their support.

         Meanwhile, Clinically-Dead-But-Still-Serving Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley announces his support for the suspension. So does Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who survived a close re-election contest in 2026. Eventually, the GOP Senate caucus, which enjoys a narrow two-vote majority, endorses the idea of suspending the 2028 election.

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         There are three reactions to the possibility that Donald Trump, if he is reelected next fall (as the current polling seems to indicate), will make himself President for Life:

         1. Existential horror at the prospect, and determination that this must never happen, lest it spell the end of the American experiment.

         2. Belief that this just can’t happen, and naïve, whistling-past-the-graveyard hope that, somehow, the guardrails will hold and people will come to their senses. This is the biggest group, and includes many of you reading this essay.

         3. It’s about damn time it happens: Full-throated support for ridding ourselves of this pestilential democracy, because it is rife with incompetence and corruption and allowing America to devolve into an impure country that has lost its way, welcoming people who should never be allowed to enter and coddling gays, transgenders, atheists (and, yes, Jews) and others who weaken our national fabric.

         I consider myself part of the first group. Donald Trump has promised to be a Dictator For One Day. Presumably, he’ll go back to being a normal president on day two, although Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of authoritarian dictatorships, notes “I have studied dictators for decades and guess what? They don't stop being dictators after one day.”

         Former Congresswoman and Trump heretic Liz Cheney is clearly having none of it. She was on the Today Show the other day:

The daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney believes Trump would install himself as a permanent president and refuse to leave office after the mandated two-term limit if he is reelected.

"There’s no question," she said. "Absolutely. He’s already done it once. ... He’s already attempted to seize power, and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic. But he said he will do it again. He’s expressed no remorse for what he did."

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Haven’t You Been Paying Attention?

         Those who think this just couldn’t happen should consider the legacy of his surprising election to the presidency in 2016: Who’da thunk it?

         Many of his signature domestic initiatives, like the Muslim ban and caging immigrant children, were greeted with horror by the American people and struck down by courts as illegal and unconstitutional. His unsteady and ego-driven response to the COVID pandemic caused thousands of additional deaths and much turmoil in the American, and global, economy. (The one thing he did right on COVID – the Operation Warp Speed mobilization of our scientific and technological prowess to find a treatment – has had mixed results because he spent so much time and energy poisoning Americans’ minds about vaccines.)

         Internationally, he simultaneously coddled our enemies and undermined our allies. In four years, he destroyed America’s reputation as a steadfast and reliable leader of the international coalition for freedom. He personified, in our international dealings, the Ugly American stereotype as “loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric.”

         In doing so, he turned the once noble Republican Party into an abject cult that worships him and demands fealty to him of all its elected officials. The GOP is now driven by one policy and stylistic imperative: fealty to the Dear Leader.

         To return briefly to my wheelhouse, consider his poisonous effect on Texas: Although the Four Horses’ Asses of Texas politics – Abbott, Patrick, Paxton and Sid Miller – were all in statewide office before he was elected, his presence on the national scene has made them all worse – more extremist, more intolerant of others, and more cruel in their policies. Without him, we probably would not have the multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star boondoggle, a sniveling Texas Senate, an OAG that brings new depths to “frivolous lawsuits,” or a Texas Department of Agriculture dress code that requires employees to dress “in a manner consistent with their biological gender.”

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Red Signal Lights Are Flashing

         In the last couple months, a whole cottage industry of doom predictors has spoken out about the risks of a Trump return to office. The Bulwark, which started out as a Never Trump website, features articles (like this one) about the nightmarish return to power of Donald Trump. The Atlantic devoted a full issue to “If Trump Wins,” featuring articles like “Trump Will Abandon NATO” and “A War on Blue America.” A Washington Post essay promised “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

         Common themes runs through many of these analyses: Trump’s laziness and megalomania blunted many of his worst ideas during his first term. He was unfamiliar with (and uncurious about) the workings of government, and so could not manage the bureaucracy. He recruited a few A-listers, but quickly ran them off; most of his staff and appointees were C-listers who’d failed upward into the administration and could not implement his plans.

         In his second term, goes the warning, he will not make the same mistakes. He will, like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, “figure out how to open doors.”

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Believe Him When He Tells You

         As if afraid his detractors did not have sufficient evidence to justify their alarm, Trump doubled down on his most incendiary invective during speeches in New Hampshire, Iowa and Nevada over the weekend in which he:

         Said migrants from mostly Africa, Asia and South America are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a line from Adolf Hitler;

         Stated, without evidence, that migrants are being sent from prisons and mental institutions in their native countries (although …);

         Suggested, again without evidence, that China is using our immigration system to sneak an army into the U.S.;

         Cited Russian president Vladimir Putin to describe his legal troubles as “politically motivated” and “very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy;”

         Praised authoritarian dictators, including Putin, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and Hungarian president Viktor Orbán;

Concluding Thoughts

         As I said at the outset, I’d really like to not talk about Trump. You’d probably not like to read about him, at least from me. But alarm bells are going off throughout the Ship of State, and it’s, frankly, irresponsible to ignore them. Our citizenship entails responsibilities as well as privileges, and the first responsibility is to cherish and preserve the system of government that has provided the freedom and opportunity we enjoy.

         Trump seems on course to win the Republican nomination. Just like in 2016, all the things that would seem to disqualify him – the indictments, the incendiary language, the catastrophic predictions of what he’ll do if re-elected from his own people – have not dampened the ardor of the Republican Party for him.

         Next November, it will be our duty, as Democrats, Republicans and independents – Americans one and all – to step into voting booths and vote for the future of this country and against Donald Trump.