Trump, Huey Long - How To Give Us A Dictatorship

I read America’s First True Dictator by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev earlier this week. The sub-headline might give things away: "For a playbook on how to capture the state, look at the tenure of Louisiana Governor Huey Long." This is from the podcast transcript

Pomerantsev: So there you have Long’s playbook for state capture: Capture the legislature, take over independent institutions, intimidate the media, and then employ violence. And the whole is made possible with a propaganda that strategically divides the state, where you have blind loyalty from your voters, who will always support you for anything—and I mean anything—you want to do.

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Pomerantsev: Right. But recently I’ve learned that the systems of government meant to protect the U.S. are more malleable and spongy than I thought. I talked to Amanda Carpenter. She’s the former communications director for a Republican senator, Ted Cruz, and now she works at Protect Democracy. That’s an NGO that brings court cases to defend democratic values and rights.

Carpenter: Modern-day authoritarians do not come into power by brute force. Modern-day authoritarians typically come to power competing in and winning democratic elections, but then once they get into power, tilting the levers of government, tilting all the levers of power in their favor.

Pomerantsev: The levers of power she’s talking about—turns out they can have a big impact when it comes to how federal agencies are run.

[Music]

Donald Trump: Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all.

Carpenter: Donald Trump has said explicitly: On day one of his presidency, he’s going to implement an order known as Schedule F.

Trump: —restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

Carpenter: That would provide the basis for him to purge up to tens of thousands of career civil servants, then creating openings in which he can replace those positions with loyalists.

Trump: We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.

The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe.

Nichols: If you have a governor, for example, or political allies, you could have the military show up to their events in uniform and make it clear that you support them.

You know, putting National Guard units working with Homeland Security or SWAT teams—there’s all kinds of mischief that you could do that really could just be a way of flexing muscle and trying to intimidate the civilian population, especially if you’re about to do something pretty shaky, constitutionally.

If Donald Trump wins, he’s talked about mass deportations. We don’t have a big enough Army to deport 11 million people but, you know, that could get into an ugly situation.

There was this kind of harebrained scheme that seems funny in retrospect, but less funny now, where the idea was to seize voting machines to be, you know—and I’m making little air quotes here—to be “examined” for fraud. And then, there was even one step further, where there was some talk about, Let’s rerun the presidential election under the watchful eyes of the military, so there could be no fraud. You’re not betraying the Constitution; you’re saving it by protecting the sanctity of our elections, by going in and being the armed guards around polling machines.

Pomerantsev: The Russians like to do this in places they’ve occupied. Like, you know, Eastern Ukraine, they’ll have military soldiers come around to—I’ve seen the videos, you know—the military will come around and knock on people’s doors. There’ll be some granny who opens the door, and they’re like, Hello. We’re here to get your vote. And there’s, like, a guy with a Kalashnikov and a balaclava.

I managed to get back into Google Keep to get my notes. All are ancient by Internet standards, but a few seem to me as having currency.

Or now have a piquant humor to them. Such is my feeling toward Trump’s Angry New Attack on “Dumb” Kamala Gets Wrecked by Leaked Data by Greg Sargent.

Obviously that hasn’t alone solved the issue, as Blitzer reports, because it’s not nearly enough to fix the region’s deep problems. But the point is, Trump simply does not think addressing the root causes of migration should be a meaningful part of the solution to immigration at all. As president, Trump canceled aid programs to the region. If reelected, he would cancel Harris’s efforts, too.

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One other caveat: Many progressives do not see lower border numbers achieved through asylum restrictions and stricter Mexican enforcement as a success, because it likely denies many truly endangered people a chance to seek refuge here. That is a fair criticism. However, it should be placed in the context of Biden’s broader agenda: He has also created new parole programs that allow tens of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti to apply from abroad for entry.

Biden and Harris simply have not closed the door on migrants. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier has usefully detailed, these parole programs are a genuine humanitarian success story, impacting hundreds of thousands of people or more. Trump would also cancel them if reelected—even though they have provided an alternative pathway to showing up at the border, reducing pressure on it. Which shows that Trump’s real goal isn’t a secure border—it’s fewer migrants in our country, because he believes that they are “poisoning” us.

First, the debate showed Harris is not the dumb one.

Second, the debate showed that Trump has no real plan for solving the immigration problem - other than rounding up illegals. (And for those who thought ABC was tough on Trump, they did not call him on how this round-up plan is meant to satisfy the simple-minded, not solve any problems.)

Third, Trump offers no real solutions, only a lot of noise that will get people to vote for him. After all, he did kill the bipartisan bill that would have solved much of the border problem.

Fourth, go back and read the extracts from the Huey Long piece.

Nothing has diminished the truth of Will Saletan's Trump Is Okay with Political Violence (by His Supporters); which also reinforces the Huey Long piece.

“You’ve called yourself the candidate of law and order,” Rachel Scott, the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, told Trump. “When Time magazine asked you if you would consider pardoning all the rioters, you said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”

Trump proudly affirmed that statement. “Sure,” he told Scott.

She went on:

You called them patriots. One hundred forty police officers were assaulted that day. Their injuries included broken bones. At least one officer lost an eye. One had two cracked ribs, two smashed spinal discs. Another had a stroke. Were the people who assaulted those 140 officers, including those I just mentioned, patriots who deserve pardons?

Scott wasn’t asking about people who had walked into the Capitol after the mob broke in. She was asking specifically about those who had attacked police. If Trump supported law enforcement and opposed political violence, there was an obvious answer to give: No. I won’t pardon them.

He didn’t give that answer. Instead, he changed the subject to vandals who were seen “spraying these incredible monuments” in Washington, D.C., to protest last week’s visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They fought with police. They fought with them much more openly than I saw on January 6th,” he said, falsely.

sch 9/27