Trumpolini.. il duce Americano
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Trump is behaving like the dictators the US is often leading the way to condemn on the global stage..
Article from: Business Insider France
Author: John Haitiwanger
President Donald Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, threatening to shatter a tradition that lies at the heart of the democratic process in the US. There are serious concerns among scholars that Trump is putting America's democracy in mortal danger.
Combined with Trump's relentless disinformation campaign, celebration of violence against journalists, and incitement of armed militias, historians and election experts warn that the president is mirroring the behavior of despots that the US generally leads the way in condemning before the world.
"I've been an election observer in broken authoritarian countries, and let me tell you: Trump's behavior would be swiftly and unequivocally condemned by all international election monitors if it was happening elsewhere. He is behaving like the despots past presidents condemned," Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the University College London, tweeted on Friday.
When asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power earlier this week, Trump suggested ballots would be thrown away.
"We're going to have to see what happens," Trump said when asked whether he would accept the final results of the election. "Get rid of the ballots and...there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation."
Trump has given the country myriad signs that he will not concede under any circumstances, placing the US on the precipice of a political crisis the likes of which it has never experienced before. The president has repeatedly pushed the bogus assertion that the expanded access to mail-in voting for the 2020 election - a move designed to protect vulnerable people amid a pandemic - will lead to widespread voter fraud.
Top experts on democracy have been warning for years that Trump exhibits authoritarian tendencies. But their consternation appears to have ramped up significantly as Election Day draws closer and Trump essentially signals that he plans to do whatever it takes to stay in power.
"You want to go into history to look for something like this? Go into Italian history and look at Mussolini. This is the way dictators come to power," Beschloss said in response, comparing Trump to the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini.
"[Trump is] telling you what he intends to do. And we've got to make very sure that in the next five and half weeks and after, that we do not get into a situation where...Donald Trump announces that he's won and puts us in a situation where our democracy is being stolen minute by minute. This is not a drill," Beschloss added.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who's written extensively on Mussolini, agrees with Beschloss that Trump's behavior mirrors that of the Italian fascist dictator. She noted that Mussolini was not immediately a dictator, but gradually consolidated power.
"The clearest parallel is that Mussolini was prime minister of a democratic coalition government from 1922-1925. During that time, he slowly chipped away at democratic institutions, insulting the press, using violence against the left, joking that he would be in office for 20 years, establishing a militia and a legislative body (the Grand Council) loyal to him," Ben-Ghiat told Insider.
"[Mussolini] bought off elites with privatizations of major industries and by ending worker and peasant strikes. In 1924, to consolidate power, he had a law passed that drew accusations of fraud but gave him a majority. He had his main opponent, Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, killed for accusing him of fixing the election and for threatening to reveal his financial corruption - and then he declared dictatorship in 1925 to escape a special investigation," Ben-Ghiat added.
David I. Kertzer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Pope and Mussolini," told Insider that comparing Trump and Mussolini does "a disservice" to the Italian leader given he "read newspapers every day in four languages, followed policy issues closely, played the violin and loved classical music, and was not particularly interested in lining his own pocket (although there was no lack of corruption in his regime)."
"What the present moment in American politics does make me appreciate more is how Italy, a parliamentary democracy, could so quickly become a dictatorship," Kertzer added.
Kertzer noted that Mussolini said "people were like sheep" and "craved being followers," adding, "Like Trump, he had very little in the way of strong ideological beliefs himself, and knew the power of emotional rather than rational appeals, and of the power of repeating simple, emotionally powerful yet substantively empty phrases (Make America Great Again)."
To Kertzer, the most striking parallel between Trump and Mussolini is that similar to the Italian fascist dictator, the president has enjoyed strong support from religious leaders despite not having "a religious bone in his body."
"Mussolini could solidify his dictatorship only by reaching a deal with the pope and gaining the support of the Church hierarchy, in a totally amoral exchange: he would give the Church leaders what they wanted (ending separation of church and state, religious instruction in schools etc) and the religious leaders would throw their support behind him," Kertzer said.
Recent research suggests the US is heading toward autocracy under Trump.Trump has spent the past four years eroding democratic norms and institutions at an astonishing rate.
A project that monitors the health of democracy across the world, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), in its 2020 findings said the US has become more autocratic in the Trump era. V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy - including freedom of expression, free and fair elections, and levels of government corruption, among many others - and the project involves over 3,300 scholars and other experts worldwide.
"The United States - former vanguard of liberal democracy - has lost its way," V-Dem's 2020 report said, adding that the US "is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization."
Over the course of the past week, Trump at rallies repeatedly applauded an incident in which a journalist was struck with a rubber bullet fired by police during a protest, prompting laughter and cheers from supporters.
Last month, a caravan of Trump supporters drove into Portland with the sole purpose of antagonizing anti-racism protesters. Their presence in the Oregon city led to clashes that turned deadly. Trump referred to them as "GREAT PATRIOTS!" as he simultaneously condemned those protesting against racism and police brutality.
The president in recent months has moved from joking about removing term limits to suggesting he's "entitled" to a third term because he was impeached.
Mary Trump, the president's niece, on Thursday warned that Americans should take her uncle's election threats seriously. She said Trump would go "farther than you can possibly imagine" to stay in power because he's afraid of potentially facing prosecution for tax fraud and obstruction of justice after becoming a private citizen again.
"We have no idea how bad this is going to get," Mary Trump said.
* On January 6 - 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was stormed during a riot and violent attack against the U.S. Congress. A vicious mob of President Trump supporters attempted to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
I’m a conservative myself and former Republican. I can’t speak for liberals, but for me the biggest challenge to answering your question would be to limit it to just one policy. So I won’t try.
1. Trump immediately started a trade war that actually increased the trade deficit. By the end of 2018, we had lost almost 2,000 American manufacturing plants and about 300,000 jobs as businesses closed or moved overseas. American farmers went bankrupt as Russia supplanted the US as the chief importer of soy into China. The tariffs increased the cost of vital manufacturing components which led to heightened inflation. A carryover effect of that has been that the domestic manufacturers that didn’t close reduced their inventory of such components in hopes that the tariffs would end and their costs would decrease, and this is a contributing factor to the product shortages we have now. That’s one policy.
2. In the 26 months between Trump’s tax bill and the economy’s peak before the pandemic, economic growth slowed by about two-thirds. Between Obama’s recovery act and the tax bill, the Dow grew at an average of 16.2% annually. After the tax bill that dropped to 5.8%. Before the tax bill, unemployment was dropping by about .75% annually. After the tax bill, about .25% annually. In 2019, the Fed lowered interest rates for the first time since Bush was President to combat the slowing economy, and Trump himself complained that they didn’t commit to do more to prevent a recession. And the Trump recession officially began in February 2020 while Trump was still pretending the pandemic was a Democratic hoax. That’s two.
3. Starting in 2019, Trump began undermining our operations in Afghanistan. That began with an invitation to the Taliban to a private meeting at Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. That meeting was changed after outrage from both sides of the aisle. Nevertheless, Trump insisted on meeting with Taliban leaders outside the presence of the legitimate Afghan government, and negotiated with the Taliban rather than Afghan leaders about the future of the country after the American withdrawal. Trump promised and secured the release of 5,000 Taliban terrorists being held prisoner in Afghanistan including more than 150 that had been sentenced to death, 44 who were known to be involved in high profile attacks against US forces, and the mastermind of the deadliest attack of the entire occupation. Then he committed to a withdrawal date about 100 days after he knew he’d be out of office. A few days after he was determined to have lost his re-election bid, he announced that before leaving office he would reduce our troop presence to its lowest of the entire occupation. This drew so much criticism from all sides that Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which in part barred the removal of any troops from Afghanistan prior to Inauguration Day. Trump vetoed this bill, and his veto was easily overridden even as his own party controlled the Senate at the time. Then five days before leaving office, he illegally withdrew the troops anyway in knowing violation of the law. That’s number three.
4. Of course we can’t skip the pandemic. The Obama administration left a robust pandemic response team in place, but all accounts are that Trump was completely disinterested in understanding the threat posed by a potential viral outbreak, and instead immediately started dismantling the team. In 2017, Trump's budget request called for massive cuts in spending on scientific research, medical research, and disease prevention, cutting $1.2 billion from the CDC, $82 million from the center that works on vaccine-preventable and respiratory diseases, making a 17% cut to CDC’s global health programs that monitor and respond to disease outbreaks around the world, and cutting 10% from the CDC’s office of public health preparedness and response. Former CDC director Tom Frieden described the administration's CDC request as “unsafe at any level of enactment. Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs.” In 2018, Trump fired homeland security adviser on the NSC Tom Bossert, whose job included coordinating the response to global pandemics. Bossert was not replaced. That same year, his biodefense preparedness adviser warned that a flu pandemic was the country’s number one health security threat, and the U.S. was not prepared. Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC's senior director for global health security and biodefense, left the council and was not replaced. Luciana Borio resigned as the NSC's director for medical and biodefense preparedness policy and was not replaced. By 2019, an independent study reported that the US was not prepared for a pandemic. Biden responded to the report by criticizing the Trump administration’s dismantling of the pandemic response team. Again, this is months before Covid-19 was even discovered. Trump then spent 23 of the first 69 days of 2020 on vacation, repeatedly downplaying the pandemic before declaring it a national crisis on day 70. Despite that, he refused to develop a national strategy to slow the spread, instead going on the offensive against state and local officials working to protect their communities. As a result, by the end of 2020, hundreds of thousands of businesses had permanently closed, 75% of schools were closed, and unemployment was over 6%. That’s number four.
5. Trump was by far the most wasteful President in modern history. He grew the deficit every year he was in office—a feat not even GW Bush accomplished. He wasted billions on an idiotic border wall (and shut down the government for the longest time in history because his own party wouldn’t fund it). He wasted millions if not billions rebranding part of the Air Force to look like Star Trek cosplayers. When he should have been investing in making the country safe for commerce during the pandemic, instead he borrowed trillions to prop up the stock market and to pay people to not work. He would become the first President in history to maintain a debt to GDP ratio over 100% for his entire term, added more to the national debt in four years than Bush 41 and Bush 43 added in their twelve years combined, and added more in one year than Reagan added in two full terms. That’s number five.
6. Trump consistently undermined our national security by siding with hostile dictators against our own intelligence agencies, by holding private meetings with Putin, by tweeting classified photos, by ordering the assassination of an Iranian general in violation of international treaties, by sabotaging our operations in Afghanistan (as described previously) and by diverting money from national defense to fund his idiotic wall. That’s number six.
Does attempting to subvert our elections count as a “policy” or is that just a crime? What about spending a century of Presidential salaries on golf trips? How about appointing racists, criminals, unqualified campaign donors and his own children to positions in his administration? How about pathologically lying every time he opened his mouth? Are any of those “policies”? Because those were all harmful to our democracy. And if you notice, I didn’t even need to bring up the mean tweets.
So in short, Trump was a complete disaster for the US in every way imaginable. The best way for America’s enemies to try to hurt the country would have been to help Trump gain power. And obviously Putin was smart enough to realize that early on. It’s too bad that so many Republicans still haven’t figured it out themselves.
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Criminal investigation or investigating a criminal?
Trump's legal problems in 2022.. and pending!
As for now in
August 2023:
Four
criminal indictments have
been filed against former U.S. president Donald Trump, amounting to a total of 91 felony counts. Two were filed at
the federal level by the office of the Smith special counsel investigation.
Federal indictments:
1. A federal
indictment related to classified government documents, in which Trump faces 40 criminal counts alleging mishandling
of sensitive documents and conspiracy to obstruct the government in retrieving
these documents. The trial is scheduled for May 2024.
2. A federal
indictment related to attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, in
which Trump faces four criminal counts of conspiring
to defraud the government and disenfranchise voters, and corruptly obstructing
an official proceeding. The trial is not yet scheduled.
State indictments:
3. An indictment
in New York, in which Trump faces 34 felony counts of
falsifying business records in the first degree related to payments made
to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. The trial is scheduled
for March 2024.
4. An indictment
in Georgia, in which Trump faces 13 criminal counts
related to alleged attempts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in
Georgia. The trial is not yet scheduled.
State indictment 3 - falsifying business records related to payments made to a porn actress.
Verdict: Guilty
Date: 31 May, 2024
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