Donald Trump began his presidency with a promise to put “America first.” He boasted that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example.” That self-congratulating fiction has been dismantled in the last two weeks. American television has now broadcast dozens of hours of live footage from convulsions that the salesman-in-chief would rather conceal and while protests against police brutality continually produce more of it, and stoke further outrage, he has doubled down on exactly the sort of belligerent enforcement that provoked the crisis in the first place.
Emerging, humiliated, from his retreat to a secret bunker Trump has overcompensated with his customary bravado. First he used ridiculously excessive force to disperse protestors in order to create a photo-op with a bible. Then there was talk of a domestic “battlespace” among his advisors, while he threatened using military force to restore law and order and urged governors to “dominate” protests if they didn’t want to look weak and foolish. With no apparent sense of irony, he then decided to install a barrier outside the White House in order to keep protestors at a safe distance.
In April 1944, while American lives were on the line in the war against Europe’s fascist powers, the New York Times asked US Vice President Henry Wallace: “What is a fascist? How many fascists have we?” and “How dangerous are they?” He replied that an American fascist “would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.” He added that with such people “the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.” Wallace feared that US fascism would likely produce a group of “superpatriots” who “would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution … demand free enterprise but [act as] spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest,” while seeking “to capture political power so that using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.”
During a perfect storm of political and economic crises, Trump and his minions have behaved eerily like Wallace’s imagined fascists. Instead of seeking to unite the country they have chosen to divide it at every turn. Having done next to nothing to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, they have deliberately ignored the plight of those most affected by it, calling on profit-making corporations to help instead of the federal government. Their hypocrisy seems limitless. Less than a month after cheerleading for armed protests against state lockdowns, Trump has called for crackdowns on protests that dare to question the brutality of the US police. Golfing while the country marked 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus; tweeting lunatic conspiracies about an imagined murder or a former president’s unspecified crimes Trump has increasingly behaved more like a mad king than a sitting president.
These repeated failures have now gained enough momentum to threaten a wider political backlash. In a scathing indictment of the GOP’s moral collapse, the conservative columnist George Will writes that the “measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium” must include not only “the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House will not disappear ‘magically,’ as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would” but also a “rout” of Senate Republicans “as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration.” If this is any indication of the attitudes within the remnants of the Republican party, then the current unrest on America’s streets will be a prelude to a much harsher reckoning in November.
