(2023-12-05) Enough With All The Fatalism About A Trump Dictatorship

Opinion | Enough with all the fatalism about a Donald Trump dictatorship. Are you afraid of a Donald Trump dictatorship? Well, know this: The only thing you have to fear is fear of Tyrannus Trumpus itself.

By now, it’s hard to deny that Trump has a narrow but plausible path to authoritarian rule in the United States

Trump has a narrow but plausible path to authoritarian rule in the United States

But certain versions of this argument have grown seriously problematic.

Undue fatalism could even prove counterproductive, de-energizing voter opposition exactly when Trump is brazenly projecting his dictatorial intentions

The polls certainly are disconcerting, but let’s not draw premature conclusions from them

When Trump executed his 2017 ban on many Muslims entering the country, crowds descended on airports in a surprising outpouring of support. A year later, historians Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol documented an unexpected groundswell of painstaking political organizing among formerly apathetic middle-aged women to defend democracy, fueling Democrats’ 2018 midterm blowout.

In the 2022 midterms, many prominent GOP election deniers lost, and fears for democracy were a key motivator for voters.

Trump’s gaming of the judicial system to overturn his 2020 loss hit a wall in the courts. By a wide bipartisan margin, Congress passed reforms to Trump-proof the system by which we count electoral votes.

The purpose of this isn’t to downplay the gravity of the moment; it’s to channel anxieties about it in a constructive direction. As Brian Beutler writes on Substack, excessive public worries about Trump’s supposed inevitability bury the all-important truth that popular majorities have regularly, emphatically rejected Trump and all he represents.