Lame Ducks and Dictators

‘S ome ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them,” said George Orwell. And he should know, having let his socialism convince him to fight alongside child soldiers on behalf of Stalinism in Spain.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou convinced himself that Mao Zedong “thinks in an almost infinite way” and effectively pledged his own intellectual career in the service of the Cultural Revolution, of which he then knew almost nothing.

America’s intellectuals are convinced that Trump presents the threat of dictatorship to the United States. The Atlantic dedicated an entire issue to more or less this premise. The Washington Post is running op-eds with titles such as “The Trump dictatorship: How to stop it.”

Were any of these people alive between 2017 and 2021?

I have an idea of how to stop the Trump dictatorship: Elect him president. Then he will once again reveal his relative powerlessness.

The problem with Trump is the exact opposite of dictatorship: chaos and disorder.

When Trump wanted to do something that respectable opinion in Washington wished to see him do, such as bomb targets in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, it was done in milliseconds. When he wanted to do something for which he had the authority but that respectable opinion opposed — consider his early presidential orders on immigration — he was stymied by the courts, which tried novel theories to block him. When he wanted to ban transgender persons from serving in the military, the military quietly announced it would study the issue then expanded access and services for transgender military personnel. Trump would announce a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, and then weeks later, the White House would announce a contrary policy. Some officials bragged about misleading the president about the number of troops in a given theater. One of the few perspicacious journalists of the Trump era, Graeme Wood, put it pithily: The Deep State is in the White House, and Trump appointed it.

While Kenosha, Wis., burned, this “dictator” tweeted the words “Law and Order” impotently. While members of his own administration during the pandemic instituted, as much as they could, Chinese-style lockdowns, clearly against Trump’s own wishes and instincts, he sank into the background. Meanwhile, the unsubtle threat was made that we would remain in Zoom school until we elected someone other than Trump. Even his most successful initiative as president, Operation Warp Speed, was intentionally delayed (at the cost of who knows how many lives) in order to deny him credit before the 2020 election.

Sure, Trump would give people a scare every few weeks. Among the millions of forgotten mini-crises of his administration was his tweeting harebrained ideas about delaying the 2020 election. But these were about as honest an account of his intentions and follow-through as his golf score sheets.

Robert Kagan warns us that Trump is taking “another page out of the dictator’s playbook” by issuing “more threats of investigations and persecutions should he become president.” Since they are against political prosecution, shouldn’t the authors of these warnings also be sounding the alarm about the novel and untested legal theories that are now being tried out on Trump by the likes of Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith?

McKay Coppins really gives the game away in the Atlantic. He stresses the fearsome scenario that a reelected President Trump might hire a slightly higher percentage of staff who wouldn’t undermine the policies he ran on or remand his decisions on their own judgment. Oh, no! Trump’s enemies might run slightly less of the executive branch to which Trump might be fairly elected by the American people.

So much for democracy.

In the real world, the danger of Trump is not an excess of order but the absence of it. This problem is very likely to be compounded by the fact that he would be elected as a lame duck. In fact, electing him again puts the final expiry date on his influence over the Republican Party, thus slowly freeing people to try more brinksmanship with him.

The effect of opinion pieces such as Kagan’s and Coppins’s — the intended effect — is to soften the ground for extralegal resistance to an elected Trump administration. They license people to treat the bumbling distractible lech in the Oval Office as if he were a person who thinks infinitely — and therefore represents an immediate physical and political peril to us all. It allows people to shake their fist at a TV-addicted buffoon but feel like they are standing up to the politburo under Stalin.

Unfortunately, the obvious lesson Providence wishes to teach us with Trump is that in our age, heroism begins in self-effacement and humility. Who wants to learn that?