In many ways, the Trump administration is no different than the presidencies that have preceded it. Every new president wants to put his stamp on the office, to move the agenda outlined during the campaign forward. And when the new president is of a different party, this often includes overturning rules and policies put in place in previous terms.
So while Donald Trump’s efforts on immigration and the environment are backward and inhumane, they do not represent a complete break with precedent.
I don’t mean to normalize his presidency by pointing this out. There is little about the Trump administration that is normal — from his over-reliance on generals and corporate CEOs in his cabinet to his rapid-fire over-reactions on Twitter, he has shown himself to be unlike most who have come before him. His temper has made him easy to lampoon, just as his apparent Russia ties makes it seem as though someone else is pulling his strings.
But the danger Trump poses goes beyond standard-fare conservative policies and a potential Putin-connection. Trump is a nationalist. His rhetoric glorifies hyper-patriotism and military might for its own sake, while denigrating and scapegoating the other and his opponents. This is one way to read his Saturday tweet storm, in which he alleged a nefarious plot by Barack Obama — a president he spent eight years attempting to delegitimize as a foreign interloper — to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency. There is no evidence of such a plot and, aside from the most loyal and committed of Trump supporters, few are even willing to entertain its provenance. But that is how Trump operates — accuse others of nefarious actions, roil the base, and rely on them to maintain his legitimacy.
That was the point during Tuesday’s speech of introducing Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy Special Operator Senior Chief William ‘Ryan’ Owens, who was killed in a controversial botched raid in Yemen ordered by the Trump administration. Trump introduced the widow and then basked in the applause:
During his Tuesday speech to the joint session of Congress, he used language like “national rebuilding” and — as the clip above shows — conflated military sacrifice with religious virtue, merging love of nation and love of god into a unitary concept. This is how demagogues operate.
I have called Trump a proto-fascist in the past, meaning that he exhibits some of the traits of the traditional fascist but may not be one in practice. Those traits include hyper-partriotism or nationalism, a glorification of the military and the military ethos (often by merging militarism with religious symbols), the merging of corporate interests with the state, scapegoating of opponents and the most vulnerable, and veneration of average folk. Trump’s rhetoric is full of these attitudes. Consider his praise of Chief Owens (edited here — but you can watch it in full above):
Ryan died as he lived: a warrior and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation…. Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity…. For as the Bible teaches us, “There is no greater act of love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Ryan laid down his life for his friends, for his country, and for our freedom. And we will never forget Ryan.
Owens deserves gratitude — and an apology. He died in a raid that probably should not have happened, and not just because this raid does not seem to have been well-planned or executed. The raid was part of a much broader foreign policy agenda that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama are complicit in pressing and which needs to be rolled back. This is not the plan, under Trump, who apparently plans to unleash the military and, as The New York Times reports today, expand it as part of a strength-for-the-sake-of-strength approach connected to “a nationalistic worldview that is unfamiliar today but dominated the geopolitics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Trump, the Times writes, is
fascinated with raw military might, which he sees as synonymous with America’s standing in the world and as a tool to coerce powerful rivals, such as China and Iran, which appear to be his primary concern.
He also appears little-focused on the details of America’s continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and globally against Al Qaeda. None of those missions will be resolved by the new aircraft carriers Mr. Trump has promised, and generals warn that they will be set back by his proposals to slash funding for diplomacy and aid.
Trump’s ramp-up of the military, the Times writes, is as much about symbolism as it is about strategy. Erin Simpson, who has advised the military in Afghanistan, told the Times that
“I think he sees force as performative. The utility of force is in its demonstration.”
It “suggests,” the Times writes, “a pursuit of policies that seem less suited to any particular strategy or conflict than to a view of military power as its own end.”
Trump’s nationalism and militarism pose a danger, as does the cult of personality that has grown up around him as savior of the past. Power, pageantry, nationalism — the blueprint is in place for the slide into a variation of fascist rule, but I believe our constitutional order is strong enough to withstand the slide. It will take effort — nothing eases the path away from democracy more than apathy — but nothing about the future is set in stone.
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Hank Kalet 