The Last Election?: Two Men Aren’t On The Ballot: Democracy Itself Is

2024 is not a contest between two unpopular men, as the corporate media would have you believe. It’s a contest between democracy and autocracy — if not fascism. Just ask Liz Cheney, once the third-ranking House Republican.

Cheney has little in common with Joe Biden, but Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, she warned at an Iowa event on March 27. “I certainly have policy disagreements with the Biden administration — I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution,” she said.

If Trump wins, “He won’t leave office,” Cheney warned. “We know he tried once not to leave office, and he will have no incentive to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power and to leave office should he be elected again,”

Trump himself has long indicated as much. In 2018, after Chinese President Xi Jinping consolidated power and extended his tenure indefinitely, Trump was inspired. “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” he said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

That was just the first of multiple times Trump expressed a desire to remain in office indefinitely. He’s also repeatedly encouraged and cultivated violence among his followers, a practice that’s only gotten worse since the mob he summoned stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. His attacks on prosecutors and judges in cases he faces have been normalized by acceptance, even as they’ve spurred an avalanche of threats, harassment, and swatting incidents.

A year ago, he threatened ‘death and destruction’ to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and shared images of himself holding a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg’s head. He recently threatened “a bloodbath” if Biden is re-elected, and last week, just after Cheney’s comments, he posted a video with a life-size image of Biden hogtied up in the back of a truck.

Recognizing The Coup Threat
“Threatening a president is a federal crime,” former federal prosecutor Andrew Weismann posted on social media. But it’s more than that, according to NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present.

“A third of my book is about coups,” she said on MSNBC. “That image in particular, it’s very important that it’s life-size because it’s performing a work of propaganda and imagination that people can see, that no one is off-limits, even a sitting President of the United States,” she explained. “It’s showing what would happen in the event of a coup, because in a coup, the sitting, often democratic leader is overthrown and becomes a hostage if he’s not killed or put in jail. So this is highly disturbing,” she said.

“But it’s not an isolated incident,” she added. “Recently the Kansas GOP had a fundraiser and donors were invited — this was a reward for donating — to assault with sticks, etc., an effigy of Biden. Now the official party distanced itself [in response to an outraged backlash], but it still happened and had lots of participants.”

Along with this surge of threats, Trump has also vowed to be a dictator. “Only on day one,” he claimed, but “History teaches us that dictatorial powers, once assumed, are rarely relinquished,” the introduction of Just Security’s “American Autocracy Threat Tracker” reminds us.

The tracker “organize[s] Trump’s and his allies’ autocratic plans by topic, providing full citations to their comments and the factual record,” it explains. Topics include “Subverting the rule of law to protect himself from prosecution,” “Persecuting his perceived political enemies,” “Rigging elections and promoting harmful election conspiracy theories,” “Draconian abortion access crackdown,” “Rejecting the Constitution,” and much, much more.

Under the topic of “Rejecting the Constitution,” they cite a December 2022 Truth Social post saying, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In response, Cheney tweeted, “No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution,” so her latest warning was part of a long-standing record, echoed by dozens of top Trump administration officials since he left office, starting with his Vice President Mike Pence. “President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution,” Pence said. “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”

Such a repudiation by a vice president is unprecedented in our history, but many top Trump advisers viewed Trump himself as unfit at best if not an unprecedented threat. “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” his chairman of the joint chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley said. “We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

Other such top national security advisers include Trump’s first and second secretaries of defense, James Mattis (“he tries to divide us”) and Mark Esper (“unfit for office”), his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson (“really limited”), his second and third national security advisers, HR McMaster (“anti-leadership”) and John Bolton (“not fit to be president”), and his first homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert (“undermined American democracy baselessly for months…. an utter disgrace”).

Harsh and unprecedented as such judgments might be, they’ve come out in dribs and drabs, defusing their significance, in a way that’s reminiscent of the 2016 election, when Trump’s endless stream of scandals got sporadic attention, while a small handful of alleged Hillary Clinton scandals got far more coverage. A Harvard media study summarized, “Attempts by the Clinton campaign to define her campaign on competence, experience, and policy positions were drowned out by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails. Coverage of Trump associated with immigration, jobs, and trade was greater than that on his personal scandals.”

From Demagogue To Dictator
So the lack of media focus, and the scattered coverage is depressingly familiar. But these criticisms fit into a larger picture, painted by experts in authoritarianism in countless articles and books.

One such expert is Jennifer Mercieca, a scholar of rhetoric, from the ancient Greeks to the present. Her 2020 book, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, identified and explained six rhetorical strategies Trump relied on repeatedly in his 2016 campaign: three to unify him with his target audience, and three to divide him from his opponents. Arguably no one understands Trump’s seeming chaos better than her.

“There is an incredibly important difference between Trump’s 2016/2020 rhetorical strategy and his 2024 rhetorical strategy,” Mercieca told Random Lengths. “In his previous campaigns, Trump was a demagogue — an unaccountable leader — who would work within the system to achieve the MAGA agenda. In 2024, he’s running as a dictator — a totalitarian leader — who will destroy the system and Constitution to achieve the MAGA agenda.”

“If there is a second Trump presidency, it won’t be at all like the first,” she stressed. “He’s determined to destroy the Constitution. He has told us repeatedly that he believes that the president is above the law and cannot be subject to its restraints. He’s always praised autocrats like Putin and Orbán, but now he knows them personally. Where he didn’t know exactly how to take autocratic control in his first term, he’s learned how for his second. I suspect if he’s re-elected he’ll try to form an autocratic alliance across the globe and the United States will no longer side with the democracies of the world.”

Beyond Trump, An Organized Plan
Mercieca’s demagogue/dictator distinction is perhaps the clearest, most insightful way of distinguishing Trump’s past strategy from what he’s up to now. But it’s not just Trump’s strategy, there’s a dramatic difference in how rightwing forces are organized, both within the GOP (where Trump has installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair of the Republican National Committee) and in the vast array of thinktanks, donor networks and activist organizations.

A prime example of the difference is Project 2025, a plan to dramatically transform the federal government in a right-wing authoritarian direction, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with over 100 other organizations. In short, “It comes with tremendous funding and the backing of much of the political Right,” historian Thomas Zimmer wrote in an online 3-part analysis. It involves a massive, 920-page document of policy recommendations, “Mandate For Leadership” with a foreword by Heritage president Kevin Roberts, a personnel database to recruit loyalists, and an online course to train them for their takeover roles. The foreward “captures and oozes the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that is fueling the Right and animating the plans for a second Trump administration,” Zimmer noted.

In a Jan. 21 NYT interview, Roberts praised Viktor Orbán’s autocratic regime in Hungary, calling him “a very impressive leader” whose regime “should be celebrated,” confirmed his intention to destroy the administrative state and fire 50,000 federal employees, and defended his claim that there’s a communist plot in the highest levels of American power.

When asked if he believed Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, he flatly answered “No” and responded to push-back by saying, “We have an election-fraud database at Heritage that shows a lot of instances of fraud,” none of which has ever been seen, much less stood up in court. He called the Black Lives Matter demonstrations “riots” that “were far worse than Jan. 6,” which he shrugged off with the ludicrous claim that “the far bigger threat to our republic is the Biden family.”

In short, Trump is far from alone in spouting his threats, demonizing his enemies, and spreading conspiracy theories. He may still be incredibly chaotic, but he’s got a much better-organized army of troops behind him than he did when he last held office. Those narrowly focused on Trump and his immediate circle underestimate how much has changed, and how serious the threat is, historian Seth Cotlar argues. “Trumpism is NOT a discrete group of political actors who can’t shoot straight, but rather a widely dispersed and fairly well-coordinated culture of cockamamie but dangerous conspiracy theories–a road map for violence,” he wrote on Bluesky.

Cotlar lives in a purple Oregon county. “On my commute I regularly find myself driving behind pickups bearing 3% militia stickers. The former chair of my county’s GOP was in the 3% militia. In 2022 the OR GOP held campaign events on a stage literally owned by a Proud Boy,” he wrote. “The chair of the Deschutes County GOP is a proud confederate uniform wearing maniac.” These once-marginal, disparate figures are being drawn ever closer together, ever closer to centers of power. This is how fascist movements have grown repeatedly throughout history.

History’s Warning
Robert Paxton is one of the foremost experts on fascism. His 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism is a classic in the field. Days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he wrote a Newsweek op-ed, “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now.” Trump displayed strong elements of fascism, as well as key differences prior to Jan. 6, Paxton explained, but, “His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

In particular, Paxton drew a parallel to “a milestone on Europe’s road to fascism — an openly fascist demonstration in Paris during the night of February 6, 1934” which “attempted to invade the French parliament chamber … to replace what they saw as a weak parliamentary government with a fascist dictatorship on the model of Hitler or Mussolini.” Their attempt failed bloodily, with 15 demonstrators and one policeman killed, but “The French Third Republic had blood on its hands. The ensuing bitter division helps explain why the French prepared only haltingly before 1940 for Hitler’s attack, and why the French defeat of June led to the replacement of the Third Republic with the authoritarian Vichy regime.”

At the time, Paxton hoped that Biden might “begin his work of healing on January 20,” though he wisely said it was “too soon for a responsible historian to say whether he’ll be more successful in sustaining our Republic than European leaders were in defending theirs.”

But the wheels were already in motion to thwart Biden in doing that, as GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell first delayed, then obstructed and ultimately led his caucus in voting to acquit Trump during the impeachment process, which would have put an end to Trump’s political ambitions, preventing him from running for office again. It’s recently been openly acknowledged what was only suspected then: threats of violence played a role in scaring GOP senators off from convicting Trump.

McConnell is now stepping down as GOP senate leader. His role as an establishment enabler of Trump recalls German president Paul von Hindenburg, who was personally opposed to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, but nonetheless appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, thereby sealing Germany’s fate. The parallels are chilling, but not exact. McConnell’s crucial role played out more than three years ago. There’s still time for America to avoid Germany’s fate.

But doing so requires a clear-sighted understanding of the danger we’re facing — an understanding that the corporate media, with its hunger for superficial balance and deep deference to wealth and power, is ill-prepared to provide. As noted above, they failed to provide true balance in 2016, favoring Trump enormously without ever seeming to realize it. And they appear to be doing it again, normalizing the most dangerous, anti-democratic presidential candidate America has ever seen, while almost never seriously questioning other GOP candidates about what he says or does. Normalization was one of the keys to how the Nazis gained power in 1930s Germany, as laid out in the classic retrospective, They Thought They Were Free. Whether America still has a democracy a year from now depends on all of us. But the institutions that should be helping to protect us — most notably the courts and the press — are normalizing the peril instead.