The New Yorker's Susan Glasser this week outlined how a second Donald Trump term is likely to go, and she warned to beware of what she described as "nihilistic" arguments aimed at forcing opponents to let their guards down.
In an interview with The New Republic, Glasser said that Trump supporters were cynically dismissing concerns about a slide into authoritarian rule because he never turned into Adolf Hitler during his first term — while overlooking the fact that he only was accused of leaving office after inciting a deadly riot at the United States Capitol in a last-ditch bid to illegally remain in power.
"One of the more nihilistic, but probably effective, talking points for Trump supporters in the immediate run-up to the campaign was saying, How dare you call us authoritarians, or, in the words of John Kelly, his former chief of staff, a fascist ," she said. "Donald Trump was already president for four years, and he wasn’t Hitler; therefore, everything’s OK.
"This is a very, very nihilist argument, and it was effective as a political matter for some people."
She then outlined that historical precedents for autocratic takeovers show that they weren't accomplished in the span of months or even a few years, but that they slowly chiseled away at the pillars of free societies.
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"I would point out that even what we come to think of as the Hitler regime in Germany took a number of years to unfold," she said. "We are not a one-week into the Trump era in our politics. We are eight years into his takeover of the Republican Party, his creation of a group of MAGA accolades who signed up and opted into Trump’s agenda for himself and for the government... Even in Russia, it’s not like they shut down the independent media on day one."
She pointed to the way that the Washington Post, under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, declined to make a presidential endorsement this year as a prime example of how elite institutions could be intimidated into silence.
"You can also go after individual critics of your government, not just by arresting them. And they’ve defined deviancy down here, that they’ll say, See, you’re overblown or you’re just hysterical if they don’t haul off Liz Cheney and Mark Milley to the gulag on day one," she said.
"But that’s not how it’s going to work. They can open IRS investigations of their critics. They can pressure their employers. There’s a whole host of ways in which systems operate. That’s what we’ll see in the next few months."