The recent New York Times report details Donald Trump is promoting authoritarianism and anticipating throwing out career staff in the government to replace them with his own ideologues. It was a plot he attempted to deploy in Oct. 2020 with a personnel chief that began sorting through the government employees for just such a purge of "disloyal" staff.
Speaking about it on Monday, MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid and historian Michael Beschloss compared the ideology to Hungary's Viktor Orban, which the far-right has promoted over the years.
"It strikes me that it is an admission of defeat in terms of the culture. In terms of them admitting that the outcomes they want and that his fans want, the reason they love Trump, is he's promising to bypass democracy to implement the things they want that a vast majority of Americans don't want," remarked Reid. "It's Nixon but much, much, much worse."
Beschloss agreed, it's also an example of Trump gaming the system.
"They're not talking about doing things that are illegal, interestingly enough," he explained, drawing parallels to Germany in 1933. "I'm not comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, but in terms of the system. Hitler basically used the existing system in Germany in 1933 so that the will of an angry minority is translated into power and dictatorship. Exactly the same thing happening here."
He said that if a poll was asked about things like "democracy," Americans would support it overwhelmingly. Things like a free press, abortion rights, and personal freedoms are all supported by 65-70 percent of Americans.
"But what the Trump people are doing is they're taking advantage of a weakness in our system that goes all the way back to 1787, which says if you manipulate it, if you appoint certain people to the Supreme Court, which is owned one-third by Donald Trump, and people who like him, Congress may be dominated by Republicans 16 months from now. If all of that happens, the will of an angry 30 percent minority, who may be a little more than that, can be made to rule all of us, and Donald Trump will be made into our dictator."
Reid warned there will be nothing that can ever remove or stop him.
"That would be the last free election," Beschloss warned.
See the full discussion in the video below or at the link here.
Trump teasing authoritarianism admits his own defeat: MSNBC hostwww.youtube.com
