For the last 48 hours or so, Trump’s toadies and martinets have been putting on a performance which is one half gaslighting, one half effort to create a bit of distance between FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s extortion and ABC’s decision to (now-temporarily) pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Then, late last night, President Trump busted all of their knees by insisting it was him doing it all along and says now he’s going to go to war even harder against ABC/Disney for having the temerity to bring Kimmel back after (Trump claims) telling him they canceled his show.
“Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.”
I’m happy to see this. It’s great that Trump is choosing to up the ante.
As I wrote yesterday, the more visible this becomes, the closer it gets pushed to the center of popular culture, the better.
I’ve heard several people make the argument of late that Trump is getting impatient and impulsive with his authoritarian crackdown. He’s jumping ahead, making moves for which he simply hasn’t sufficiently laid the foundation. Another related way of understanding our current moment is that Trump is trying to move as fast as he can so that he can outrun his mounting unpopularity. Nate Silver says that it’s a myth that Trump is getting more and more unpopular. He argues his standing has been remarkably stable since April. There’s an interesting question there. But however that may be, the salience of his unpopularity grows as the midterms get closer.
Political scientists who study democratic erosion and authoritarian takeovers often talk about so-called “salami-slicing” tactics. The would be dictatorial advances by small increments, constricting freedoms and asserting power. Individually the actions don’t attract a lot of attention and they don’t provide opponents with catalyzing moments around which to foment a popular backlash. But taken together these incremental steps add up to a successful overthrow of democracy.
You can see how these two points fit together. Whether or not Trump is rapidly getting more unpopular, he is already very unpopular. Unpopular leaders are seldom able to pull off revolutions from above. It generally works when the leader has a period of extreme popularity, generally from solving some big national problem. Trump is getting more aggressive and audacious. But it’s not clear he has the power to pull these moves off. The opposition should want to make each new move as visible and attention-grabbing as possible. Trump himself is doing everything to make that possible.