Trump Wants to Rule as a Dictator. Make Him Do It.

I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.

This reminds us what we know: Donald Trump wants to rule as an autocrat, a dictator. He’s reaching for that power through the unique apparatus of the American state. He greets words and civic negotiation with force, sometimes figuratively by ignoring norms and laws, sometimes literally as we saw today in Los Angeles. Noem said as much in her press conference, stating, “We are staying here to liberate the city from … the burdensome leadership [of] this governor and this mayor.”

So they’re using the U.S. military to “liberate” the city from its own elected leaders; they’re there to liberate the city and state from its own popular sovereignty.

I don’t think the American people want to be ruled by a dictator. I think we’re already seeing clear signs of that. As I’ve said countless times, this is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I do not think Donald Trump will be able to build an American autocracy if the majority of the country opposes it. The key is not defeating him in direct engagement, where he holds most of the power, but discrediting his project in the eyes of the public. A critical element of that is that elected officials cannot back down. They must continue to act like Americans. If the President wants to rule by tackling senators or arresting governors, make him do it. Elected officials owe us that. We should accept it individually ourselves as well, if need be.

I think the President’s degenerate pretensions will crumble under the weight of their own degeneracy when exposed for all to see. The spectacle coming this Saturday — an exercise patterned off the worst of North Korea and the USSR that even his top supporters appear to want distance from — won’t, I suspect, do him any favors.