简体中文
This weekend’s atrocity in Orlando—the murder of 49 gay clubgoers by a rifle-wielding ISIS supporter—has probably improvedDonald Trump’schances of winning the presidency, if only because bluntness at such times feels more in sync with prevailing sentiment than carefully chosen words. The notion of lowering immigration from majority-Muslim countries also gains more support from ordinary Americans than it does from those in positions of power. But terrorism is the sort of threat that can turn a restrained presidency into an unrestrained one, and nothing about a Trump presidency scares people more than the possibility of an untrammeled executive. In the days after the episode, after all, he was already speculating about whetherBarack Obamaespoused sympathy for Muslim extremism.
The horror at the Pulse nightclub inadvertently underscores one of the central questions of this election, if notthecentral question: How truly dangerous is Trump? Is he really as menacing as Adolf Hitler, asMeg Whitman recently suggested? Does Trump appear to have the makings of a true fascist?
If you define the term narrowly, the answer is obviously no. “As long as Trump does not advocate the abolition of America’s democratic institutions, and their replacement by some sort of post-liberal new order, he’s not technically a fascist,” historian of fascismRoger Griffintells Vox’sDylan Matthews. But definitional hairsplitting is of limited use. At the end of the day, fascism is just shorthand for right-wing tyranny, and that can come in many varieties. In the case of Trump, what people want to know is whether they’re electing a militarist who’s sympathetic to white nationalism, hostile to the First Amendment, and generally indifferent to the niceties of constitutional order. They worry about racial pogroms, extrajudicial violence, and new foreign conflicts. These things, all us can agree, would be bad.
Many scary presidents have turned out to be less harmful in practice than feared, while many non-scary presidents have turned out to be much worse than expected. Republicans in 1940 feared that a third term of Franklin D. Roosevelt would end American democracy—one columnist even said F.D.R. might be our “last president”—but F.D.R. left the country standing. Democrats in 1980 feared that Ronald Reagan would be a right-wing lunatic, but Reagan turned out to be less hard line than that. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson, who was supposed to keep the peace better than Barry Goldwater, increased the U.S. military presence in Vietnam to half a million troops and proved unable to prevent dozens of race riots across the country, even prior to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. For all we know, Trump’s path could more closely resemble that of Reagan (milder than expected) than that of L.B.J. (rougher than expected).
Luckily, when it comes to true dictatorship, Trump lacks many of the most ominous traits.
For all of his incendiary rhetoric, there’s limited evidence of any belief in racial superiority or hatred of other races. Saying that illegal immigration allows rapists to cross the border may be heinous, but it is not the same thing as white supremacy, and Trump is less right-leaning on many matters of race than some traditional Republicans. Regarding affirmative action, a topic that many conservatives are working to eliminate, Trump has said, “I’m fine with it,” merely laying out that one day “there will be a time when you don’t need it.” As careless as Trump has been about distinguishing the vast majority of peaceful illegal immigrants from the small minority who commit crimes, and as sinister as a “deportation force” sounds, the candidate has mostly confined his demonizations to the powerful: politicians, high-ranking officials, the media, foreign governments.
ADVERTISEMENT
The worst tyrants of the past century or two also presided over a lot of soldiers or paramilitary forces before they came to power. Benito Mussolini had hundreds of thousands of Black Shirts, and Hitler had hundreds of thousands of Brown Shirts. Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot,Fidel Castro,andRobert Mugabeall headed large guerrilla forces. Many dictators just came from the military, like Idi Amin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Juan Peron. Trump just went to military school.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Trump is starting politics too late to become a proper tyrant. The dictators of the past two centuries have had a commitment to political agitation from a young age: Saddam Hussein was a passionate Baathist in his 20s. Stalin was a revolutionary from the moment he was expelled from school. (Dictators who have come late to politics have cropped up in South America, with figures like Jorge Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, but they were senior military officials in countries with histories of military coups.) The quality that made these tyrants so brutal was not primarily thin-skinnedness or impulsivity but fanaticism. Trump is getting into politics late in life after a successful career doing other things. He’s volatile and impulsive, but he’s not fanatical.
In a best-case scenario, Trump would be less dangerous to civil liberties and democratic norms than someone likeMarco Rubio, because his own party is willing to break ranks with him. Partisanship has become so fierce in Washington that even serious abuses of power are given a pass when made by someone on the home team. Many Republicans hate Trump so much that they hate Democrats slightly less, however, and that offers more hope for checks on his power. Ironically, Trump’s very scariness could make him less dangerous.
But do not exhale too soon. None of this means that Trump couldn’t do exceptional damage to the Constitution or the rule of law. Sunday’s massacre was a reminder of how much attacks or upheavals can change the course of a presidency. WhenGeorge W. Bushtook office,The Guardianwarned that the “interventionist approach of the Clinton years is likely to be the first victim.” Yeah,thatwas a good prediction. Just as important, major crises cause Congress to turn over the reins to the executive branch. An irresponsible executive can do a lot of harm very fast, giving us unwise wars and torture and indefinite detention. Good thing that has never happened.
Also, as surprising as presidents can be, character flaws can tell us a lot about what to expect. Detractors of Richard Nixon felt his personality would be dangerous in the Oval Office and felt vindicated, if unhappily so, by the malfeasance that followed.Bill Clinton’ssupporters were much more shocked by his dalliance with a former intern than his enemies were. Lack of curiosity or knowledge are also a warning sign. I return, uncharitably, to George W. Bush, but being an empty vessel when it came to foreign policy made him vulnerable to seizing upon a pre-fab ideology in a time of crisis and swallowing it whole—hence, Iraq and the doctrine of spreading liberty everywhere.
So Trump is no fascist, and he’s not going to be a Constitution-shredding dictator. But that’s probably not going to comfort you all that much. Beyond that, the questions that I’d guess will best help predict his approach to a hypothetical presidency are these: Is terrorism against the United States likely to occur over the next four to eight years? What are some likely effects of Trump’s particular character flaws?
I didn’t promise to make you feel better.
(VANITY FAIR)