Birthing a dictator

Last week’s revelation and judgement by the US Supreme Court that Donald Trump’s actions to overthrow the US Government are not illegal, because the actions of a serving president are immune from prosecution, makes it just that much easier for Trump to fulfil his promise to be a dictator.

 

Although media coverage has been extensive about the US Supreme Court decision, the Grapevine is analysing the ‘would-be-dictator’ and how the implications of such a nonsensical and ‘mates’ judgement will impact Australia? Because it won’t matter where you live in Australia – the Central Coast or Margaret River, WA – a Trumpian dictatorship is a disease that will impact on everyone.

10 July 2024

ALAN HAYES

 

THERE is little doubt that Donald Trump now believes that he has come up trumps! But you have to seriously wonder how a country, who’s ideals include but are not limited to independence, equality before the law, freedom of speech, democracy, and opportunity, would allow a convicted felon to run for the highest office in the land.

 

Such a political debacle wouldn’t have even gathered legs in Australia – the slightest whiff of scandal or miscreant behaviour and a once promising political career would come to an abrupt end. But a former US President - who now has full immunity for his alleged seditious deeds – spread false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting and certifying of election results, whilst at the same time tried to overthrow his ‘Uncle Sam’. Never mind the fact that Trump’s actions caused four people to die, when on 6 January 2021 his supporters attacked Capital Hill!

 

Apart from the horrendous consequences now facing American democracy, with Trump’s almost certain re-election to the White House, do the same rules now apply to Joe Biden? After delivering an economy that works for blue-collar workers, Biden could have retired and invited a new generation of Democrats to contest the presidency, but instead nullified Trump’s negatives with his own and leaving uncertainly for the future for a democratic administration. So, what would now shift Trump voters?

 

Trump’s argument has always been that he is the 'best man for the job' and should be immune from indictment based on Presidential immunity – a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities. Trump-appointed supreme court justices agreed with the argument in a 6-3 vote - the court’s other justices warned the decision could lead to “nightmare scenarios”.

 

Trump’s manipulation of the Federal US Supreme Court, however, is nothing new to American politics! This favour-based scheme echoes another trial more than 200 years ago, in which former vice president Aaron Burr escaped treason charges for trying to dissolve the union.

 

Aaron Burr was only vice-president when he plotted to break up the United States in 1804 — having recently murdered Alexander Hamilton in a duel, he asked the British for assistance to help him take the newly acquired Louisiana Territory out of the union. That was a precursor to a bolder but more nebulous plan he hatched in 1805, after he’d been dropped from Thomas Jefferson’s ticket, to create a whole new empire in the American southwest.

 

Jefferson would eventually have Burr arrested and tried for treason, only for the Supreme Court, via chief justice John Marshall, to find that Burr had only spoken about his conspiracy and not actually done anything to bring it about, thus failing to meet the high standard of the new republic’s treason laws.

 

But the unexpected is always expected in the ‘alleged land of the free’ – Donald Trump has reached the heights of ‘cult-like control’ over his minions, reminding everyone just how Adolf Hitler did it.

 

Yet there are few people alive today who remember Hitler’s evil, and for most, the details of his rise to power has been lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us – goose-stepping with a fresh, stark splash of reality.

 

Shades of a dictator past

 

During his first term as president, Trump embraced right-wing militia groups and motorcycle gangs, and implicitly praised his followers when they attacked people, as well as prosecutors and judges who attempted to hold him accountable for his criminal behaviour.

 

While Trump mostly focused his public hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities, behind the scenes he and his administration had worked hand-in-glove with anti-gay fanatics to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

 

His administration opposed the Equality Act, saying it would “undermine parental and conscience rights.” More than a third (36%) of his judicial nominees had previously expressed “bias and bigotry towards queer people.” His administration filed briefs in the landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws don’t protect LGBTQ+ people.

 

His Department of Health and Human Services ended Obama-era medical protections for queer people. His Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, took apart regulations protecting transgender kids in public schools. His HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, proposed new rules allowing shelters to turn away homeless gay people at a time when one-in-five homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.

 

Trump’s attack on the LGBTQ+ community was a leaf out of Adolf Hitler’s persecution manual.

 

Once Hitler had seized full control of the German government, he set about changing the nation’s laws to replace democracy with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the “Enabling Act” that gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.

 

The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality and persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. As part of this campaign, the Nazi regime closed gay bars and meeting places, dissolved gay associations, and shuttered gay presses. The Nazi regime also arrested and tried tens of thousands of gay men using Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code.

 

Trump, in his first term in the White House, promised to use the theoretical “unitary executive” powers that right-wing groups claim the president holds, but has never been used previously in US history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many US laws. A promised that he still sees relevant if elected again.

 

Hitler followed the Enabling Act, six months later, with the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which authorised him to gut the German Civil Service and replace career bureaucrats with ‘toadies’ loyal exclusively to him. It was the end of any semblance of resistance to the Nazis or preservation of democracy within the new German government.

 

In his last three weeks in office, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F that ended Civil Service protections for around 50,000 of America’s top government officials, including the senior levels of every federal agency, so he could replace them all with political appointees (Biden reversed it). The Heritage Foundation is reportedly now vetting over 50,000 people to fill these ranks if Trump is re-elected and, as promised, will reinstate Schedule F.

 

The last bastion of resistance to Hitler within the German government was the judiciary, and Hitler altered the German Civil Service Code in January 1937, giving his cabinet the power to remove any judges from office who were deemed “non-compliant” with “Nazi laws or principles".

 

When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as “a disgrace” and “an Obama judge.” He added that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is “really something we have to take a look at because it’s not fair,” adding, “That’s not law. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit, we get beaten.”

 

When Hitler took power in 1933, he quickly began mass arrests of illegal immigrants, gypsies, union activists, liberal commentators and reporters, and queer people. To house this exploding prison population, he first took over a defunct munitions factory in Dachau; within a few years there were over a hundred of these camps where “criminals” were “concentrated and separated from society.” He called them concentration camps.

 

In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler then authorised his “final solution to the Jewish problem” that included building death camps in countries outside Germany to methodically exterminate millions of people.

 

So far, Trump, and his people, haven’t suggested, if he is re-elected, the need for death camps in America, although his redneck inner circle have always seemed particularly eager to see illegal immigrants along the Mexican border die either from razor wire or gunshot.

 

So, what is the likely scenario for Australia?

 

Without any doubt, Trump’s re-election is Anthony Albanese’s elephant in the room, and a potential disaster for Australia – the likely escalation of deglobalisation and provoking larger-scale global trade wars, unrestrained by political considerations.

 

The fear is that Trump is in favour of retreating from the world and retreating from Asia.

 

If Trump imposes tariffs on China, it will cause close to an economic crisis.

 

Going down the path of trade wars will have huge implications for the foreign exchange and the stability of currency - it might be harder to export to the US and cause an increase in consumer prices for imports if there is retaliation from China.

 

The problem then for the ‘Land Down Under’ is that once the US steps back from Asia, it becomes a much harder environment for Australia to operate in and to have a rules-based order – Trump is allergic to alliances, but he’s sympathetic to strong men like Vladimir Putin and his perverted views echo those of isolationism.

 

More disturbing, Trump’s irrational policies could induce crises in the US’s military relationship with two of Australia’s most important trading partners – Korea and Japan.

 

Trump’s re-election would be a sobering result for many Australians as they come to grips with his unhinged decisions.

 

Even though a Trumpian US Government may not affect the [Australian-New Zealand-US] alliance, which has existed for 70 years and goes beyond personality of those at the summit, Donald Trump is likely to stretch it as far as he can. It means that Albanese has to be on the ball about how to sustain the effectiveness of the alliance.

 

How successfully Albanese will be able to persuade an American dictatorship that we’re paying our dues in terms of defence spending and militarily in the Middle East is difficult to determine. What is known, is that our capacity to defend ourselves is an important part of our hitherto and future relation with the US, particularly the military equipment Australia buys from the them.

 

To add further to the problem is that in Trump’s speeches so far, Australia has been conspicuously missing from all his discussions of allies that are asymmetrically benefiting from its US alliance. It’s a ‘can-of-worms’ that can’t be dismissed – Trumpian governance of the US would certainly see a push back against China’s militarisation. Australia can’t afford to be sitting on the sidelines, ignorantly secure in the knowledge that the US will be there if China becomes aggressive.

 

As Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said, “It’s pretty hard to imagine a man who can’t be trusted with X (previously Twitter) in charge of the biggest store of nuclear weapons in the world”.

 

And what about Trump’s position on climate change? Trump is a climate change sceptic ... Australia will have to be a stronger advocate for responsible environmental policies. Of course, there’ll be a large body of opinion supporting Trump’s climate change denial  - many states, however, will have responsible climate policies, but you can’t expect the US administration to lead on the issue.

 

Not surprisingly, climate change has not been mentioned in presidential debates – sending a clear signal about its lack of priority. If Trump does what he announced to China [on tariffs], a climate agreement enabled by cooperation with China will be swept down the drain.

 

Anthony Albanese cannot underestimate Donald Trump’s the plethora of unsound policies, which will arise from a Trump-lead US government, and must prepare now to mitigate the real possibility of Trump’s election win. As a smaller ally, Australia has to sell the importance of our alliance in Washington ... Albanese should already be making plans for an early meeting with Trump.

 

The not so ‘land of the free’

 

The genius of the American Founders, looked down on by England’s ruling class, may have redefined what it means to be civilised, but this brilliance has now disappeared with the ‘birthing of a dictator’.

 

Joe Biden ran for president because he wanted to stop Donald Trump with a 'presidency' that would neuter him from changing America! Yet it would now seem that Biden's moment to go gracefully has long passed as the ever creeping glow of Trump’s red-neck army of lunatics can be seen on the horizon - a concern for Australia.