Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Prior to 2016, Republicans used divisive rhetoric and pointed attacks toward opponents to establish an “oligarchy,” not to create governmental “apocalypse.” In doing so, however, they unwittingly set the stage for someone to step into authoritarianism. Trump echoed “flat-out lie[s]” and “easily disprovable statements” the press would inevitably cover (95). Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway’s infamous statement that such lies were “alternative facts” revealed that Trump’s lies were not just inconsequential statements, but a manipulative rhetorical strategy called “gaslighting.” The constant fight to defend reality, or to determine what reality is, is an authoritarian technique meant “to destabilize a population” (97). Trump started using other authoritarian tactics, like banning people from majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the country, firing those who criticized him, and beginning to separate children of refugees from their parents at the US–Mexico border. Republicans who opposed Trump were “excluded” from halls of executive power, creating a “vacuum” that left “cronies” in the White House.

A 2017 report released by James Clapper revealed that Russia had “interfered” in the 2016 election to help Trump: Two years of subsequent investigations found that Trump’s campaign had “played along.” In 2016, Paul Manafort, who owed millions to Russian oligarchs, became an advisor to the Trump campaign and established meetings between the campaign and Russian operatives, who flooded social media with false information and funneled “dirt” on Hilary Clinton to Trump’s campaign. 

Trump “purged” officials investigating his team’s relationship with Russia, such as FBI director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He positioned himself as an innocent victim of a “witch hunt.” While Robert Mueller’s report eventually confirmed Russian interference and said Trump’s campaign “expected it would benefit” from this interference, Trump’s team spread disinformation that they were exonerated, even though “thirty-four people and three companies were indicted or pleaded guilty in the attack on the 2016 election and its cover-up” (107).

Trump’s growing authoritarianism emboldened “right-wing gangs” (109), who met at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, on August 11, 2017. This was the newest in a long string of far-right protests spanning from anti-New Deal violence in the 1930s, a standoff between neo-Nazis and officials at Ruby Ridge in 1992, right-wing violence after the Waco siege in 1993, the armed defense of a tax evader by the Oath Keepers in 2014, and the 2016 right-wing takeover over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The 2017 “Unite the Right” group was the newest racist, anti-government outcropping of such violence. However, this time, this violence was endorsed by the sitting president, when Trump called them “very fine people” (114).

In 2019, news broke that Trump promised he would release Congress-approved money to the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky if Zelensky agreed to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent Joe Biden. After Trump began directly pressuring Zelensky, a whistleblower on staff reported that Trump was pressuring foreign governments to influence the election to help him stay in power. On December 18, 2019, the House voted to impeach Trump, and in January, his trial in the Senate began. Senate Republicans rallied behind Trump, saying the impeachment was a strategy to flip the Senate. Though House member Adam Schiff warned Republican senators that Trump would continue to compromise elections and national security, the Senate acquitted him. Republican Senator Mitt Romney was the only Republican who voted to impeach. The Democratic senators plus Romney “represented eighteen million more Americans than the fifty-two Republicans who voted to acquit” (122), demonstrating how Republicans shored up power by “repressing the majority” (122).

One of the hallmarks of the Trump presidency was nepotism, as he “replac[ed] career professionals with family members and friends” (124). He hired his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, to be unpaid senior advisors in charge of important international affairs. This troubled a former democratic pillar that stated a government bureaucracy should be loyal to the state rather than its leader.

Trump positioned any civil servant participating in the investigation of him as a “Democrat who wanted to hound him from office” (125). In late spring of 2020, Trump fired the inspectors general of the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and the State Department and Intelligence Community, replacing them with “more compliant” figures. In speeches, Trump drew on the image of “the cowboy who saves the villagers by destruction” (126), depicting himself as the savior of a country on the verge of catastrophe. He spun stories about the supposed successes of his administration like he’d run his reality show: “false, scripted, and effective” (126). The appeal to improving individual lives shored up a base so devoted that it became “Trump’s party,” and no Republican could “cross him.”