He’s back. Donald Trump, that is. Just a few weeks ago he was trailing in the polls and had fallen behind in the fundraising stakes. Now the race is too close to call, and he has the momentum. No wonder Democrats are alarmists.
“Trump talks like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini,” commentator Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic magazine last week. “He and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win,” he argued.
Kamala Harris herself is now concerned enough to echo this argument. When a radio interviewer recently described Trump’s political views as fascism, she responded: “Yes, we can say that.”
He did it again on CNN last Wednesday, when asked if he thought his opponent met the definition of a fascist. “Yes, I do,” he responded quickly. ‘Yeah.’
And the American liberal press supported her with one outlet arguing that “Trump is obsessed with having a military at the level of a dictator,” while another alleged that Trump had been heard saying: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
The fact that Kamala Harris has resorted to playing the Hitler card is a sign of desperation, so I’ll go ahead and say it. She is losing this election, writes Niall Ferguson
The strange thing is that, according to research from the Center for Working Class Policy – hardly a conservative organization – this line of argument is almost completely ineffective in changing the minds of registered voters.
And that shouldn’t surprise us because it failed when Hillary Clinton’s campaign tried the same thing against Trump eight years ago. “The United States has never been so ripe for tyranny,” was the headline in New York Magazine at the time. Clinton was at it again, calling Trump “blatantly fascist” on CNN Thursday.
Does Trump look or sound like Hitler? To answer that question, I refer readers to his entertaining performance at an annual fundraising dinner for Catholic charities in New York on October 18.
Tradition dictates that the presidential candidates present tell jokes on their own. Harris broke with convention and appeared in an unfunny video instead of in person. Trump jokingly refused to send himself to jail, saying, “I guess I don’t see the point in shooting myself when other people have been shooting me for a long, long time.” He proceeded to criticize Democrats.
Or how about the good humor with which Trump served fries in a memorable election stunt at a McDonald’s drive-in? The Führer did not do stand-up. Mussolini didn’t serve fast food either.
In the last three weeks, according to the averages of all polls, Trump has led Harris in the seven swing states in this election: Georgia and North Carolina in the south, Arizona and Nevada in the west, and Michigan, Pennsylvania. and Wisconsin in the Midwest, and not because Americans thirst for fascism. (Just to remind you, fascism was all about state control of the economy and militarization in preparation for war, pretty much the opposite of Trump’s philosophy.)
It’s because they trust Trump over Harris on the issues that matter most to them: the economy, which suffered a nasty bout of inflation while Harris served as Joe Biden’s vice president, and illegal immigration, which has spiraled out of control under the direction of Biden and Harris. .
I admit it: I was wrong about Donald Trump. On January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, I thought his political career was over. The reality is that, regardless of how recklessly he behaved that day, Democrats have failed to persuade about half of likely voters that his behavior revealed that he was a Hitler-like threat to democracy.
If he is re-elected, his critics warn of a threat to the constitutional order. But they also foresee a threat to what they call the liberal international order. In a second term, it is often argued, Trump would cancel support for Ukraine.
If Donald Trump is re-elected, his critics warn of a threat to the constitutional order
His desire to be a dictator at home, they say, is complemented by his desire to align the United States with dictators abroad – in particular, Russian President Vladimir Putin. If Trump’s critics are right, then democracy is doomed, not only in the United States but also around the world, starting with Eastern Europe.
I half-seriously said earlier this year that the US election was a choice between Republic and Empire. By this I meant that if you believe that Trump represents a threat to the republic, you should vote for the Democratic candidate. But if you believe the Democratic candidate represents a threat to American primacy in the world, then you should vote for Trump.
I accept that, as Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, said this week, President Trump does not have a great deal of respect for the Constitution or the law. But the question is not to what extent Trump has authoritarian inclinations: but to what extent he could pander to them if he were re-elected for a second term.
Assuming he wins on November 5, how would Trump – as some of his critics fear – change the Constitution to give himself a third term? This is something the 22nd Amendment unequivocally excludes. It’s not even something a president is authorized to propose.
And what would happen if, as in his first term, Trump tried to change US immigration policy through an executive order, but the courts overturned it? What could you do if the Supreme Court upheld the initial court ruling?
And finally, if Trump ordered the US military to take action against his domestic political opponents, where is the evidence that the military’s top brass would be willing to carry out such an order?
The rule of law is deeply embedded in the United States, not only because it is, by design, a republic of laws, but also because it remains a country largely governed by people with law degrees. In addition, it has an officer class deeply committed to separating the military from politics.
Trump himself may have little respect for lawyers and generals. Who can really blame him after nearly four years of ‘legal warfare’ (politically motivated litigation designed to discredit him, if not imprison him) and multiple political attacks by generals he fired? But there is no aspect of the Republican platform that provides for any changes to the Constitution.
In fact, the irony is that it is not Trump but the most radical Democrats who are openly discussing constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the American political system to their own benefit. To give one example among many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors from Harvard and Yale, respectively, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to “recover” what is “broken.” . Constitution but “radically alter the basic rules of the game.”
“It is difficult,” they wrote, “to find a constitutional basis for abortion or unions in a document written by largely wealthy men more than two centuries ago.” It would be much better if liberal legislators could simply defend abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to worry about the Constitution.’
“In democracy…majority rule should always be the most important thing,” they declared. He should not have to “survive the vetoes of powerful minorities who invoke the constitutional past to obstruct a new future.”
“One way to get to this more democratic world,” they wrote, “is to fill the Union with new states,” to “break the false stagnation that the Constitution imposes on the country through the Electoral College and the Senate, in which substantial majorities They are frustrated on one issue after another.”
To anyone who reveres the American Constitution – the most successful political document in history – all of this is horrifying. It is nothing less than a call for revolution: to replace the American republic with a tyranny of the majority.
And who’s to say that, if elected president with majorities in the Senate and House, Harris wouldn’t be open to such revolutionary plans?
Real threats to American democracy take other forms as well, including the ever-increasing federal debt burden. It is worth remembering that history has few examples of great powers remaining great for long after debt service costs exceeded defense costs, as they have done this year for the first time.
That, more than Trump’s Russophilia, is the real problem for US allies. On its current trajectory – which I assume would continue under a Harris presidency – US defense spending is simply not enough to simultaneously defend Ukraine, Israel, and also Taiwan if all three are attacked.
And that is quite likely. The Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy is likely to condemn Ukraine to defeat; Israel risks war against Iran, with only limited support from the United States; and Taiwan fear a blockade by China at some point in the next four years. The characteristic term of this administration has been “de-escalation.” On closer inspection, this term is functionally opposite to “deterrence.”
We cannot know for sure whether Trump is right when he says that the attacks on Ukraine and Israel would not have happened if he had been re-elected in 2020. All we know is that no such acts of aggression by authoritarian powers occurred during his first term. . term.
So Republic or Empire? I would argue that the latter seems more vulnerable to four more years of Democratic rule than the former to four more years of Trump.
This election remains terribly close. It could depend on the decisions of ten or twenty thousand voters in a few dozen counties. But they can be sure of one thing: None of those undecided voters will vote for Kamala Harris because they have been persuaded that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
The fact that Harris has resorted to playing the Hitler card is a sign of desperation, so I’ll go ahead and say it. She is losing this election.
Sir Niall Ferguson is a Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.