UPDATE: Trump on mid-terms: 'When you think about it, we shouldn't even have an election'

Words matter. We are at our peril if we ignore this

Courtesy The Boston Globe

This is an update to this morning’s post on Trump’s dictatorial tendencies in the wake of his threatening martial law in Minnesota.

UPDATE:

During a wide-ranging interview with Reuters news service published today, President Donald Trump, worried about losing control of Congress in the mid-term elections this fall, said:

“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

This, just hours after he posted on social media that he might invoke the Insurrection Act and impose what amounts to martial law in Minnesota.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was quick to walk that back, saying the president was “simply joking” and “speaking facetiously.”

That’s what everyone thought when he said he wanted to be a dictator, too, and now look where we’re heading.

Remember, this is the same man who continually hints that he may, in violation of the Constitution, run for a third term.

This is the same guy who exhorted a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after he lost the previous election.

He’s the candidate who told the American people that if he won, “you won’t have to vote again.”

So, was it just a wisecrack? Or was it the start of a normalization campaign to get his cult and his media handmaidens at FOX and elsewhere to start talking about the idea, to make it seem less outrageous, plant a few ideas and see if they sprout?

It’s a mistake to put anything past him.

Related: Five Takeaways from the Reuters interview of President Trump

Earlier, I wrote:

So, how do you overthrow a democracy?

We have two examples to consider, one in our past, one in the headlines this morning.

Exhibit A, as you might expect, were the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when lame-duck President Donald Trump exhorted a mob of supporters in Washington, D.C., to march on the nation’s Capitol and “fight like hell” to disrupt the formal counting of election ballots.

This after futilely pleading with election officials around the country to throw out their results and recount them in his favor (“What I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump famously begged Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger). After losing dozens of court cases in which he absurdly argued the election was stolen. After urging Vice President Mike Pence to violate his oath of office and throw out the Electoral College vote. After trying to seat a gaggle of fake electors to disrupt the counting.

And the only reason he’s not in prison right now, according to the special counsel who investigated all this, is because the American public, in its wisdom, chose to re-elect him in 2024.

Exhibit B starts with Trump saying he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one.” Thing about being a dictator, like crack, once you get a taste it’s hard not to keep using.

So, the playbook has always been open for inspection:

1. Claim the nation is in crisis and needs to be saved (Make America Great Again) and that what is needed is for an anointed one, a messiah, to arise.

2. Volunteer for the job saying, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

3. Create chaos around the country to validate the initial assertion that a messiah is needed (flooding cities with ICE agents who shoot women in the face works for this).

4. Declare martial law, disband Congress, and like Julius Caesar, declare yourself dictator for life.

Step 4 seemed ominously close this morning with this headline in The Washington Post:

Back to that dictator for life thing: When democracies fall, they are hard to put back together again. Rome was never a representative republic after Caesar.

Which is, of course, why the Founders of this country created guardrails against just this sort of thing, why they divided power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

And it’s the job of the legislative branch—the very body Trump’s mob stormed—to keep chief executives in check.

If our democracy falls, it will not just be because of Trump’s dictatorial impulses. Narcissists and egomaniacs are a dime a dozen. It will be because the other branches, especially the Congress, failed to do their jobs.

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Venezuela and oil

Why did global markets hardly blink in the aftermath of the Trump invasion of Venezuela? Because, among other things, the importance of the oil reserves there are vastly overblown. Energy expert Bob Brecha explains it all in an insightful essay on the Tropic Press website. You can read it here:

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