Fear of Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office has triggered much consternation among the US intelligentsia and mainstream media. Many in the US believe that if Trump wins the November 2024 elections, he would “reshape the executive branch as a tool of autocracy”.
A surge of articles, commentaries and interviews in the US media reflects lingering fears among enlightened public opinion. A reassured Trump during his second term will fill regulatory bodies with his cronies and silence his critics with brute force, the critics warn.
Steven Levitsky, professor and author of How Democracies Die, says: “Trump is going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances agains people… he is going to come in as an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”
“Trump has long said he would seek retribution against his opponents if he wins another term in the White House in 2024 – a vow he made again at a campaign rally Friday in South Dakota,” CNN reported, quoting Trump’s own words:
“That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general. I say, listen, indict him. Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong that we know of – I don’t know, indict him on income tax evasion, you’ll figure it out,” Trump said.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and its Discontents, says: “In his second term, even a politicised Bureau of Labour Statistics’s monthly job reports or Centre’s for Disease Control and Prevention could become suspect. Do you want people who believe in hydroxychloroquine making decisions?” he asks.
Hydroxychloroquine was a reference to the way Trump had promoted the unproven efficacy of the medicine against COVID-19. The idea had to be subsequently abandoned.
His first act will be to fire the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director and politicise the FBI as well as National Security Council, Larry Diamond of Stanford University says. Then he will fill all positions with his own men. During his last term, many officials had resigned in protest.
An article in The Washington Post quoted Trump saying in September last: “The FBI and Justice Department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical left scoundrels, lawyers and media.” Obviously, he intends filling these posts with his loyalists.
Trump allies want to overhaul the federal bureaucracy. They are already working on replacing civil servants with like-minded officials. Trump’s move in this regard in 2020 was cancelled by the Biden administration. Now he will revive it.
Most observers see Trump encouraging racist and white supremacist movements for support. Jennifer McCoy, political science professor, who studied political changes in several countries, says “pernicious polarisation” always led to electoral autocracy.
Donald Trump at Conservative Political Action Conference, 2024. Photo: X (Twitter).
David Becker, executive director of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research, warns about the collapse of consensus. Federal relations under an arrogant Trump will get worse. He asks: “Why are we sending more taxes for every federal dollar we are getting back.” Some even talk of the possibility of civil war.
Trump would ban foreign Muslims from entering the US and changing the census questionnaire to intimidate the Hispanics. He would target people who are legally living in the US but harbour ‘Jihadist sympathies’ and reimpose the ban on people entering from seven Islamic countries.
It is feared that Trump will weaponise the federal government and punish critics and opponents and derail campaigns by political rivals by using the Justice Department as a dirty tricks shop. He talks openly about jailing journalists. He has also promised he would revise school curricula to ensure ‘patriotic education’ and have a system to certify ‘patriotic teachers’ so that students learn “to love their country, not hate.”
Trump’s ‘good friend’ has shown the way
Narendra Modi has been a close friend of Donald Trump. At Houston in September 2019, he greeted the former with ‘Howdy Modi’ and both leaders praised each other’s work. Modi had just won a second term and Trump was trying for his.
In an interview, Trump called Modi a “good friend” and “a great guy doing terrific job”. Speaking to a crowd of Indian-American supporters, Modi said ‘ab ki bar, Trump Sarkar’ (‘now is the time for a Trump administration). But when this led to a controversy in the US, his foreign minister, S Jaishankar, came out with a denial.
Apart from such mutual praise, both of them advocate right-wing policies and represent the trend towards electoral autocracy. Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) is akin to Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat and Hindutva’s romantic vision of the past. Such themes inspire the followers of both leaders.
“Perhaps their greatest commonality is their adherence to a familiar autocratic playbook, the likes of which has been adopted by other democratically elected leaders around the world… Their illiberal tendencies offer some insight into what a democracy in autocratic transition might look like,” writes Yasmeen Serhan.
However, there are also many dissimilarities in the working style of the two elected dictators. Consider the following.
The Trump-Modi analogy has an alarming subtext. The US media during the Trump years had valiantly tackled the regime’s brinkmanship. But in Modi’s India, there has been a failure of the Indian mainstream media and the bulk of the intelligentsia to rise to the occasion and resist the systematic dismantling of structures of democracy. As L.K. Advani had famously said about the media in the Emergency, when asked to bend, they crawled. But the same is true of the BJP, which earlier took its internal democracy quite seriously. Within the BJP, the leaders Adani had groomed are now merrily colluding with Modi and the RSS has also fallen in line. With the kind of complete control he has over his own and over all institutions and the media, Modi can now claim to be the Vishwaguru of electoral dictators.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.
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