Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.
That’s from a report by kenneth Vogel and Shane Goldmacher in the New York Times on a concerted campaign to use the power of the state to cripple the ability of the Democratic Party to raise funds, to organize campaigns, and to rely on legal and organizational support critical to winning elections.
The report is replete with details of the crooked onslaught to tilt the playing field to favor MAGA Republicans — or, to put it another way — to rig American elections so Democrats can’t compete.
This is straight out of the playbook of authoritarians — Putin and Orban are among the most prominent today — to wound their political opponents and undermine civil society. MAGA Republicans have openly praised both the men, revering them as role models.
Trump pledged throughout his 2024 campaign to seek retribution against his political foes. He has whined incessantly about the weaponization of the justice department, while directing DOJ attacks on folks (“horrible people,” “thugs,” “scum”) who dare oppose him. Trump is intent on seeking personal vengeance, exacted through the coercive power of the federal government.
The course Trump is following is exactly what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — authors of How Democracies Die –predicted Trump would do (when interviewed last December, a month before he reentered the White House).
I quoted from the interview in a previous post; first Ziblatt: “So, it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition.”
Levitsky predicted that “we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior,” and he foresaw “politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.”
There’s nothing new here. Trump, the White House, the DOJ, and MAGA activists are literally following the path trod by foreign authoritarians (past and present).
Americans haven’t seen this before — not here. But it’s happening right before our eyes. The institutions that undergird our democracy and our civil society — associations separate and independent of state power — are being dismantled. Our president is grasping for unchecked power, in direct violation of the constitutional restraints that preserve our liberty.