What can we do when the president turns to fear and threats of violence to impose an authoritarian regime, one in which rights that Americans have taken for granted are curtailed? The answer to that question is yet to emerge. Things will return to normal eventually, whether next year after the congressional elections, in 2028, or a decade from now. In the meantime, however, we must endure ideological purges and an effort to crush dissent by whatever means necessary.
The fast slide toward a post-constitutional dictatorship was on display Tuesday as the president and defense secretary addressed a perhaps unprecedented gathering of the nation’s top military leaders. We can only hope that behind the stoicism of the assembled admirals, generals, and other brass is a degree of resistance even though the president made the consequences of opposition clear, joking that if any of them left the room in protest, they would be taking their careers with them. None left, as far as we could tell.
“Our history is filled with military heroes who took on all enemies foreign and domestic. . . . That’s what the oath says — foreign and domestic. Well, we also have domestic,” the president said. Mr. Trump is not only a dictator wannabe but an unstable one at that: He told the military leaders that extreme measures against protesters were okay: “I say they spit, we hit. Is that okay? I think so, they spit, it’s a new thing. They spit, we hit.” These are not the words of a sane person.
Despite the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, he told the military leadership they might use cities as “training grounds.” This reveals a feverish imagination that even a younger Mr. Trump would not have seen through during his party days in New York.
Fighting crime is not the point. By combining federal, state, and private statistics, a picture emerges that shows dramatic declines in violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the United States. With few exceptions, American cities are vibrant. Remote work has been an economic boon. In Portland, Ore., which the president has singled out for a possible National Guard deployment, crime has declined sharply, with robberies, assaults, shootings, and murder all falling — violent deaths by 52 percent, for example. Nonetheless, the president has called Portland a living hell.
In a recent executive order, the president sought to redefine dissent as terrorism with even expressions of verbal opposition becoming criminalized. His subordinates all the way down the line conflate peaceful protesters and members of the press with rioters. Violence must be met with even greater violence; if military or police vehicles are hit with bricks or other objects, the president tells his angry and cartoonish masked federal officers, “You get out of that car, and you can do whatever the hell you want to do. . . .”
The harms from all of this are many, perhaps the most insidious among them that people who object to what the president represents now must think twice before making their feelings public.