This story originally appeared in The New York Times December 7, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/us/politics/trump-2025-overview.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_saves

Trump plots his return: Pardons, payoffs and payback

As seen in other fascist governments, this corrupt behavior will have a trickle-down effect across American society

By Chauncey DeVega

Published December 16, 2023 5:45AM (EST)

Trumpism, like other forms of fascism, is crime in the form of politics.

For all of the talk about a “democracy crisis” and American neofascism, Trumpism as a form of “legal” crime and how it will negatively impact the country is one of the most important aspects of the crisis while simultaneously being among the least discussed by the mainstream news media, pundits and larger political class. The country’s elites have committed many extreme errors and failures in the Age of Trump, with the above being one of the most serious and worrisome. If the Fourth Estate as a whole was engaging in pro-democracy journalism, it would clearly communicate to the American people the following information about Trumpism and fascism as a form of crime, and what it will mean for them and the country.

Fascism is first and foremost a form of corrupt power that is not held accountable by the law, “the institutions," or the public through voting or other means of oversight or accountability. Trump’s repeated threats of violence and intimidation against the judges, court officers, prosecutors, attorneys general, witnesses, jurors, the Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith, President Biden, and the rule of law more broadly are just one of many such examples of antisocial and pathological behavior.

Public opinion and other research show that Donald Trump’s “populist” appeal and criminal behavior reflects how his followers support him precisely because he is willing to “break the rules” to “get things done” for “people like them” while engaging in revenge against their shared “enemies." Fascism as a form of criminal politics is based upon a crude understanding of power and its limits, where friends and followers are to be rewarded and “the enemy” (however defined) is to be targeted for violence, harassment, and other cruelty because they have little to no protection from the state. 

In all, if Dictator Trump, his MAGA people, and the Republican fascists and their forces take power this will mean that the American government and society will be ruled by the equivalent of a de facto crime family and elevated street gang. In the Age of Trump, the Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement and right-wing are, in many ways, already structured and are behaving in such a manner.

The organization and movement are hierarchical with Trump serving as the Big Boss. The Trump MAGA crime organization is large, very well-funded, and powerful with its own institutions and a wide sphere of influence across American society and internationally.

Republican elected officials and other party leaders in the MAGA movement and across the larger white right follow Trump’s orders and directives with little disagreement or dissent. As seen during the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign, Republican leaders must demonstrate extreme fealty to Trump and the MAGA movement or they will be punished and eventually ostracized. In fact, loyalty to Trump is more important than loyalty to the party or even the country — and perhaps even themselves and their own families.

As seen with the “struggle” over the Speaker of the House and the elevation of Mike Johnson, violence is a means of maintaining control of the organization and of punishing disloyalty. And like the mafia or other criminal organizations, the Republicans in Congress and the larger right-wing and “conservative” movement have also repeatedly shown that they are willing to both bend and outright break the law in service to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

Like more formal criminal organizations, Trump and his agents will use their power to enrich themselves, advance their own narrow interests, and engage in extortion, shakedowns, and collect protection money while they dispense “favors” and other opportunities to those individuals, groups, and businesses that demonstrate sufficient loyalty and are otherwise of use.

As seen in other fascist and authoritarian-autocratic governments, this corrupt behavior will have a trickle-down effect across American society.

For example, Trump’s promises to be a dictator on “day one” and to use his unchecked power to dispense rights for oil drilling and other resource exploitation and to “build the wall” (while of course receiving kickbacks and other personal financial incentives and payments) is a classic way that dictators and other autocrats secure the loyalty and support of elite actors.

Under Dictator Trump, this will be a continuation in a much more extreme and unrestrained manner of how his first regime was one of the most corrupt in American history.

Because America will be ruled by a system of “competitive authoritarianism” under Dictator-Crime Boss Donald Trump, there will be no substantive accountability or consequences for such abuses of power and exploitation.

The ultimate goal of Donald Trump and his allies is to create a state of permanent emergency where he, like Hitler and other such dictators, will declare all of his heretofore criminal actions to be “legal” by definition. In such an arrangement, Trump the Great Leader and Big Boss is above the law while simultaneously being the embodiment of it. Power authority benefits flow to him and through him and the party and the movement.

In a recent conversation here at Salon, philosopher Jason Stanley warned:

What Trump really means is he's going to change all the laws, and then the new laws will enable him to do what he wants. According to the new laws, Trump will no longer be a dictator. The new laws that Trump puts in place will be about fealty to him. He will declare a state of emergency and change the laws.

These last few weeks have seen a rapid escalation in how Trump’s public threats and promises of how he will rule America as a de facto crime lord when and if he takes power in 2025 – an outcome that appears increasingly probable given his lead over President Biden in the polls.

Trump has repeatedly signaled that he supports prosecuting the Capitol Police and other law enforcement who defended democracy on Jan. 6 against the MAGA attack force as part of the ex-president’s coup plot.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump’s other Republican MAGA followers in Congress are now literally rewriting history and the events of Jan. 6 to conform with the Big Lie that there was simultaneously no coup attempt, the attack was actually “peaceful” and if there was violence (which is a documented fact) it was actually committed by Antifa, Black Lives Matter or some other “leftist” group as part of an elaborate "false flag" or psyop to discredit Donald Trump as a precursor to a “left-wing” takeover of the country. This Orwellian rewriting of history includes blurring the faces of Trump’s MAGA terrorists to protect them from prosecution for their obvious crimes.

On this, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains in her newsletter Lucid:

Authoritarianism revolves around the power to commit crimes with impunity. That is why protecting and promoting criminals and turning violent and corrupt activities into patriotic and necessary actions are always priorities of authoritarian parties and governments. The statement by Speaker of House Mike Johnson (R-LA) that House Republicans will blur footage from the Jan. 6 attack to help participants avoid being brought to justice is symptomatic.

When autocratic forces triumph, the rule of law becomes rule by the lawless. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, this will be the situation in the United States.

The party took a big step forward in the process of normalizing impunity when they made the methods and philosophy of the Jan. 6 attempted coup into party dogma. A 2022 GOP resolution decreed the assault on the Capitol to be "legitimate political discourse.” This rhetorical defense provides an "intellectual" rationale for the overturning of our democracy.

Normalizing impunity also means actively shielding participants in the coup attempt from being brought to justice and discrediting democratic institutions of justice in the eyes of the public. This is what keeper of the MAGA cult Johnson sought to do with his statement. "We have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ," he said.

As with everything Johnson says and does, this declaration was meant for an audience of one.  It was a loyalty performance meant to reassure Trump that the GOP will defend those who tried to save him from the awful fate of accepting democratic precedent and leaving office when he was voted out.

Like a mob boss and dictator, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s campaign and political committees have received at least 1.8 million dollars from the people that he pardoned before the end of his presidency. Trump is also promising to pardon the Jan. 6 terrorists – a group he describes as “patriots” who he has raised money for. From the Washington Post:

Never before had a president used his constitutional clemency powers to free or forgive so many people who could be useful to his future political efforts. A Washington Post review of Trump’s 238 clemency orders found that dozens of recipients, including Arpaio, have gone on to plug his 2024 candidacy through social media and national interviews, contribute money to his front-running bid for the Republican nomination or disseminate his false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election….

Experts say Trump’s abuse of the pardon power while in office was unprecedented in modern times.

“The Arpaio pardon previewed a whole different approach, in which the clemency power was going to be widely used to reward cronies and score points with constituents,” said Larry Kupers, who led the Justice Department office that reviewed clemency requests but left halfway through Trump’s presidency in protest of his approach. “It looked so transactional, in that it was furthering his own interests.”

Trump’s decision to return to politics, unlike many other one-term presidents, means that he can reap the benefits of that politically charged clemency process as he campaigns again for the White House.

Many of the campaign donors, Republican operatives and media pundits who made his clemency list were well-positioned to return the favor….

As former criminal defendants, these clemency recipients are particularly poised to amplify the former president’s attacks on a justice system that has brought 91 felony charges in two state and two federal indictments against him. Many of them are fueling one of the defining narratives spun by Trump for his 2024 campaign: a “two-tier” justice system in which the former president and his supporters are unjustly persecuted victims of a “political witch hunt.”

Trump has also publicly signaled that he will most certainly pardon himself and his agents who are convicted of any crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 coup attempt, the larger attempt to end American democracy, and more broadly.

Given Trump’s stated plans and threats to be a dictator, and to purge the government of anyone who is more loyal to the Constitution and rule of law than to him and the MAGA movement, this will mean that members of the new regime will be able to break the law with impunity as they follow through on his orders and vision to end democracy and civil society in America.

As the 2024 election approaches, and Trump is also facing increasing pressure from his criminal and civil trials, he is increasingly channeling Hitler and the Nazis with his threats of a “final battle”, talk about betrayal, and promises to rid the country of human “vermin” such as the Democrats, "the left", non-white migrants and refugees and other “undesirables” in order to “purify” the “blood of the nation”. Adolf Hitler is one of history’s greatest criminals. Trump in his admiration of Hitler and the Nazis and other dictator-criminals such as Putin is announcing that he shares their evil values and beliefs.

There is an additional aspect of the extreme dangers embodied by Trumpism and fascism as “legal crime” that the mainstream news media and commentariot have largely either ignored or been willfully blind to.

For several years, Donald Trump and his campaign have been issuing membership cards to the MAGA followers in exchange for their money. Trump has also created his “President’s Trust”, an even more “exclusive” group of supporters who he has tasked with “peacefully” defending “our movement no matter how vicious the endless witch hunts became.”

If Trump the dictator mob boss takes power, these membership cards and other such proof of loyalty will basically grant his followers the permission and power to engage in all manner of violence and harm and mayhem with the not unreasonable understanding that by being an official member of the MAGA movement they will be able to operate outside of the law as it applies to other people.

The dangers will be especially great for those people who are members of a community targeted as “the enemy” because of their race, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, sexual orientation and gender or some other marginalized identity.

The centrists, hope-peddlers, and happy pill sellers in the media and across the political class will instinctively reject such a scenario as being a symptom of “Trump derangement syndrome” or “hyperbole” or being “hysterical” because “American Exceptionalism."

As Jason Stanley said of such enabling and normalizing voices in our recent conversation, “Those like me, you, and a select group of others have been saying for years that Trump was a potential fascist dictator and there is a movement behind him. They dismissed us and laughed at us. Now instead of turning to those of us who were accurate and sounding the alarm years ago, the media is turning to people, supposed experts, who only now are realizing that we're facing a fascist, social and political movement. Such people should not be the ones turned to by the news media to be talking about the near-term future of Trump and this fascist movement and the danger. Why? They have quite clearly demonstrated total unreliability. For example, a person who is so late to this danger and reality can go back instantly to normalization. Who knows what someone who was so blatantly wrong for so long about social reality will believe or say?”

Of course, there will be loud voices soon to be silenced or otherwise muted who will shout in opposition to Dictator Crime Boss Trump and his regime that “But that’s illegal!” and “The Rule of Law!” and “What about the institutions!” to which Trump and his people will respond, “So what. We are the law!”

These are just the plain and unpleasant lessons of history and what commonly occurs when fascists, authoritarians, demagogues, autocrats, and other such political criminals and their organizations take power. The last seven years (and the decades of political and cultural breakdown that helped to create the Trumpocene) have shown that America is not immune from such forces.

By Chauncey DeVega

Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.