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From a comment on Reddit’s Daystrom Institute, a Star Trek subreddit:
The framing of this statement made it clear they were switching from talking of a specific fictional character to obliquely mentioning former President Donald Trump. So, I have a question for the non-Trumpers, never-Trumpers, and former Trumpers of The Motte: prior to and excluding the events of January 6, did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might? And if so, whose opinion on the matter did you value?
(Please note that you will probably not convince me personally, and a Gish gallop will make me even less likely to listen to your arguments.)
None of the above. Any person with such aspirations was handed a wonderful gift, a global pandemic and a population and intelligentsia that revealed itself to be overwhelmingly in favor of anything sold as helping to fight the pandemic. It's even better than a war. The pandemic can't surrender, and the people won't rise up and start burning their draft cards.
Trump didn't do anything to capitalize on this fantastic opportunity for any would-be dictator.
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Something that is endlessly frustrating to me: Hitler isn't infamous for wanting to "end democracy", he is infamous for the industrialized extermination of millions of people in death camps. Do I think Trump wanted to construct death camps and lock millions of people inside of gas chambers and kill them and then bury them in mass graves? No. Do I think Trump wanted to set up a secret police force to go house to house and look for members of some ethno-religious group and then load them onto train cars and send them to death camps where they would either be vivisected, starved to death, or force into gas chambers? No.
I think Trump wanted to build a wall to prevent illegal immigration, and to avoid the US getting pulled into another world war. It is a source of endless frustration to me the work that American Liberals are doing to rehabilitate adolf fucking hitler into "a bad guy with some bad ideas about elections".
At this point, Hitler/fascist/Nazi are just political jargons for "a-hole" in the progressive dictionary. I don't believe we have another Hitler of our time that's threatening world peace. The hawks apparently want a cold war 2 with Russia and China. Well fine, but culture wars at home do not achieve any unity abroad.
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In short: no.
In long: in the beginning, he seemed not too different than other politicians. Lots of smiling, hand-shaking, and declaiming the other side as evil ne'er-do-wells. With time, though, and the demands of the office, I came to see him as a person far out of his league. Not a good administrator. Not a good leader. Not a good engineer. Great at speaking to a certain sort of crowd and turning up the emotions, but that seems to be his only skill. I also found his denial of election results disgusting.
For an example, read the Paris Climate Accord speech. He starts it off by talking about how great America is doing, how many jobs he and his party have given Americans, etc. Off topic. Worse, a cheap shot of flattering his audience, almost insulting. Then he goes over the reasons for getting out of the accord. There he gives some good reasons, but fails to put them together into a well constructed argument. The average themotte user could do better here. I mean, he makes claims full of pathos, without much backing. He loves the American worker. He loves the coal miner. They're his people. So we should mine coal (what about the country's energy policy? Why can't we have nice, dense energy production like nuclear? Why is the coal miner better than my children and grand children, who could have much better lives if we switched to clean, abundant nuclear energy?) And then, throughout the whole piece, you have little snarky remarks about the blue tribe. He and his tribe are working hard to help the American, but the other tribe isn't doing anything, just standing around with their hands in their pockets. Come on, this is high-school-level mockery--at least hit them with something that matters, I mean it's not like the blue tribe doesn't do stupid things.
If we're talking about providing cheap entertainment, he's your man. But if we're talking about leading the country through the tumultuous beginnings of a new century? Bah.
Because he exists? Your children and grandchildren might, but the coal miner is alive now and trying to live in the world today, and hopefully make any kind of world at all for his children and grandchildren. Why are your children and grandchildren better than his?
Also do you really think Trump would have been treated better if he'd backed out of Paris to ramp up nuclear?
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Doesn't this argument justify all short-term thinking?
Also, why can't the coalminer find a different job? Yes, there's both a physical and mental cost to this. But does that justify forcing 330 million citizens to live under a worse energy policy so that 62 thousand of them don't have to re-educate themselves into a different profession? This is the USA--many people here have careers that span half a dozen professions.
I never said that, nor was it implied.
Treated better--by whom? His enemies would be just as critical of him as they were always. His supporters would be just as supportive. A small handful of people who care about energy policy would be happy.
Doesn't the absence of this argument justify working everyone to death in Elon Musk's rocket factories in a desperate attempt to seize the cosmic endowment even one second faster?
This is, of course, a rhetorical question. Yes it does, and Bostrom proved it mathematically some years ago:
https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
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Your argument justifies any and all long term thinking the same way what I said justifies short. Both are necessary for a functional society however. And I would argue that in this situation, where we are required to make a trade off between them, we should go with the one that doesn't hurt people who actually physically exist.
As for the coal miners "forcing 330 million citizens to live under a worse energy policy so that 62 thousand of them don't have to re-educate themselves into a different profession" avoiding that sounds fantastic. Sadly however, it also sounds fantastic, as in not based in reality. Which countries have benefited from shutting down coal power?
Also you implied your grandchildren are better than his to the exact same extent that Trump implied that coal miner is better than your grandchildren. If you never implied it, neither did Trump.
Regarding nuclear, you are right that his enemies would not be less critical than they currently are. Because they would be a thousand times more critical. Environmentalists don't care about the benefits of nuclear power, they are too concerned about the potential dangers.
Edit: forgot a word
I'll concede that my long-term thinking argument was a slippery slope. I should have constrained it by something like "moving to nuclear power sooner rather than later will be advantageous in this half century."
I'm not sure I understand your question about which countries have benefited from shutting down coal power. I want to say--all of them--which is why more governments are building reactors. India and China are building multiple reactors, and I suspect the cleanliness of the energy is secondary to its abundance, which also entails a larger degree of sovereignty. This seems obvious to me, which is why I think we're coming at this from very different angles. What's good about coal power? Does it outweigh the benefits of cheaper, more abundant sources?
I don't think his enemies would be a thousand times more critical. They're already at max critique. They'd critique him for using the wrong side of toilet paper to wipe his butt. Note that I don't consider myself in that camp. I just think he's lacking as a leader.
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I thought then and think now he's a corrupt huckster and a clown, and I'm sure he would like to be a dictator (I don't think he respects the rule of law or the Constitution whatsoever), but because he's petty and egotistical and would love a world in which no one can tell him no, not because he has anything as coherent as a fascist ideology.
But he's not the first president who wanted in his heart to rule as an emperor, and so far our checks and balances have prevented that. Trump fans decry the "Deep State" for foiling him, but much of that was simply the obstructionism that was built into our system of government by design.
I think the people decrying the deep state were getting at the notion that Trump was put under an isolated demand for rigor, and that if he aligned with their ideology, they would not have been as obstructive. The essay about resisting Trump from inside his administration was notable for a reason, and it was a man who didn't even work directly for Trump, but for his DHS secretary.
I think there is a degree of truth to that (certainly many people within the government disliked Trump and opposed him, passive-aggressively if not with outright insubordination), but I think this is dramatically overstated by his followers. Every president has had to contend with an entrenched bureaucracy that is willing to wait them out, in a system that's set up to make it hard for presidents to just sweep away all opposition to their agenda.
But has it been to the extent Trump was scrutinized? It seems kind of obvious that he was different and repulsive to the people who made up the administration's staff in a way previous presidents were not.
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I'm struggling to think of examples of, e.g., Obama being hamstrung by uncooperative executive bureaucracies.
I do think that at the point that generals are lying to the President and deliberately disobeying directives, that rises to a level of insubordination worthy of being called exceptional.
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Literally Hitler 2? No. Wannabe authoritarian? Yes. Trump was - to the consistent rage of his supporters - too bounded by American institutions to consolidate power (and too incompetent to effectively dismantle them), but the spirit was willing.
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No. First, I never believed he would seriously run, then like everyone else I accepted that Hillary would win. His victory was a total surprise to me, and to be honest, rather enjoyable for the amount of seething and screeching about it. I thought the "basket of deplorables" remark was very badly done, and of course it was a gift to the Trump campaign.
I didn't think he was the Anti-christ cross between Hitler and Stalin who was going to set up a Fourth Reich to imprison and torture women, minorities, and gays that the more hysterical online reaction was painting him as. The same way I did not believe all the hype about Obama being a lightworker, but rather a career politician who would get some things right, some things wrong, but in the main it would be business as usual, I thought Trump would be a one-term president who didn't do all that much and he was certainly not going to start the Third World War.
And guess what, he didn't! The country ended up pretty much the same at the end of his term as it was at the start. The one thing that really amazed me, and it has only paid off in Biden's time in office and not in Trump's, was the Supreme Court decision on Roe versus Wade. After the years of Republicans running on "trust us, we'll do something about it" and nothing happening, the fact that a loudmouth, vain, no previous experience guy who was more interested in building a business brand was the one to actually get something achieved, who kept his word about doing something, was astonishing to me.
It honestly doesn't surprise me because it's pretty clear that Trump had systematically alienated every section of the competent, institutional right except for Catholic conservatives, and overturning Roe has been their #1 priority since 1973. Also their #2, 3, and 4 priorities.
Of course a regime that is now staffed with them will put together the court that overturns the ruling they've wanted gone more than anything else in the world for fifty years.
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Mostly no, I considered that such fears were overblown, that he was "just" an incompetent and boisterous asshole that people elected as a big "fuck you" to the establishment and especially the sanctimonious "I know better what's the best for you racist rednecks so shut up and listen to your betters" left.
However, I saw his refusal to accept the election outcomes as despicable, showing that maybe in fact he would have liked to strong-arm his way into staying if power if he could get away with it.
However, part of the blame for that seems to be the crappy electoral system in the US, especially the lack of voter ID which is just baffling. If people don't trust the system, the proper response is to make the system more trust-worthy, not to tar anybody voicing criticism as a fascist.
I mostly made my opinion of Trump by reading his Twitter. I don't trust journalists to give an accurate portrayal of Trump, they have a "boy who cried Hitler" problem.
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My opinion of Trump circa 2016 (that I think has largely been borne out) was that he would be like Silvio Berlusconi. He would be corrupt, he would be outrageous, he would weaken existing norms, he would drag political discourse into the mud and create a lot of drama. But the country wouldn't be much worse off after him.
The January 6th thing does make me think he was more sinister. I assumed that he had little interest in actually illegally seizing any power, because he had no interest in actually exercising it. But even all the "stolen election" bullshit seems more focused on his personal pride rather than any dictatorial aim.
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As old guard of the Motte will know, I have always been extremely anti-Trump. I don't think I ever regarded him quite as a Hitler in the making, and pieces like this this Andrew Sullivan op-ed from 2016 struck me as at the very least hyperbolical. My main concern about Trump (besides deep doubts about his basic competence) was that he had scant regard for political norms, and would badly weaken the invisible pillars of liberal democracy in a way that could facilitate more explicit forms of tyranny in future from both right and left. An historical analogy here might be someone like Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose largely ineffectual pro-fascism paved the way for Mussolini.
Trump's greatest weakness in my mind was that, contra Teddy Roosevelt's advice, he spoke in a loud voice and carried a small stick, effecting little significant change while simultaneously alienating moderates and creating bad precedents. What the GOP would have benefited from instead, in my view, would have been someone who could have positioned themselves rhetorically as the sensible adult in the room while simultaneously quietly pushing back against progressivism via things like judicial appointments and spending bills.
Since you're asking about broad sentiments rather than requesting a detailed case, I'll leave it there for now, but happy to elaborate if you wish.
Do you think there is any merit to the argument that all he did was short-cut a lot of them? Even the "election denial" is always done, it's just normally run through deniable paid secondaries, like Jill Stein. From my view, a lot of the things people hyperventilate about Trump doing is just what they have always done, with one or two steps of deniability eliminated.
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I won't quite say they were spoiled for choices in this regard, but in 2016 you had at the very least Rubio, Kasich, and Jeb! as Responsible Adult candidates and... they didn't do well. As more than one observer has remarks, the great irony of Trump winning is that any of the above would have been far more effective at achieving conservative policy (judicial appointments, repealing Obama's executive policies, etc...) where Trump's mixture of incompetence and naked intent to discriminate constantly undermined his own efforts on that front.
Trump had two qualities that set him apart from the "responsible adult" candidates. First a willingness to entertain outside views. For all the accusations of him being a closet authoritarian and being unable to take criticism his staffing choices were notably devoid of the usual "yes men". If anything he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid them. Second, and most important in the eyes of the GOP base, he displayed a willingness to stand and fight. As I've said before, if Cruz had told Trump to go fuck himself when Trump made that comment about his wife's looks during the debate or gone full scorched earth-on the Washington Post for going after his kids and their elementary school teacher, Cruz would have been the 46th POTUS. That he didn't, was interpreted as a sign that he lacked the 'grit' required to stand up for his own, and by extension his voters' interests, and that perception is ultimately what lost him the race.
100% agreed. "He fights" was the #1 reason people were willing to put up with all of Trump's other obvious faults. It doesn't matter if Cruz was better on every policy, failing to react to attacks on his wife and kids was fatal to an electorate who just wanted a candidate to treat the media like the hostile operatives of the Democrat party they are.
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Trump repeatedly telegraphed that he would not accept the election outcome if he lost. There was a distinct sense that we'd all become very familiar with the post-election process because there's no way he'd ever concede.
I mostly considered him too incompetent/lazy to stage a proper coup, not that he would be against one on principled grounds of respect for democracy or whatever.
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At no point did I believe (nor do I believe now) that Trump is an authoritarian who is willing to usurp the democratic government. Bad president, yes. But nowhere near the wannabe Hitler zone, that (imo) is a completely unfounded fear.
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In the earlier years of his presidency he couldn't even build a wall, so I never thought he could build a dynasty.
He didn't seize the reins of power when people were begging him to do it in the COVID era, which laid my remaining doubts to rest.
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