Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy

More than three years have elapsed since former President Donald Trump nearly got former Vice President Mike Pence killed, if not by executive order (pun intended), then by sheer narcissistic disregard for Pence’s life. Pence had rebuffed the former president’s badgering demands that he violate his oath to honour the U.S. Constitution by decertifying state electors, duly chosen by American voters, during the U.S. Congressional proceeding on January 6 2021 to officially count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. As the law clearly states, ‘the role of the President of the Senate [that is, the Vice President] while presiding over the joint session shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties.’ The Vice President ‘shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.’

At the Ellipse south of the White House on the morning of January 6, after months of relentless litigation in which he lost 61 of 62 court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election results (with 22 Republican judges and 10 Trump-appointed judges presiding, and the sole victory not altering the election results), Trump misled the crowd into believing that Pence could ensure a Trump re-election by ‘doing the right thing’, knowing full well that he could not. Moreover, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump said of his audience: ‘I don’t [f—ing] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me… They can march to the Capitol from here.’ Hours later, of course, after Trump told them to ‘fight like hell’, January 6 rioters marched to the U.S. Capitol and stormed through the doors, many of them chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, as U.S. Congressmen barely escaped with their lives.

What lesson can we assume Trump learned from this? Never mind the constant stream of reports that Trump entertains the prospect of weaponising the U.S. Department of Justice in a vindictive campaign to persecute political opponents—or in Trump’s terms, his enemies—who have tried to hold him and his co-conspirators accountable. We got our answer when he selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has declared that he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that Trump should ignore ‘illegitimate’ Supreme Court rulings. Vance has also embraced the views of an influential far-right blogger who does not believe in democracy and argues that the country requires an absolute monarch, even a tyrant, to purge a purported oligarchy of progressive automatons who populate and rule a ‘cathedral’ of mainstream American institutions where insidious left-wing ideology is ubiquitous. Vance, it can be safely assumed, was chosen as a ‘yes man’ for a presidential nominee who exercises complete control over a Republican party that, in the words of Senator Mitt Romney, ‘really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.’

In the wake of the unforgivable attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, House Speaker Mike Johnson has implored America’s two political parties to tone down the rhetoric, as if the delusions of a lunatic assassin, whose motives remain an enigma, can be traced directly to the overheated rhetoric of a political environment which Trump himself has supercharged with his own long history of apocalyptic demonisation of immigrant ‘invaders’, blistering rants against political opponents, and proto-fascist MAGA harangues.

It was almost a year ago that Trump mocked and joked about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband after an assailant fractured the latter’s skull with a hammer. In 2020, ABC News identified 54 criminal cases of violence, threats, and assaults in which the evidentiary record indicated that Trump had been invoked by an assailant (e.g., ‘This is for Trump’). In 2016, Trump callously mocked a handicapped reporter. In 2015, Trump, who avoided the draft, denied that the late Senator John McCain was a war hero because ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young recently provided a catalogue of instances in which Trump has encouraged or stoked violence. Finally, Trump resurrected the Dark Side of American politics by claiming that Mexico sends drug lords and rapists over the border, conceding only as an afterthought that ‘some, I assume, are good people.’

The January 6 insurrection was perhaps the most dramatic spectacle of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric and behaviour. But it was far from being a singular case. Trump has since claimed that he would like to be dictator for a day (wink, wink). He has claimed that presidential immunity for official acts means that his 34-count felony conviction in the recent New York ‘hush money’ case should be overturned, even though he paid money to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to bury the story of their affair before he was elected president in 2016. This case, by the way, exposed sordid details about his possible rape (on my reading) of Daniels while his wife was at home with their newborn son. In short, Trump is a man accustomed to possessing the kind of invincible and audacious power of men whose complicity in rape culture was epitomised by Trump’s remark that he can ‘grab [women] by the pussy’ without repercussion.

America is in imminent danger of succumbing to a proto-fascist movement reminiscent of the antidemocratic rumblings that shook the world in the interwar period of the first half of the 20^th century. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting partial immunity to the former president, in a ruling that defers to lower courts to ascertain whether Trump’s plot to overturn election results in 2020 constituted an ‘official act’, has set a precedent whereby a lame-duck president unhappy with his election defeat can devise a plot to alter the results of the election and thereby disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, all the while taking comfort in the non-negligible probability that he will not be held accountable. (Trump certainly has not been held accountable by his legions of supporters who would not only hold fast in their blind allegiance even if the former president shot someone on Fifth Avenue but also deride any attempts to hold him accountable in a court of law before an independent jury as ‘show trials.’)

As much as President Joe Biden may deserve his historically low job approval ratings, it nevertheless has been a relief that, in the months and years after he was inaugurated, he restored a refreshing normalcy to the executive office after the insurrectionary crimes of former President Trump. In my lifetime, I have watched several former presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama—face severe rebuke and censure for allegedly abusing the office of the presidency. Not once did it occur to me, however, that any of these presidents ever had even the faintest intention of being crowned an American Caesar. To say that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy is not rhetorical excess. It is an incontrovertible fact.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp