Trump and the Trapped Country

[DonViejo]

For years, we debated whether Donald Trump would topple democracy. But the threat continues to come from the system itself.

By Corey Robin

March 13, 2021

Before the storming of the Capitol, it seemed as if Donald Trump might leave the White House the way he had come in—tweeting an average of thirty-five times a day and promising the world, “see you in court.” But that Trump, the Trump of litigation and bluster, lawsuits and tweets, disappeared on January 6th.

In a democratic election, candidates must will their way to victory or accept defeat. Trump could do neither, leaving him with the option that observers had long feared he would take: a violent assault on democracy itself. That the assault failed, and probably had nowhere to go had it succeeded, is important. That it was tried at all is also important.

The attack on the Capitol was the latest, and most significant, data point supporting the claim that Trump has practiced strongman politics, variously described as authoritarian, fascist, or tyrannical. The strongman thesis was supposed to capture something novel on the right: not its cruelty or racism, which had long been observed by scholars and journalists, but its potential to end democracy itself. For many liberals and leftists, Trump threatened the people’s power to determine their future. While this idea provoked much debate during the Trump years, January 6th seemed to settle it. Even the sharpest critics of the thesis were shaken from their skepticism.

Yet if the fear behind the strongman thesis was the eclipse of democracy, we still have reason for concern—less because of a tyrant looming on the right than because of a paralysis of political agency across the board. The signal quality of Trump’s Presidency was not how unusual it was but how emblematic it was. In all likelihood, the first two years of the Biden Administration will see little transformative legislation and a lot of executive orders. (The stimulus bill may augur fundamental changes down the road, but its most redistributive provisions are temporary and will face major challenges upon their expiration.) It will look, in other words, like Trump’s Presidency and all but the first two years of Obama’s. It will mark twelve years of an era in which the call of the voters is answered by the palsy of our institutions.

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