227 - Wannabe Caesars: Dangerous Loudmouths All, and Corrupt

Trump and Putin

            Putin and Trump are a pair. And their malevolent messages and sheer notoriety keeps inspiring others.  Putin not only revels in his destruction of Ukraine, accusing it once again of alleged Nazification, a fully falsified absurd allusion based an unwitting mistake in Canada's House of Commons.  Trump, meanwhile, channeling Putin, declares openly that he seeks dictatorial powers -- from Day 1.  And he means nothing less.

            Saturday, Trump repeated a Putin utterance to support his claims of being persecuted; but Putin was taking inaccurate potshots at American democracy that Trump was prepared to magnify and endorse. Trump echoed Putin by saying that the United States was "in hell." Using the hate speech that he nearly always employs, he declared that immigrants (that's all of us, and his father) were "poisoning the blood of our country."  His opponents were "backstabbing establishment losers."  And so on. Earlier, Trump deployed a noun from Hitler's litany and vowed to "root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin" within the U. S.

            Unwittingly, but in the manner of a wannabe Caesar, Trump was also echoing the hate speech of Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-based Roman Catholic priest, in the 1920s and 1930s. On radio, Coughlin throughout that decade retailed vicious antisemitism combined with praise for Hitler. He staunchly defended the state-sponsored violence of the real Nazi regime, and deadly attacks on Jews that were precursors to the extermination of the Holocaust.

            There are worries about "hate speech" in the universities and once more on X.  But no speechifying is more harmful in this country than the vituperations and lies that Trump utters on the supposed campaign trail, or in courtrooms.  Lies are not protected speech, except when a motormouth former president spews them endlessly, day after day, about judges, prosecutors, his direct Republican opponents and our president.  The last is defamed over and over, accused incorrectly of this malfeasance and that malfeasance, none of which is true.  And now the extreme Republicans and their owlish Speaker are trying to link the sad case of a troubled son-of-Biden to his father despite -- as the press reiterates over and over -- a complete lack of evidence. Impeachment in Republican hands has become a fund-raising vehicle, nothing more.

            What have these United States come to?  How can God-fearing evangelical Christians, no less, abide a foul-mouthed, serial sexual predator, who now proclaims himself a dictator in waiting -- negating the very core beliefs on which the nation was founded and has conducted itself for almost 250 years?  Do potential voters not believe Trump when he himself says that he wants to upend the democratic ethos that is our nation's most distinctive and long-esteemed virtue and code of political conduct? "Tens of millions of Americans," laments David Remnick in the New Yorker, are "undeterred by the prospect of absolutism, cruelty, and corruption on the horizon."

           Trump promises to tear apart the civil service that every president from Chester Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt has attempted to strengthen. He promises to replace trusted bureaucrats -- the very people who have kept the nation running well through depressions, recessions, world wars, the Cold War, nuclear threats, and existential battles like the one with which we are now engaged with Putin, and with Xi Jinping. Trump wants his own people.  He wants acolytes who will only obey his erratic and self-serving (and self-monetizing) instincts. Do the American people (or a sizable segment) really prefer Putin's orange-faced disciple to a leader who embraces the public interest and identifies and who has always identified with underdogs, the downtrodden, and honest not underhanded methods of keeping America's greatness going?

            Trump promises to give Putin a bye, too. There is a real danger that a Trump presidency would abandon NATO (and Europe) and leave what is left of Ukraine dangling precariously in the winds of denial. He might once again try to sweet talk Kim Jong-un of North Korea, disrupting our alliance with South Korea and our ties to Japan. Or he might well blunder into a global-shaking war with China, having meanwhile dislodged his military chiefs and marginalized our necessary military prowess. There is no end to the damage a self-professed, self-anointed, wannabe dictator can do to this legacy democracy. Nor should we underestimate how thoroughly Trump has already and would continue to diminish the soft power standing of these United States in the world, certainly in the global south but even in the democratic fastnesses of Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

            Already, the Trump-Putin combination has let loose a cascade of would be Caesars across the globe, potentates whose publics might have been less receptive if the examples of Putin and Trump had not already been displayed. A very recently elected president in Argentina shoots his mouth off not as an outlier, but as a distant disciple of both Putin and Trump. Jair Bolsonaro, the electorally defeated former president of Brazil, consciously modeled his behavior on Trump's, and gleefully aroused the kinds of outrage that eventually led to his electoral defeat.

            Elsewhere in Latin America there are three presidents who stand with Trump in terms of their methods, their contempt for their publics, and their determination to crack the whip of a strong man, ruling their peoples harshly, in some cases brutally: President Nikolas Maduro of Venezuela predates Trump, but learns from him anyway. In the last two decades he has systematically stripped his people of their livelihoods and their freedoms, all for the benefit of a ruling elite that masquerades as ideologically socialist.  Once the wealthiest country in South America thanks to its abundant supplies of oil, Venezuela is now poor, its people suffering vast food shortages and little chances of employment. They flee to Colombia, and then head for the Darien Gap and the arduous trail to the northern edge of Mexico, seeking asylum across the border. Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, his predecessor, criminalized a once prosperous polity and funneled the proceeds into their pockets and the pockets of cronies.

            Farther north El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has reduced gang violence and killings by ignoring any notion of judicial due process and detaining large numbers of his own people on suspicion (rarely proved) of gang affiliation.  Although El Salvador, like many Latin American countries, limits presidents to a single term, Bukele is running again for election in February, using six months between November and June, when his reinauguration will take place, as a supposed sabbatical insisted upon by El Salvador's Supreme Court in exchange for a new (illegal) term in office.

            In nearby Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, the married duo that are joint autocrats, Roman style, exploded last week when a comely citizen was crowned Miss Universe. They (president and vice-president) became vindictive against the new Miss Universe, her Nicaraguan sponsor, and anyone associated with such a threat to their dictatorial state.  Ortega helped mobilize Sandinista rebels against Somoza, a military overlord who had terrorized the banana-growing republic north of (peaceful) Costa Rica from 1937 to 1956.  Later Ortega won and lost real elections. But since his return to power at the ballot  box in 2007,  he and his deputy and wife have turned Nicaragua into yet another criminalized state where all proceeds, legitimate or not, enrich Ortega and his family.

            The young colonels who last year and this have overthrown well-respected liberal administrations across Africa, or who are biding their time in other jurisdictions, are equally empowered by the Trump-Putin examples, by the immensely hegemonic quality of China in Asia and Chinese muscle everywhere.  Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed,  Nobel Peace Prize winner, is one of those African Caesars.  So is President Emmerson Manangagwa in Zimbabwe and Paul Biya in Cameroon.

            Communist-led Vietnam and Laos are equally motivated. And so must be Myanmar, run by a junta desperate to maintain control.  Cambodia is a further country obedient to the wishes of its unrelenting dictator (and his son and heir).

            Further little Caesars, but playing unfortunately decisive roles in contemporary affairs, are such troublemakers and despotic discriminators (against some of their own subjects) as Hungarian President Viktor Orban, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Tunisia's President Kais Saied, and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (the so far successful persecutor of 200 million Indian Muslims).

             A recent British book (Ferdinand Mount, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson, Bloomsbury, 2023) defines the phenomenon as "aspiring dictators intent on destroying existing institutions and establishing themselves as the maker and breaker of laws."  Caesars employ "violence, law-breaking...lying...on a huge...scale." They rig the system to support their ambitions. "All wannabe Caesars rely heavily on the ability of propaganda to crowd out more factual history."

            If we want as Americans to continue to enjoy democratic, tolerant, honest government, we must guard against such Caesarism, and Trumpism and Putinism. We must be on guard against shameless doublespeak and the spreading of scurrilous falsehoods. We must fight back against those who would scapegoat Kurds, African immigrants, Haitian escapees, or Central American migrants for job losses or other difficult societal problems. Otherwise, we will soon find ourselves following depression-era Germans, contemporary Indians and Hungarians, and too  many of the globe's citizens into the dungeons of despotism. Let us halt the spread of such self-aggrandizers, now.