By Andy Brack | If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the years, it’s that people often will expose their souls and tell you exactly who they are. When they do, you need to take them at their word. They are exactly who they say they are.
So when Donald Trump says he’ll be a dictator for a day if he is elected to a second term as president, he’s not pussyfooting around. He’s telling America – the land of democracy, not autocracy – that he will be a dictator. That Hitlerian world view is real, not something that he will be able to turn off like a water spigot.
And as Washington Post Editor at Large Robert Kagan suggests, what happens if he doesn’t get everything done on Day One of being a dictator? Would there be a Day 2, 3, 4? Or maybe that would turn into freedom’s greatest nightmare – a dictator in the White House for four years who won’t follow the Constitution.
“The problem has never been knowing what to do,” Kagan wrote Dec. 7. “In the past, stopping Trump has required people taking risks and making sacrifices that they did not want to make, whether out of selfishness, fear or ambition.
“Today, the challenges are even greater but there is little evidence that the people we need to rise to the occasion are any more likely to do so than they have been for the past eight years.”
To thwart Trump, who has the backing of more than 50% of GOP voters in South Carolina according to a recent Winthrop Poll, the Republican Party needs to coalesce behind a single alternative candidate, Kagan says. And that needs to be former Gov. Nikki Haley, he said, “because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible.”
And the next big thing that must happen, he said, is that leaders from U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney to President Joe Biden must communicate over and over how Trump is unelectable because he is fundamentally unacceptable.
“Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and open disdain for the Constitution can become his greatest vulnerabilities – they might be his only vulnerabilities – if sufficiently highlighted for the American voter.”
But Haley and her foes aren’t exploiting Trump’s vulnerabilities. Rather, they seem to continually affirm his acceptability as president, Kagan writes. And the big problem is that unchallenged, he will get worse, issuing more threats and persecutions.
Trump’s increasingly authoritarian messaging, such as calling Democrats “vermin” – the same label Hitler gave to communists – has one seasoned South Carolina political observer seriously worried.
“These are truly dangerous times,” this politico shares. “Citizens must cast aside their political allegiances and not only take not, but say no to this rhetoric, to this movement and those promoting it. For those who suggest it can’t happen here, you are wrong. It can happen here, and it already is.”
Republicans not smitten by Trump, independents and Democrats need to coalesce now to do everything they can to make Trump and his red hats as unacceptable as Hitler and his brown shirts. Furthermore, the millions of registered American voters who didn’t bother to go to the polls in 2016 or 2020 have to wake up and participate to impede this smooth-talking Orange Menace from power. To fail to do so will risk everything that America stands for.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
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