After the first two criminal indictments of the former president the once-upon-a-time Teflon Don’s lead on the field of GOP candidates had risen from 15 percent to 29 percent over the second-highest polling candidate and nobody besides Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 22 percent was in double digits. Meanwhile, his “war chest” to defend himself continues to grow with some 20 percent of those giving having allegedly not done so before.
Last Sunday night Donald Trump made his first Michigan campaign speech in Novi months ahead of the 2024 election. Trump was as defiant as usual calling the indictments a “badge of honor.” As Trump accepted the Oakland County Republican Party’s Man of the Decade award, he also claimed that transitioning to electric vehicles would “decimate” the state of Michigan.
Trump’s other takeaways included attacks on Joe Biden, transgender athletes, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer – not by name — for “giving away hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Michigan taxpayer money to Chinese companies.”
Concerning the indictments and the other investigations, Trump stated:
“If these corrupt persecutions succeed, they will complete their takeover of this country and they will destroy your way of life in the United States of America forever. It will be forever destroyed; we’ll never be able to come back from that.”
The twice impeached, twice indicted former president finished his rambling speech by saying, “In the end, they’re not after me. They’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way. We’re not going to let anything happen to us.”
Although many now expect Trump to receive the 2024 GOP nomination, and odds makers are giving the former president a 30 percent chance of defeating President Biden in a rematch, compared to his eight percent chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, I believe that Trump will lose the popular vote by more than ten million votes should he still be the 2024 nominee of the Republican Party.
Accordingly, I contend that when the baneful saga of Donald Trump finally comes to a long overdue ending, his legacy, if the GOP can survive his political debacle will include a party that rejects American constitutionalism, is about deconstructing the state or emptying out as much as possible the executive branch, the department of justice, the environmental protection agency, the Consumer Protection Agency, and so on by swapping in or substituting for those professional experts and public servants who have taken an oath to the U.S. Constitution ideological true believers in Trump-like anti-democratic authoritarianism.
This preoccupation of Trump which has always been to clear out and not clean up the Department of Justice, which has been investigating and has now indicted and will shortly be prosecuting the former president for his smorgasbord of political crimes and his strong desire to dissolve almost 50 years of an “independent” attorney general with a reconstituted and weaponized AG as in the case of his last “fixer” Bill Barr, has also become a preoccupation of the Republican Party.
In other words, it is not only whether Trump is elected president again in 2024, but also other Republicans such as DeSantis or former Vice President Mike Pence. If not in 2024, or even in 2028, these Republicans would like nothing better than to perpetuate Trumpism without Trump.
In a similar vein, as the so-called “nationalist” or “populist” conservatives grow increasingly “enthusiastic about using the state to enforce a particular social order” as in the decisions of the alt-right SCOTUS, the Republican Party has also “begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.”
In many ways, this is simply Republican “business as usual” as “business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics.”
After all, the nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors have always been full of family-owned businesses from car dealerships to food franchises and from construction companies to landscaping businesses.
Among those elements that distinguish these closely held models of ownership from multinational corporations are the degrees to which these businesses are understood to be extensions of the business owners that appear to exercise total authority over their places of production so long as their employees have not organized and established a union.
As New York Times political columnist Jamelle Bouie concluded, “If the nature of our work shapes our values – if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it – then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those habits and pathologies, to political office.”
That was the case in spades with respect to Donald Trump where there was no separation between the POTUS and the Trump Organization. Moreover, as the Republican Party came to wrap itself around the lawless and fraudulent Trump, and as the GOP came to shape itself around the Trump persona, it also adopted his anomic and nihilistic worldview, and the ideology of a crime boss no less.
No longer content to run government for businesses’ sake, the Republican Party as with Trump now wants to run the government as though it was their very own privately owned business. However, this “doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry, it means instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.”
The current struggle between democratic and anti-democratic forces in the context of revolutions and civil wars – ours and other nations’ — takes us to the heart of the matter in America as analyzed by biologist and climatologist turned political historian, Peter Turchin, in his recently published “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration” that addresses the iron laws of oligarchy and wealth pumps that always take from the poorest and the masses in order to giveth to the richest persons and corporations.
This is the historical situation in which the United States has found itself since President Ronald Reagan took office in 1980.
In a nutshell, the contemporary crisis in government is about intra-elite competition and conflict on the one hand, and about the weakened legitimacy of the state, its laws, and institutions, on the other hand, as both of these political conditions are exacerbated by the economic conditions of elite overproduction and popular immiseration.
Fortunately, the “reintegration” of these types of political-economic crises has been resolved in America’s past. We can incorporate those successful remedies used previously.
However, going forward I am arguing in the forthcoming book, “Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy,” that in order to be most effective against the fight for authoritarianism and to preclude the next cycle of U.S. institutional failure from happening again, we must also transform our present constitutional democracy from a “tyranny of the minority” to a “tyranny of the majority.”
Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, co-founder and former North American editor of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, and author of “Criminology on Trump.” He is currently writing a sequel, “Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy,” to be published in early 2024.
