What did Michael Cohen mean by this?
“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.”
Cohen’s testimony—which described our president as being like a mob boss, speaking in cryptic code that communicates an ongoing thuglike criminal intent—was shocking at times, and deeply disturbing most of all. But reflecting that Trump might try to cling to office even after defeat at the polls was like looking into the abyss.
A quick reminder: There has never, in the history of the United States, been a president who was defeated for re-election who did not peacefully depart the office with no attempt to use its power to remain in it. Never. Not even a hint, though there have been 10 incumbents who lost re-election.
It’s one thing for someone outside of Trump’s circle, particularly anyone who’s opposed Trump, to say such a thing. I recall seeing the jaws of my hosts in Australia drop to the floor last September when I similarly suggested that we have no reason to believe that Trump would concede an electoral defeat, and that as a consequence the election would be extraordinarily fraught. But that’s me, someone long suspicious of the man’s intentions.
However, we’re talking about the man who was Donald Trump’s legal fixer for ten years. A man who once said he’d take a bullet for Trump. But a man who now believes the person to whom he gave his loyalty is in fact a “racist, a con man, and a cheat.”
Cohen’s closing note—which felt something like a cryptic warning—came as he put the finishing touches on describing the president he knows as a conniving charlatan who gets his way the same way any mob boss does, by demanding undying fealty from his underlings: by being an absolute authoritarian.
Cohen provided a little more context by noting that he had long been party to Trump’s wrongdoings, but that he could no longer bear “silence and complicity in the face of the daily destruction of our basic norms and civility to one another” as a consequence. Among the most longstanding of those norms, of course, has been the peaceful handover of power by American politicians when they lose elections.
Yet Trump himself raised the specter of an American president who refused to leave office even before winning election in 2016, when he adamantly refused to say whether or not he would concede the election to Hillary Clinton if he were to lose, telling a debate audience coyly, “I'll tell you at the time. … I'll keep you in suspense, okay?” He set the stage to never concede the election if he chose not to. “This whole election is being rigged,” Trump would tell his roaring crowds. “The whole thing is one big fix. One big ugly lie. It’s one big fix.”
At a press conference held to announce whether he would concede, Trump told reporters:
“I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all of the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election . . . If I win.”
The outcome negated any need to test Trump’s willingness to ignore precedent, of course.
Politico’s Jack Shafer has reviewed Trump’s options, and the reality is that he doesn’t have many when it comes to clinging to power, although postponing the election always remains one of them—and breaking precedent seems less like an obstacle with this president than it does an incentive. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observes, Trump’s odds of success would be extremely low.
However, Trump himself has rarely been dissuaded by low odds, if his history as a politician is anything to judge by. Moreover, there is one possibility that neither Shafer nor Blake pays much attention to, but which happens to be the scenario a classic populist authoritarian might deploy: an appeal to a popular uprising to prevent his removal. In other words, greenlighting a civil war.
Certainly his most ardent defenders in the conspiracy-theory-loving far Right have been hankering for exactly that solution to their simmering hatred of all things liberal for a very long time. There is no shortage of heavily armed militiamen in rural America with large basement arsenals, itchy trigger fingers, and a hatred of the government.
As Blake suggests, that option is also likely doomed to fail. Even the likely potential involvement of Erik Prince and his high-tech mercenary operation, which is close to Trump himself and has tentacles inside the armed forces, is not a scenario in which any insurgent force could overthrow the constitutional American government. Maybe just as concerning is that Trump’s powers as president are disturbingly immense, leaving him vast leeway to wreak immense harm.
But even in ultimate failure, any of these scenarios would entail large numbers of casualties, both among insurgents and among the civilians and first responders who would be their most likely immediate targets. Inchoate rage, especially when coupled with megalomaniacal greed, creates many victims.
The problem is that this scenario becomes more likely as Trump himself becomes increasingly authoritarian when his power is challenged. We’ll be seeing more and more of this as the year proceeds, along with the 2020 presidential campaign, not to mention likely revelations from multiple investigations into the president’s now-established criminal dealings. The most troubling aspect of all this is that, while everyone’s focus will be on Trump and his authoritarian leadership, we also need to pay attention to his army of authoritarian followers, which remains large and hysterically defensive of him.
One of the core traits of right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities is their proclivity to conspiracism. One study found that conspiracy theories seem to be more compelling to “those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large.” They often long for a supposed 1950s-style America with lawns and cul-de-sacs, and are angry that the world no longer works that way. While the mainstream media simply presents the world as it is, conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain to them why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has taken that alien shape.
Conspiracism creates a toxic mindset, a worldview in which the world is actually being run by secretive, powerful schemers intent on suppressing the believers, against whose immense power an ordinary individual is almost entirely powerless. Even their neighbors are suspect. People who are “red-pilled,” as the conspiracy-loving alt-righters have dubbed themselves, see themselves as awake to actual reality, utterly detached from their communities, and fighting a desperate battle with only the help of their fellow conspiracists against truly dark and evil forces.
Alex Jones constantly describes his targets as “demonic.” It’s not just a bleak world; it’s one in which people can become overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and anger. That’s one of the primary reasons conspiracist beliefs are so often associated with horrific acts of terrorist violence. All of these people, and their many domestic-terrorist cohorts, act out of a desperation fueled by anger over their sense of deep disempowerment—all of it a product of a belief in conspiracy theories. And the violence committed by domestic terrorists serves the purposes of authoritarians in profound ways, because it ratchets up the levels of fear in society generally, and a resort to the false security of authoritarianism is a common psychological response.
This is where the role played by authoritarian leaders like Trump is key. Because rather than ease people’s fears, as a normative democratic leader would do, authoritarians immediately reach for the panic button. Keeping the populace in a fearful state is a cornerstone of their rule.
Authoritarian leaders have a personality type quite distinct from that of their followers. It is called social dominance orientation (SDO), which is essentially a form of narcissism on steroids. If you wanted to create the ideal portrait of an SDO leader, he would look and act like Trump.
SDOs are far more interested in the personal acquisition of power than are RWAs, who by nature are more inclined to march on someone else’s behalf. They also have different reasoning capacities, and are far more calculating and manipulative. What they have in common, more than anything else, is a shared dismissive view of equality as an important social value. They both believe that inequality is the natural state of the world, and that any attempts to tamper with it are doomed to fail and screw everything up. And SDOs revel in getting RWAs to do their bidding.
So the attacks on democracy come both from below—from Trump’s violent and fanatical foot soldiers, people such as the Proud Boys and the #MAGAbomber—and from above, from the president and his administration, as we have seen whenever Trump is confronted with the reality that his rhetoric is providing a “violence script” for his more deranged followers to enact. Within days after losing the House to the Democrats, Trump went full banana republic and attacked the press and everyone else in sight. Trump’s presser two days after the election went historically off the rails: He pointed at CNN’s Jim Acosta, calling CNN “fake news,” ordering him to sit down, and creating a tussle. The White House then suspended Acosta’s credentials.
The question that Acosta was asking at the time Trump blew up at him was about his caravan fearmongering and was related to increasing questions directed at Trump about the effects of his rhetoric in inspiring violence. Trump then verbally attacked a female black journalist, calling her question about his rhetoric inspiring white supremacists “racist.” A day later, he attacked another black female journalist who asked a similar question and told her she was “stupid.”
Trump has never answered questions about his culpability in political violence, as we saw after the #MAGAbomber incident, violence that unquestionably followed a script he had written. He keeps justifying his followers’ violence. The victims have it coming. He did this during the campaign, when two men badly beat a Latino and urinated on him, then said Trump inspired them. Trump explained that some of his followers “are very passionate.” When anyone asks him about his connection to the recent terrorism, he retorts that it’s the media creating the violence with their “fake news.” The logic is clear: If you were submissive to my rule, and reported the news as I like it, you wouldn’t be facing this violence.
I’m reminded what longtime Democratic presidential adviser Ron Klain told Ezra Klein: “If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state. It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”
This is the real-life manifestation of Bob Altemeyer’s “lethal union” of right-wing authoritarian followers with a social-dominance-oriented authoritarian leader: that moment, as Altemeyer says, when “the two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.” We also run the very real risk of an era of scripted violence, the phenomenon that occurs when a major cultural figure uses his position and the media to call for violence against a targeted minority group, and their fanatical followers carry it out.
None of these scenarios bode well for the health and well-being of the public, or for our long-term safety and stability. This is why we fight.