Predicting the end game of the Trump presidency is clearly dangerous, as time after time, the ante has been upped on the outrageous and unprecedented with no real consequences. But it’s tempting to see an inflection point last month, when like Nixon, the president became an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime. Thus far, his response has been to declare ‘no collusion,’ but it’s a weak argument to claim a win just because you’ve committed a different crime than the one people expected. Following that logic, ‘crook not traitor’ might be a good bumper sticker for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Even without the added weight of the final Mueller report, the dragnet appears to be tightening, and assuming Democrats retake the House in November, the denouement could be impeachment, resignation, or less likely, a criminal indictment. If you’re an optimist, the ship of American democracy then gradually rights itself, and the work begins to put this experiment in populism behind us.
I certainly hope that’s the case, but it’s worth considering a less likely but more pessimistic end game, in which Trump morphs into a true authoritarian simply to protect himself. Cornered, angry and desperate, he becomes a president who not only refuses to go quietly, but simply refuses to go at all. To judge whether this is scaremongering or a realistic threat to America’s rule of law, you need to examine how the Trump phenomena has metastasised over the last three years.
In the beginning, Trump was just media catnip, and we became all too familiar with his incantations of ‘make America great again,’ ‘build the wall,’ and ‘lock her up.’ His victims were truth, civility, Hillary Clinton, and the egos of a slew of Republican presidential hopefuls. But like Bucky Barnes – the ‘Winter Soldier’ in the current Marvel movies – Trump’s repetitive rhetorical conditioning succeeded in turning large swathes of the ‘salt of the earth’ American electorate into unquestioning, fervent, and incredibly resilient foot soldiers.
Once elected, Trump has continually fed red meat to that base of loyalists by engaging in what Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times has called the ‘test marketing of fascism.’ The question that seems to preoccupy the Oval Office every morning is ‘What can I get away with?’ What about a blanket Muslim travel ban? What happens if I’m ‘fair and balanced’ regarding white nationalism? What about separating families at the Mexican border and putting the kids in cages?
Despite the media cacophony surrounding many of these policies, the result has been a core Teflon-coated national approval rating that, despite Cohen and Manafort, only dropped marginally from 44% to 42% over the last few weeks. In the perpetually-looping soundbite world of Fox News, the president is doing a great job protecting the ‘real America,’ and the existential danger to the republic is homicidal undocumented immigrants, not Russian election interference or a corrupt president. And to be clear, polling shows that Trump’s base believes that Michael Cohen did pay off porn stars, they just don’t think it matters, and that is what emboldens the president.
Despite being consistently morally reprehensible and chaotic, the last 20 months still has at least the vague outline of a recognisable political process at work; policy, execution, reaction, and refinement. Sometimes the courts have been the restraint, other times the media and public opinion, and very occasionally Congress. But with the rising waters of corruption and criminality lapping at the door of the Oval Office, we need to consider – given the trajectory of the last three years – what will happen when Trump is truly backed into a corner. Maybe he’ll gamble that the rule of law is there to be broken, and that it’s time to test the theory behind his campaign boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. But if he does, it will take two to coup, so assessing the risk means gauging both the likely behaviour of Trump himself, and the hardcore of Americans who support him.
Looking at his loyal base, a worrying harbinger of where we could be heading is the rise of the QAnon meta-conspiracy theory. Over the last few months, it’s become increasingly common to see prominent ‘We are Q’ t-shirts at Trump rallies. They’re identifying with an online conspiracy theorist who claims to be a high-level government official. His bizarre central claim is that Trump is in fact working behind the scenes to take down a global paedophile ring whose members include past presidents, actors and film directors. So far, Jimmy Saville hasn’t got a mention in Q’s posts, but nothing would surprise me.
In this alternate reality, the Mueller investigation will conclude with the arrest of Hillary Clinton and her imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. Like the anti-Semitic ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ from a century ago, this conspiracy theory is elastic enough to subsume everything, from the assassination of JFK to 9/11 being an inside job. Over the course of the last few months, as the conspiracy has propagated, QAnon has become a flourishing and self-reinforcing online community of wackjobs, generating reams of what amounts to Trump fan-fiction. For an unknown number of Trump loyalists, this spun confection of nonsense reassures them that, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the great leader has a masterplan, and that at the appropriate moment, order and justice will be conjured from chaos.
The White House hasn’t endorsed the Q theory, but it also hasn’t denounced it, and this messianic characterisation of Trump has been supported by, among others, popular comedienne Roseanne Barr. The problem is that it doesn’t need many people to take it seriously for it to be dangerous. One of the minor conspiracies subsumed by Q is ‘Pizzagate’, the claim that top Democrats were running a satanic child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlour in Washington DC. The online fervour around that particular lie led a vigilante from North Carolina to ‘self-investigate’, which involved him opening fire with an assault rifle in the restaurant to ‘save the kids.’
It’s easy to dismiss such incidents as the work of deranged loners, but it’s worth remembering that it was a domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people and injured nearly 700 in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; an atrocity which he characterised as an act of resistance against the federal government. For the hard-core Trump supporters with this paranoid mindset, the stakes rise dramatically when he’s threatened. If Republicans lose the House in November, it isn’t just a normal political setback, it’s the ‘paedophiles’ rigging the election to get back in charge and remove Trump; and that could seem like a cause worth fighting for.
As for Trump himself, one possible leading indicator of the trouble to come is his increasing productivity as a liar. The Washington Post reports that in his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false claims, which doubled in the last six months to 4,229, and then hit a peak in early July, when a full 76% of the statements he made at a campaign rally were fact-checked as ‘false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.’ As the pressure on him mounts, the temptation is for a pathological liar to double down and adopt the Goebbels approach, that ‘if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
What if that big lie ends up being some watered-down version of the QAnon narrative that the ‘deep state’ is illegally forcing Trump from office? In that scenario, he might replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general, instruct his successor to shut down the Mueller investigation, threaten any congressional Republican who resists with his signature ‘fire and fury,’ call out the national guard to maintain order, and ultimately assume ’emergency powers’ to remain in office.
I’m still firmly in the ‘it can’t happen here’ camp, but polling suggests that if Trump decides to burn down the house rather than go quietly, his loyalists will listen to him. A recent CBS poll indicated that 91% of hardcore Trump supporters trusted him to tell them the truth, versus only 63% for their family and friends, and a paltry 11% for the ‘fake news’ mainstream media. There’s also material support for him taking unmistakeably authoritarian actions, with nearly half of self-identified Republicans agreeing that ‘the president should have the authority to close down news outlets engaged in bad behaviour’; which in Trump’s narcissistic world is obviously any outlet that disagrees with him.
So, what happens if a Democratic House starts impeachment proceedings on the back of a damning Mueller report, and Trump goes on live TV and asks ‘real Americans’ to stand with him and ‘protect the country from this witch hunt’? The streets of Manhattan and San Francisco will remain quiet, but let’s face it, that’s not where most of the guns are. At best, we seem to be heading for a constitutional and political crisis, but if you take the measure of the current resident of the White House and his hard core of supporters, you can’t dismiss the possibility that the next few months could get a lot worse than that.
By Alan McIntyre | 5 September 2018