Retired General Mark Milley’s worries about “Donald Trump being fascist to the core” are even worse than the former Trump chief of staff may know. Like retired General James Mattis, the one-time Trump Secretary of Defense, Milley was expressing his fear of a future President Trump’s betrayal of the republic by using the military at home to enforce his power over American citizens. The generals were not likely thinking about a parallel harm—the strangling of the economy.
In Trump version 2.0, our financial well-being is in as serious jeopardy as the liberty about which Milley was speaking. It would be very different from last time. Milley and other true patriots who care about ordinary Americans will no longer be present as guardrails on Trump’s grift, graft, and greed.
The hallmark of authoritarian states is self-serving corruption that lines the pockets of autocratic leaders and their cronies. One need only look at the Russian fascistic kleptocracy run by Putin and his oligarchy. The national economic drain from their theft of capital runs so deep that it drops the waterline in every cup outside those held by the favored few.
History tells the same story. As British historian Richard J. Evans has written, the “Third Reich was a kleptocracy riddled with corruption to benefit the elite of the SS and the regime.” (Though Trump has denied it, Gen. Kelly has shared that Trump, as president, expressed admiration for Hitler because he “did some good things.”)
Upon a moment’s reflection, what allows autocrats to steal from the people is obvious. As David Dayen, editor of the American Prospect, wrote last week, in dictatorships and oligarchies, “the license to steal stems from a lack of accountability between government and its people.” The demise of the rule of law is the reason such accountability disappears.
If you think for a moment it can’t happen here, you’ve missed Jonathan V. Last’s sharp analysis showing that it’s happening right now. Indeed, as Last smartly observes, it’s later than we think in the erosion of the rule of law’s accountability for the uber-wealthy. It’s all visible in the surrender of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to Trump by quashing the paper’s endorsement of Harris.
History again enlightens. In Germany, Richard Evans reminds us, it was the silencing of all institutions of accountability the bred systemic corruption in the Nazi regime:
[T]he Reichstag and legislative assemblies had been effectively muzzled, the press and media taken under control of the Propaganda Ministry, and the prosecution service and police forces thoroughly Nazified. Thus all the means by which in a normal democratic society corruption is investigated had been silenced.
Here, Trump has already threatened the licenses of media outlets whose journalism he does not like. And if Trump’s Republican enablers control Congress, add checks and balances to the list of constitutional casualties.
Don’t count on self-restraint. The art of the steal is the throughline of Donald Trump’s business and political life. Consider the Trump Organization’s criminal conviction for tax fraud. Ask those eager enrollees at Trump University or the paint sellers, cabinet makers, waitstaff, and other “little people” he’s stiffed. Look at his theft from taxpayers by overcharging the Secret Service 300% for rooms at his hotels during his presidency.
Or check out the “carnival of corruption” from Trump’s last cabinet members. Remember Scott Pruitt spending our tax dollars on a $43,000 soundproof office phone booth; or Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s plan to spend $139,000 on his office doors.
But we needn’t to cool our heels until after the election to see in action the kind of corruption from future Trump administration officials. Even now, Trump transition team insiders are accusing their head, Wall Street CEO Howard Ludnick, of conflicts of interest—trying to stock a “second administration with new people who could be personally beneficial to him.”
Then there’s Elon Musk, who has poured $120 million into pro-Trump campaign PACs. He’s also dangling million-dollar gifts in front of potential Trump voters to get them to the polls, though paying for votes is illegal.
Oh, and Trump has said that he intends to put Musk in charge of a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” Nothing like empowering a major government contractor by having him oversee “the efficiency” of government agencies with whom he contracts.
This is where autocracy and kleptocracy converge.
Foxes never so licked their chops at guard duty over the chicken coop.
No wonder the honest people who know Trump best, people who supported him and who worked with him for years as his appointees, are not supporting him now. They include Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence. More than a dozen individuals from his administration agree with General Kelly that Trump is a fascist, including his former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Above all, we should remember that our finances are at stake in this election, as well as our freedom. Constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe put it perfectly in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books: “[I]t is the ordinary, day-to-day life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent.”
Our rights, our pocketbooks, and our future are on the ballot.