Robert Kagan: "A Trump Dictatorship is Increasingly Inevitable; We Should Stop Pretending"

[eyeroll]

Kagan probably didn't write his own headline, so I'll refrain from nit-picking about what "increasingly inevitable" could mean.

   To paraphrase Tom Wolfe: The dark night of fascism is always descending on the Republican party, and yet lands only among the Democrats.

    To be clear, I don't want Trump to be President again. I also rather doubt he can win, though that's a different matter.

   But we've heard all this before. Trump is literally Hitler. He will declare himself dictator for life, send his enemies to concentration camps--and/or just execute them. He will use the administration, the military--and, somehow, the courts--to solidify his iron grip on power. etc. etc. etc.

   We were told he would do all that the first time. Instead, he governed more like a devout federalist than either Obama or Biden. His administration was hamstrung by a coalition of Democrats from the media to the military--and, yes, in administrative deep state. 

   And, perhaps most importantly, it is the Democrats who are actually doing much of what they speculate that Trump will do--undermining free speech, deploying the administration, the courts and the media against their political opponents, and undermining democracy by rigging the process against Republicans (e.g. by using courts to rewrite election laws, deploying lawfare against Trump, indiscriminately spewing mail-in ballots (the least-secure form of voting by every measure), and selectively pouring billions of dollars into allegedly neutral GOTV efforts in Democratic strongholds)). 

   The Democrats are actually moving us further and further toward a cliff. And this is before we even discuss their implementation of the woke worldview in schools, universities, corporations and the administration. Spreading the pseudoscientific CRT lie that the USA is inveterately racist, brainwashing and sexually mutilating children, and all the rest.

   Trump--who, again, has, IMO, no business even being in any serious discussion of Presidential candidates--is a font of lunatic tweets. He talks a big game...and a crazy one. But he has a record of governance that indicates that it's all talk. (Such crazytalk is itself disqualifying in my book, to be clear.) Democrats, of course, distort everything he says to make it even crazier than it is...but, worse: the whole time they are actually doing things (and trying to do even more) that actually accomplish left-wing analogs of the things that the hyperbolic Trump of their fevered imaginations merely talks about.

   Trump talks about prosecuting his enemies; the Democrats are actually prosecuting theirs. The left shrieked at the sky when crowds at Trump rallies chanted "lock her up." The Democrats are actually using lawfare in a serious effort to lock up Trump. Four years on, the Democratic DoJ is still hunting down and arresting people who were near the Capitol during the January 6th riots. Participants in violent terroristic BLM/Antifa riots went almost entirely unprosecuted. 

   Blah blah blah.

   Same old story.

   Consider just one slice of this mess: the Biden influence-peddling operation and the first Trump impeachment. There is now very strong evidence that Biden was part of a large influence-peddling operation that raked in at least tens (and perhaps hundreds) of millions of dollars for himself and his family--and from very unsavory international sources. There is simply no denying that very strong evidence points clearly to this conclusion. We don't (yet) have proof. But we have more than enough evidence to open a formal investigation. Democrats--many of whom still refuse to acknowledge that the Russiagate allegations were disproven--insist that "there is no evidence" of Biden wrongdoing. They live in a fantasy world in which Orange Man bad is a fundamental axiom, and, apparently, no evidence short of conclusive proof is ever enough against Democrats...and without conclusive proof already in hand, it is impermissible to investigate. Even more alarmingly, the mainstream media is fully on-board with this coverup (so, perhaps, ordinary Democrats can be excused for believing this fantasy). Perhaps most astonishing of all this is that Trump was impeached for inquiring into the Biden influence-peddling operation in Ukraine. The mind reels...

   The bitterest irony of all this is that many of Trump's more extravagant claims are being confirmed right before our eyes. The elite Democrat-progressive machine is bringing all its guns to bear against the madman who, among his other ravings, has spoken forbidden truths about the greater--or greatest?--threat to the nation. Like most other then-Democrats, I derided Trump's talk of the deep state. But now there can be no doubt that, whatever details he may have gotten wrong, he was mainly right. We derided his suspicions about Biden influence-peddling in Ukraine and China. But he was very probably right. "Fake news" was ridiculed (though not so much by me). Now not only has the phrase proven itself insightful, but the elite machine has absorbed it, tarted it up as "disinformation," and simply turned the idea into another of its mechanism for spreading, yes, fake news...and crushing its political opponents. "Build the wall" was derided as racist--but as soon as Biden took office we saw why physical border barriers are crucial: without them, we are even more at the mercy of the left, which aims not only to protect, but to expand, mass illegal immigration. 

   Kagan's screed is of a type with which we should, by now, be familiar: Ignore the fact that the left is rapidly and systematically wrecking the country. And ignore the fact that Trump has been right about the most of it. Focus instead on his wildest and most intemperate tweets, and on our feverish fantasies about his Hitlerian plans for the future.

   To repeat: Trump should never be anywhere near the Oval Office. But he is far less dangerous than the Democrats and the progressive left. 

   I'll add: the crazy on the right is currently focused mainly in one person, whereas the crazy on the left pervades the faction. And the faction pervades our institutions. If we could replace Trump, the most pressing problem on the right would be solved. There is no such solution on the left. There is no plausible Democrat candidate that would re-hinge the Dems. Joe Manchin is not going to get the nomination. And, even if he were President, the madness on the blue team now runs too deep.

   As I've said: I fear Trump because I fear that he might possibly do some of the things he talks about. I fear the left because I know they will continue to do the things they are already doing.