I know we all like to laugh and joke about how Trump doesn’t have any actual policy positions, and compare him to Hitler, etc. In the past week he has been hailed by child tyrant Kim Jong Un for his far-sighted vision. MSNBC reported just yesterday that Trump became friends with an Italian politician who wears a black shirt to his rallies to invoke the ghost of Mussolini.
But the more I look at him the more obvious one thing becomes: Donald Trump isn’t flirting with authoritarianism. Rather, I’d argue his entire life has been rooted in the dictates of it. This isn’t a new phenomenon: this is what has influenced his entire political and personal ethos.
It would be easy to talk about how his father was a German immigrant who didn’t show Trump enough love (according to biographers) and mostly taught him the value of strength and power. How even in this you see the Machiavellian underpinnings of valuing fear over love as an emotion. But that’s juvenile, it’s Freudian, and it’s mostly irrelevant. Let’s talk about – in order – Trump’s mentor, his closest advisor, and his newest campaign guru. When we’re done, I believe I will have made the case that Trump has always been a fascist, he’s just now becoming a politician.
First up is Roy Cohn. For those who don’t know – or only know him from Angels in America – Roy Cohn had a…storied career as an attorney. As a young man, he worked directly under one Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That’s right: one of his first major forays into politics was accusing people of being Communist spies and trying to have them arrested. I know the Cold War was a scary time, but we can all agree that this was fearmongering and political censorship, right? Are there people out there who still think Joe McCarthy was fighting the good fight? Anyway, after leaving McCarthy, Cohn moved to New York where he became the lawyer for the Genovese crime family. In fact, a lot of meetings of the Five Families are alleged to have happened inside Roy Cohn’s office because the FBI couldn’t bug him without violating privilege. Suffice it to say, Fat Tony Salerno wasn’t the worst person of Roy Cohn’s references. Another one of Cohn’s clients was Donald Trump. When Trump was accused of discriminatory housing practices, he hired Cohn. Cohn was a bulldog who fought tooth and nail – he even accused the FBI (somewhat ironically) of employing “Gestapo tactics.” In Cohn, we find a lot of Trump’s father and a lot of Trump: never back down, attack your enemies, never admit shortcomings. Always negotiate from strength.
Next up is Roger Stone! Roger Stone was considered one of the masters of the political dark arts alongside other luminaries like Lee Atwater. Stone is now a retired lawyer in New York, but he remains one of Trump’s closest friends. When Stone was 19, he infamously donated money to Richard Nixon’s primary opponent in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance and leaked the donation to the press. Stone approaches dirty politicking with a relish and zeal mostly reserved for professional athletes. Guess who introduced him to Donald Trump? Roy Cohn. Remember that time that Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s father murdered JFK? Yeah, Roger Stone was involved. The time that Cruz allegedly had affairs with six women? They couldn’t link it to Stone, but Cruz accused Stone of being behind the allegation. To be fair to him, dirty politicking isn’t fascist. Idolizing Richard Nixon – and getting a back tattoo of him – is a bit more questionable. Either way, the dirty politics of Stone border on the kind of thing we see with a lot of dictators. It’s discrediting opponents instead of killing them, but America does still have some laws. I could also discuss the legendary status of Roger Stone’s lobbying firm… and I intend to!
Last up we have Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort is from a nearly bygone era of political operatives – he’s contemporaries with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Slate, Reuters, and I have all written extensively about Paul Manafort, but the highlights are worth revisiting. Manafort (and Roger Stone) spent the better part of two decades rehabbing dictators who had fallen out of favor. He extended at least one civil war, he convinced Congress to finance warlords. He once disappeared for three weeks as the result of a deal gone awry with Vladimir Putin’s stooge in the Ukraine, a guy he supported while Putin was poisoning his opponent. Manafort’s firm earned the nickname “The Torturer’s Lobby.” It was a running joke in DC that if you asked him about a warlord, he’d tell you who had the account.
So Trump learned from Roy Cohn, befriended Roger Stone, and then hired Paul Manafort. If this feels like a guy who just idly dreams about having a private army to deport Mexicans, a guy who wouldn’t accuse his opponents of murdering a President, a guy whose threat to “open up the libel laws” is idle…look at his history. Trump isn’t flirting with fascism. It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to an ethos and he has surrounded himself with the kinds of people who think rolling back Democracy isn’t the worst idea. His mentor, his advisor, his de facto campaign manager. From the time he was a young man Trump has believed in absolute strength and achieving it my whatever means necessary.
Machiavelli famously said “It is better to be feared than loved if one cannot be both.” A look at the polls show Trump isn’t loved. If he wins, he’s going to rely on fear.
And, unlike most everything else in this campaign, our fear is something he absolutely deserves.
Chris Talks Politics 2016! 