After all the sturm and drang of the past few months it’s time to do some common sense reassessing. The constant concern that a person who is both mentally unfit and fundamentally uninterested in the role of President is on the verge of reclaiming public opinion and authority is inconsistent with the reality of the present situation: Biden is the sole authority figure in the room.
Being an authoritarian implies just that — the ability to exude and wield authority. By nature they are charismatic, populist, and know how to effectively create and leverage political opportunities. The whole purpose of manufacturing crises is to give the masses a stark choice — chaos or normalcy. Normalcy. That things will go back to what they once were.
The problem for Trump is he represents the chaos and it is Biden who represents normalcy, what once was, and ‘authority’.
Remember, Trump won 2016 with the slimmest of margins. He has been unpopular throughout his term and lost his party control of the House. Trump’s presidency has been the aberration, not the norm. He never had any period of ‘law and order’.
Most importantly, an overwhelming majority of the country agrees. Trump’s approval has continued to drop since the protests began. Biden is now consistently ahead by double digits and down ballot races show the entire GOP is on the verge of losing the Senate! All this happened AFTER the protests began.
Why? Because the majority of Americans rightly believe Trump to be the source of current instability, chaos, and a threat to democracy. Despite fractious social media narratives, Trump and the GOP are recognized as the ‘extremists’ that must be removed. It doesn’t hurt that Biden has been more and more aggressive and direct in his rhetoric against Putin and other bad actors seeking to destabilize the country. This is what competent strongmen do. Trump has feebly tried the same with China, but per usual he is transparent in his strawman rhetoric and of course no one believes him.
The result of all this is a Reverse Reichstag Fire scenario.
The original fire that helped sweep the Nazi Party into power happened at the beginning of Hitler’s term as Chancellor. It was an act to legitimize his authority, not undermine it. We are now at the end of Trump’s first term and the coronovirus is the fire that has delegitimized his presidency and on track to sweep his party out of power.
The unending comparisons to Hitler and authoritarianism/fascism in general give Trump way too much credit and fails to acknowledge what the polling and public reactions are telling us. This is not to say that Trump’s actions aren’t inspired by fascist/authoritarian behavior — we all know his love of dictators knows no bounds — but he himself is too incompetent and lacks any interest in actually doing the hard work needed to pull it off successfully.
He doesn’t have his father to do the real work while Trump claims credit in front of the cameras and Putin is too far away and limited in his powers to take the reins (and probably wouldn’t want to even if he could). Even Trump’s own people are openly admitting the deployment of federal troops to cities is to generate “viral content” i.e. scare people with video and images in social/media feeds. That’s hardly the mindset of a real authoritarian. It is however on brand for a RealityTV President whose career was revived by Survivor creator Mark Burnett.
If there is any conclusion to be drawn from the data we’ve seen it’s that the protests and Trump’s poor response is pushing people the public *to* Joe Biden, not away from him in exactly the way one would expect for an authority figure. The more Trump tries to overextend his authority, the more Biden’s support grows.
99 more days and we are going to vote this cosplay dictator and his fellow traitors off the island.