He’s not hiding his authoritarianism. He’s selling it.
The September 10 presidential debate taught Trump and his campaign that they could not win if the campaign were . . . a debate. So Trump is refusing to participate in a second debate, or for that matter in any interview that might be a simulacrum of a debate. More fundamentally, Trump has abandoned any pretense of having to debate real issues or having to put forth any serious programs. Of course, Trump’s heart has always been in authoritarian demagoguery, not in democratic and civic debate. But in the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.
It’s not just that, as Politico showed in ample detail this weekend, “Trump’s “racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
It’s also, for example, Trump on Thursday calling for CBS to lose its broadcast license—and for Democrats to “be forced to concede the Election”—because he didn’t like the interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.
Then yesterday Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
This is, as the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser put it, “Straight up language of dictators and tyrants, who want to use the military on their own people.”
Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.ARTICLE HERE